Reconstruction talk:Proto-West Germanic/bogōn

Reconstruction

Kroonen reconstructs this as *bugōną, along with listing Old Frisian bāgia, Middle Dutch bogen and Dutch bogen op, with the Old English bogan, boian already given here(but with short vowels instead of long).

With this reconstruction here, I assumed that because of the related Old English noun bōung [[1]], that the -g- in Old English bōgan might have been a realization of the weak class 2 infinitive -ian. In light of the other words, which I was not aware of initially, maybe the -g- was weakened to -w- or lost between the back vowels?

From what I can see now, Old English might reflect PGmc *bōgōną, which could be related to Old Norse bága, Old High German bāgan(< reduplicating *bēganą (“to argue, quarrel”)).

Dutch bogen can only come from *bugōną, I think, which could conceivably be related to Old Frisian bāgia from *baugōną(?), though unrelated to the above words.

It's not a very clear picture. Any thoughts? Anglom (talk) 22:22, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

The Dutch form can be cognate with the Old Frisian form though (since au > ō in Old Dutch), so it probably is. —CodeCat 22:55, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Do you think this should be moved to *bōgōną, then? Anglom (talk) 23:12, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

No I think you're right about the interpretation of -i- and -g-. It's probably bōġan with /j/. A form like *bōgōną would leave bōian unexplained. The Middle English -w- would then be epenthetic, having been inserted after the reduction of -ian to -en, which is not very unusual as Old English used this same sound for epenthesis. —CodeCat 23:27, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

An alternative could of course be *bōh(w)ōną, since h was lost between vowels anyway. And Old English -o- could come from -u-, so that leaves *buhōną as another possibility, which could then be an ablaut/Verner variant of *baug- found in Dutch and Frisian. However, that would require reconstructing *bʰewk- for PIE, which violates the root constraints that prohibit roots from containing both an aspirate and a voiceless consonant. —CodeCat 23:32, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Kroonen also reconstructs *stōwō as *stōō. So we could also potentially move this to *bōwōną. Anglom (talk) 19:48, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

It's possible, but the difficulty is in the variety of glide vowels found in different languages. In some cases the glide -w- is universal, which points to it being original. But other times, Old English has -w- while Old Saxon and Dutch have -j- instead. That means that Old English doesn't provide enough information to distinguish these cases. —CodeCat 21:07, 5 May 2014 (UTC)