Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/-inī

Inflection

@Leasnam, Holodwig21, DerRudymeister, Victar The Gothic reflex suggests that this is actually an ī/jō stem. I'm not sure to what degree Gothic is indicative on that front, though. What do you think? —Rua (mew) 12:09, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

I've been reading The Germanic (i)jō-stem declension (Johnsen 2005) he concludes, at the end of a rather long and detailed investigation, that these four classes of words had ī/jō ("dēvī") inflection, with a nominative singular in -ī rather than -(i)jō:

1. Monosyllabic nouns with a heavy stem, including many female names
2. The suffix *-injō-/*-unjō- (i.e. the one in question)
3. The suffix *-isjō-/*-usjō-/*-izjō-/*-uzjō-
4. The two light-stemmed nouns *mawī (“girl”) and *þiwī (“female servant”), possibly more

Of this suffix, he says moreover that it ablauted, with -inī in the nominative singular and -unjō- elsewhere. Both variants are still found in Old Saxon. He also mentions an addition to Sievers' law, which he calls "Dahl's law", which states that two light syllables count as one heavy. This principle affected suffixes with a light syllable like this one, so that they actually had the heavy Sievers variant -ij- when affixed to a word with a light syllable. It is visible in Old English gyden, with an ungeminated -n- in most of the attested inflected forms, pointing to *gudi/unijō-. —Rua (mew) 16:06, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for doing the research on this, @Rua. I'll give that paper a read. --{{victar|talk}} 00:05, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

@Rua, I have tried to look for some additional sources, but to be honest I can't find much about this subject. Changing the current inflection seems reasonable, would you suggest that the Sievers' law variant is used as well? --DerRudymeister (talk) 15:05, 26 March 2020 (UTC)