Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/flauhaz

Vladimir Orel 2003 reconstructs this noun as *flauhs, but Kroonen 2013 reconstructs the same word as *flauhaz. How do you explain umlaut in German Floh/Flöhe and Icelandic fló/flær? Is the plural vlooien of Dutch vlo also umlauted or is the /ooi/ pronounced as a true dipthong? (I'm not familiar with dutch orthography). I can neither find any good Middle Saxon nor Middle Dutch dictionaries in English to see if the noun was also umlauted in those languages as well (note the asterisk next to the Old Saxon and Old Dutch entries).Nayrb Rellimer (talk) 18:54, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Actually, Kroonen does not reconstruct an a-stem *flauhaz, but rather feminine *flauhō-. It seems that by West Germanic there was dialectal variation in the gender; it's feminine in Old Norse and its daughters, and despite being masculine for most of West Germanic it is found as feminine in Middle Dutch vloo (~ vloy, vlooy), which by Ockham's razor would seem to (slightly) support the feminine form as the original, in West Germanic surviving only dialectally. Though, the page on Old Dutch *flō reconstructs it as masculine (maybe the Limburgish reflex is masculine? Rua would know), so I could be wrong that the Dutch reflex has anything to do with it. Orel also notes that it varied between feminine and masculine, without giving an analysis, but that might explain why he prefers to reconstruct a root noun. (Troublingly, neither Kroonen nor Orel supports the reconstruction *flauhaz that we have on Wiktionary!)

Anyway, I've noted Orel's reconstruction *flauxs (=*flauhs) on the page. — 69.120.64.15 08:30, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Gender: Middle Dutch is a fairly weak indicator because it already shows a lot of interchange between masculine and feminine. More importantly, the feminine is also attested in Middle High German and the word is still mostly feminine along the Rhine even down to Switzerland (cf. also Luxembourgish Flou). On the other hand, words that are predominantly used in the plural tend to become feminine in German (because the inflections of feminine and plural are similar). So this doesn't prove much.

Umlaut: Dutch "vlooien" isn't umlaut. The word couldn't even have umlaut in western Dutch even it were an i-stem (because in western Dutch only short vowels are umlauted). German "Flöhe" is to be expected: with but a few exceptions all inherited strong masculines take umlaut in modern German. It does seem that umlaut is already predominant in Middle High German, which would be more remarkable. But umlauts were much less regularly written in MHG than the heavily edited publications make us believe. So this is also inconclusive. 90.186.170.60 01:27, 27 August 2023 (UTC)