Germanic /p/

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Chengjiang
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Germanic /p/

Post by Chengjiang »

What are the main sources of /p/ in Germanic? PIE has almost no certain cases where modally voiced /b/ can be reconstructed, and yet there are numerous common Germanic words with /p/. It can't all be from a substratum, can it?
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Sumelic »

Well, obviously /sp/ occurs fairly often due to the exception to Grimm's law after /s/. Medial /pp/ can come from Kluge's law (pp < pn, bʰn, bn; Wikipedia says it's not mainstream, but also says the alternative explanation is apparently "expressive gemination" which seems like such a cop-out). Also, there seem to be a lot of Germanic words with unclear PIE etymologies, like the ancestor of "ship".

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by KathTheDragon »

Further to Sumelic's post, a number of verbal roots ending in *p following a heavy nucleus or a consonant can also be attributed to Kluge's law in the iterative derivative (deriving from a present in *-n(e)h₂-) and analogical influence.

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Chengjiang »

Sumelic wrote:Well, obviously /sp/ occurs fairly often due to the exception to Grimm's law after /s/.
Well, yes, of course.
Medial /pp/ can come from Kluge's law (pp < pn, bʰn, bn; Wikipedia says it's not mainstream, but also says the alternative explanation is apparently "expressive gemination" which seems like such a cop-out). Also, there seem to be a lot of Germanic words with unclear PIE etymologies, like the ancestor of "ship".
So basically, the jury's still out. Honestly, it kind of looks like Germanic is just a weird branch of the family generally.

I'm not behind the times as to PIE /b/, am I? Is there actually confirmation that /b/ definitely existed now?
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by KathTheDragon »

So far, it seems that PIE definitely lacked any *b in the onset of verbal roots, and it was either rare or nonexistent in the coda of verbal roots. All such examples can be explained otherwise, primarily by accepting Kluge's law (which has its utilities in other ways, and allows Germanic to be slightly less oddball, which is an unfair and a Graeco-Aryan-centric assessment anyway)

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Sumelic »

Chengjiang wrote:
sumelic wrote:Medial /pp/ can come from Kluge's law (pp < pn, bʰn, bn
I'm not behind the times as to PIE /b/, am I? Is there actually confirmation that /b/ definitely existed now?
Sorry, I just wrote "bn" there automatically since part of the idea of Kluge's law is that all of the phonation contrasts were neutralized. It was probably a dumb thing to do. I guess I was thinking that if it existed, "bn" would become "pp" by Kluge's Law, since "dn" is supposed to have become "tt". I didn't mean to suggest that "b" is actually known to have existed for sure, or that there are established etymologies with "bn" > "pp".

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Chengjiang »

Sumelic wrote:
Chengjiang wrote:
sumelic wrote:Medial /pp/ can come from Kluge's law (pp < pn, bʰn, bn
I'm not behind the times as to PIE /b/, am I? Is there actually confirmation that /b/ definitely existed now?
Sorry, I just wrote "bn" there automatically since part of the idea of Kluge's law is that all of the phonation contrasts were neutralized. It was probably a dumb thing to do. I guess I was thinking that if it existed, "bn" would become "pp" by Kluge's Law, since "dn" is supposed to have become "tt". I didn't mean to suggest that "b" is actually known to have existed for sure, or that there are established etymologies with "bn" > "pp".
You're fine. I was just speaking generally. I had the thought after I started this thread that my PIE info might be out of date.

So some time ago I seem to remember someone around here suggesting that early PIE lenited *b to *w word-initially and perhaps elsewhere, explaining both the paucity of *b and the prevalence of onset clusters like *wr and *wl. Is there any scholarly support for this?
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Soap »

Chengjiang wrote:So some time ago I seem to remember someone around here suggesting that early PIE lenited *b to *w word-initially and perhaps elsewhere, explaining both the paucity of *b and the prevalence of onset clusters like *wr and *wl. Is there any scholarly support for this?
Someone else might be able to give a fuller answer. As far as I know, it's just a hypothesis at this point, and probably always will be. But a couple points in its favor:

1)PIE has no tradition of similar clusters with /y/, which in other positions seems to pattern similarly to /w/.

2)/w/ usually appears as a vowel when not adjacent to an ablauting vowel such as /e/, but there are no known examples of words beginning in wl- showing up with vocalic reflexes in any daughter languages, suggesting that [w] in this position was not merely an allophone of /u/ as it is in most other positions such as *kun/kwon "dog". This suggests that it was distinct from the phoneme /u/.

i originally wrote a bit more here, but on second thought, my position is actually stronger if i just leave it as the text above. but i'll preserve this in a smaller font size:
It seems that all roots with wr- and wl- have those /r/ and /l/'s becoming syllabic in zero grade roots, but this doesnt seem to mean much, since 2nd-position liquids in PIE seem to always have syllabic forms no matter what the preceding consonant was. On the basis of pn- being apparently allowed, one might suppose that there were once a few words beginning in wn-, but maybe even PIE found that cluster too difficult to handle.

Also, Wiktionary reconstructs the root for "wool" with an initial laryngeal instead of an initial /w/. Im not sure if that comes from a different opinion, or if the older #wl- reconstruction is no longer seen as possible.
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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by KathTheDragon »

It was me who suggested it here (though I saw the idea elsewhere), and Soap pretty muched summed up the reasons for thinking that *wR- clusters might somehow be different. That said, the suggestion a few pages back (I think by Tropylium) that PIE might have possessed a phoneme *xʷ has led me to wonder if *wR- might not actually represent *xʷR- instead.

On "wool", the non-Anatolian languages all presuppose *wl̩Hno-, while Hittite requires an initial *h₂. These are usually combined as *h₂wl̩Hno-

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Soap »

Accepting Kluge's Law could allow us to rework the etymologies of words which are traced back to PIE morphemes containing /b/ solely because of the perceived Germanic cognates. Still, there are words like "apple" that cannot be explained by Kluge's law.
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Re: Germanic /p/

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Soap wrote:Accepting Kluge's Law could allow us to rework the etymologies of words which are traced back to PIE morphemes containing /b/ solely because of the perceived Germanic cognates. Still, there are words like "apple" that cannot be explained by Kluge's law.
Yes, and in general any Germanic word containing /p/ that is not part of the cluster /sp/ or explainable by Kluge's law is suspect to be a loan (e.g. path is supposed to be a loan from Iranian).

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Zju »

hwhatting wrote:
Soap wrote:Accepting Kluge's Law could allow us to rework the etymologies of words which are traced back to PIE morphemes containing /b/ solely because of the perceived Germanic cognates. Still, there are words like "apple" that cannot be explained by Kluge's law.
Yes, and in general any Germanic word containing /p/ that is not part of the cluster /sp/ or explainable by Kluge's law is suspect to be a loan (e.g. path is supposed to be a loan from Iranian).
So basically all words begining in p-? (among others) I checked a bunch on wiktionary and they all are indeed loans, except for pack < PG *pakkô with unknown further etymology, and peek, which is onomatopoeic. Which in itself is also a source of /p/.

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Re: Germanic /p/

Post by Nortaneous »

iirc Hiw has initial wC clusters and no yC clusters, but w patterns as a voiced fricative G_w
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