Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/aunōną
Latest comment: 7 years ago by Anglom
Is change *agw- -> *au- regular, or is it due to confusion with *awiz ? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:09, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- Yes, it's regular and it's detailed on w:Proto-Germanic. *gw generally becomes *w in Germanic, but also *b word-initially, and *g when next to another labial sound. There were two allophones of the voiced obstruents in Germanic, voiced plosive and voiced fricative. The changes to *gw "conspired" in such a way to eliminate all the fricative allophones, leaving only the cases where the plosive allophone appeared, which was only after *n. So only *-ngw- preserved the original labiovelar. —CodeCat 12:09, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
- -gʷʰ- does regularly give -w- but in this case the expected form is *ak(w)n-, so analogy with *awiz is required. Anglom (talk) 22:52, 7 September 2016 (UTC)