Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/baunō

The whole north-thing

Excuse me, but when has Low German ever been influenced by a Scandinavian language? It basically shaped half of them.
But to me it looks like this:
Either the Ö-Forms come from Old Norse. (Au~>Ö seems rather common)
Or the Middle Saxon form had an umlaut. There's no reason at all to include one for the Scandinavians and I'm not aware to have ever heard of such a thing.
My educated guess: the Tręmsen-dictionary gives bean as "Bon".
1. Tręmsen is a meckl. dictionary, its rendition as "Bon" (instead of "Boon") denotes that the word comes from proto-germ. -au-
2. The English word is 'bean'. 'Ea' usually corresponds with a Low German pure O.
3. There is no i in the Old Saxon word, thus there's a major indicator for an Umlaut missing.
Conclusion: It is possible that there was an umlaut anyway in Middle Low German, it is also possible, that the Danish just included one randomly. Yet it seems more probable to me that they have their words from Old Norse corresponding with daudr-död, draumr-dröm. So unless referenced, I'm going to rearrange it tomorrow.Dakhart 16:55, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

There are actually two things at play here. On one side there is the difference in the outcome of au in Old East Norse (ö) and Old Saxon and Old Dutch (ō). But there is also the ending of the noun which differs. Final -ō disappears in both North and West Germanic for the most part, and becomes -u when it survives. The -a in Old Saxon, Old Dutch and Old High German is actually an innovation taken from the accusative. It seems that at a time when Old/Middle Low German were spoken and came into contact with late Old Norse speakers, some confusion occurred between the native form 'bön' (with no ending, having lost -ō), and the Saxon form 'bona/e'. The result could well have been that the Old Norse form took the Saxon ending and reinterpreted it as a feminine ōn-stem, which ended in -a (later -e in Danish), but kept the stem vowel. Such 'mixed' forms are quite likely if the forms were similar enough. —CodeCat 18:40, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I noticed the E as well...but when we're not sure where a word comes from or have to assume that it comes from different influences, we should note it...Ideas? Put them under both with an 'influenced by'? Put them under an extra 'uncertain' line?Dakhart 03:49, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

It seems clear to me that at the time of borrowing, Danish and Swedish still posessed the original word. So it seems unlikely that it is really a borrowing, more an 'influencing'. I think it would be best to put them under Old Norse, and note that they changed their ending because of Saxon influence. —CodeCat 09:26, 12 September 2011 (UTC)