Germanic vowel correspondences (was: Scots.)

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:41:10 -0400, ROGER MILLS wrote:
>Generally I'm woefully iggurunt about Germanic vowel correspondences, but
>thanks to Dutch I've figured out (or at least noticed) a few:
>Haus :: huis :: house (*u:)
>Laus :: luis :: louse
>
>How about Zaun 'fence (enclosure?) :: Du. tuin 'garden' :: Engl. town ???
>(this semantic range crops up in my Indonesian research and seems
>reasonable....)
>
>Baum :: boom :: beam ?  (*o: ??), and Engl. borrowed boom (nautical term)
>Straum :: stroom :: stream
>Traum :: droom :: dream
And Swedish ström, dröm.
So PG */au/ becomes /o:/ in Dutch, nice to kno. But where do they get /VU/
then? Anywhere aside l-vocalization (<zout> for "salt" etc.)?

My understanding of the unconditioned correspondences of the non-short
vowels goes like this:
PG - English - German - Scandinavian - Icelandic - Dutch
*u: - aU - aU - u\: - u: - 9Y
*o: - u: - u: - u: - oU - 2:
*e: - i: - i: - o: - aU - e:?
*i: - aI - aI - i: - i: - aI
*ai - o: - aI - e: - aI - e:
*au - i: - aU - 2: - 9Y - o:
*eu - i: - oY - y: - ?? - ??
Pretty hairy, even before you add in all the waves of compensatory
lengthening (from *x, from short consonants...) and all the various splits;
if you only had the modern languages' phonetic forms to work on, it might
take a while to reach proto-Germanic as it's currently understood. :)

…Have any of you noticed the "reprise" vowel shifts taking place in English?
/O:/ merging with /A/ is still somewhat vanilla, but what I find a bit more
eerie is /au/ in many dialects working its way forwards to [&u] or somesuch.
Dutch /9Y/ <> German /au/ also parallels this, even tho I presume they got
it via */u:/ fronting to */y:/.

John Vertical

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