Re: Primitive W., and a name-change

FFlores wrote:
> (I think it was a problem with Grimm's laws... Does anybody know?).
Ah, yeah, Verner's Law, or something like that.

> How far away (and/or isolated) from each other were
> the speakers of those dialects? The same phoneme evolving
> into three different sounds seems a strange event if there
> was any contact.
Well, their land is about the size of England.  There was a fair amount
of contact between the Elders of each village, but the commoners had
only a small degree of contact.  Enough that a few borrowings might've
occurred, creating doublets.

> Are those one syllable or two? (I assume a diphthong is one
> syllable, but I may be wrong). I mean, the accute being the
> two vowels makes it look as if they were *two* syllables.
It's one syllable.  If an acute was on the first vowel (i.e., *dika'u),
it would be a falling diphthong (/aw31/), and if it were only on the
second vowel (*dikau'), it would be two syllables (/a1.u3/)

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