Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/swōtuz

Why *-uz?

Every descendant form listed here points towards the form having been *swōtiz, all of them having gone through i-umlaut, no? Am I missing something? I can see that the Greek and Sanskrit forms would suggest that some common ancestor might have had a *u in there, but what evidence is there, that the Proto-Germanic form would not have been *swōtiz? Skomakar'n (talk) 23:20, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

There isn't any evidence that Germanic had -uz within Germanic itself, but there isn't any against it either. In all Germanic languages except Gothic, the u- and i-stem adjectives fall together with the ja-stem adjectives, as they probably already shared most of the forms with them. So without an attested Gothic nominative, there is nothing to distinguish -uz, -iz and -ijaz in adjectives. The -uz here is therefore based on the Proto-Indo-European evidence. —CodeCat 00:16, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Formally, Old English swōt is most easily explained as continuing the nom. sg. *swōtuz directly. This would imply that u-stems were still a separate category in the immediate prehistory of Old English and thus in Common West Germanic.

@Skomakar'n: For the underlying reason for the development of the u-stems in Germanic, see Hill 2012 (in German, sorry). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)