Re: THEORY: Evolution of infixes/ablaut?

On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> At 05:03 PM 3/22/2000 +0000, yl-ruil wrote:
> >John Cowan wrote:
> >
> > > yl-ruil wrote:
> > >
> > > > After a quick consultation with my Etymological Dictionary, it seems eke
> > > > (vb) and eke (adj) are unconnected. The adj is from OE éc "also",
> >cognate to
> > > > German auch "of uncertain origin" and the vb is from éacan "grow", which
> >is
> > > > cognate to Latin augere.
> > >
> > > Well, so speaks the voice of authority, but I wonder why auch and augere
> > > can't be cognates: no sound-shift seems to prevent it.
> >
> >I'm not sure, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
>
> It seems to me that German auch would be from PIE *auk, whereas Latin
> augere would be from *aug; unless perhaps the ch in <auch> comes from the
> affricate shift in German, but I've never heard of /k/ undergoing that
> shift in the standard dialect (/p/ > /pf/; /t/ > /ts/; but not /k/ > /kx/).
The shift to an affricate only occured initially; medially and
finally the shift went to a fricative: *PGerm fo:t > MG Fuss.
This was part of the High German sound shift, which the other
Germanic languages did not undergo.

Prokosch has the following as Germanic reflexes of PIE *g:

IE *aug-, L. augeo:, G. aukan, ON auka, OE e:acian, OS o:kian,
OHG ouhhon 'increase'.

There seems to be no reason why German auch couldn't have
originated as IE *aug-; the historical development would look
like this:

        PIE           aug-
        Grimm's Law   auk-
        HG Shift      aux-
        MG           <auch>

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu