Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/mann-

Nominative form of *mann- in Germanic

I am quite certain that this word was not declined as an a-stem in Germanic, and that *mannaz was not the nominative form. All the later languages (even Gothic) seem to agree that it was a consonant stem. The problem is the nominative singular form, which differs in Gothic. North and West Germanic have a form going back to *mannz while Gothic has a form that would go back to *mannô, as if it were a masculine n-stem. So I'm wondering what the actual formation would be. One theory I saw suggested that the stem is similar to Latin carō, with a nominative in -o and all other forms in -n. If that's the case then the original nominative would have been *man-ô, and the other forms *man-n-. This does at least fit with compounds of the word in Gothic, which are formed from a stem mana- with only one n (and maybe *allaz belongs to the same group, since it also has compounds in ala-). Does anyone have any more information on this? —CodeCat 11:55, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. According to Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch, the Germanic base is *manōn-, an n-stem, which had zero-grade vowels in certain forms.

This has lead to a new base *mann-. --MaEr 18:17, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the above: I think there was more than a single stem, as Old English also has manna "man, human", a weak n-stem. These might be better represented as separate entries, broken-out for each. Leasnam 22:15, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think there are actually two distinct nouns, especially since Gothic preserves an irregular paradigm. I think that the original paradigm must have been a consonant stem *mann- but with a nominative singular *manô or *mannô. This formation was unique in Germanic so it would have probably confused speakers a lot. Most speakers would have concluded that the nominative singular was irregular and unconsciously replaced it with a regular form. But there might have been some that would have built an n-stem paradigm from the nominative singular form instead, creating a minority formation that was never widely used beyond a few speakers. In that respect, Gothic probably preserves the original paradigm the best. —CodeCat 22:27, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

According to Kroonen, it was inflected as an n-stem in the singular, consonant stem in the plural, from earlier sg. *mannô, pl. *mannaniz, which with "... regular syncope of the unstressed vowel in the sequence *-nnan-..." became *manniz. And that the n-stem endings were removed from the singular in all but Old English and Gothic. Anglom (talk) 15:43, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Also, he does mention that the original nom. would have been *manô, that the gemination probably came by analogy from the oblique, he gives gen. *mannaz/*manniz. If that helps clear the picture any. Anglom (talk) 15:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Could the Nominative form have originally been *manwuz then > *mannuz ? Leasnam (talk) 16:52, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

In principle, yes, I'm pretty certain about that. However, as Kroonen points out, Sanskrit *mánu- presupposes *men-u- (not *mon-u-), which would yield the regular result *minn- in Germanic (compare Proto-Germanic *kinnuz (“chin”) from Proto-Indo-European *ǵénu- (“jaw”)), making this etymology less likely. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:21, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

My thoughts are that it makes sense, given the high frequency of the word, that it would have inflection unlike any other.

Second, in connecting the reconstruction to other languages outside Germanic, I thought perhaps it derived by mon/man + uh₂, the masculine ending of which occurs frequently in Sanskrit as -ū. In the European languages, including Germanic, Latin, Greek and Celtic, there was a soundchange in which h₂ takes the syllable nucleus instead of the high vowel (compare -ih₂ which became Latin and Greek -ia .) In Germanic, the soundchange is more specific in that it only happens after light syllables (short vowel+1 consonant) which is what we have here. Man-uh₂ > man-wā > mann-ō

Fortunately for us though is the presence of Old English's form manna which proves that it was ô (ō which could've been the precursor to Gothic -a cannot have been for the Old English form, in which it would've become -u in Northwest Germanic and then disappeared due to it following a heavy syllable (long vowel or short+2 consonants.) I also find it odd that this article acts as if the lack of a vowel for n declension nouns in the suffix is out of place. Look up any nouns of that declension and you'll see that Indo-European had no vowel in that suffix for oblique forms. Those with a vowel are the result of analogy.

Finally, what is the Accusative Singular with mann-ǭ based off of? Shouldn't it have been mann-ų?--Riqiz (talk) 05:06, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

@Riqiz: The accusative singular looks like a weird bug. Check the tables of the other n-stems linked as comparisons ... they have the expected accusative. I don't think the inflection was really unique in Proto-Germanic; I agree with the hypothesis at the end, that it was originally really just a special, rare type of n-stem (originally presumably the hysterokinetic type in -ḗn ~ -én- ~ -n- whose nominative singular is preserved in Old Norse as -i, or simply a type that preserved the PIE amphikinetic ablaut -ṓn ~ -on- ~ -n- ~ -én-), that was reinterpreted as a consonant stem or root noun *mann-, perhaps because the geminate nn was unique and this type of n-stem generally didn't survive unchanged anyway. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:25, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

In fact, I think that the most probable solution is that either the *berô type (the hypothesised origin of the apparent paradigm *manô ~ *mann-) simply preserves the Proto-Germanic inflection of all masculine n-stem nouns, or that at least some masculine n-stem nouns (probably more than those few mentioned if you add those that were affected by Kluge's law, obscuring the ablaut) preserved the original PIE amphikinetic suffix ablaut, yielding the *berô type as a kind of Restklasse, or maybe the *berô type is (part of) what Kroonen calls a "mixed" amphikinetic/hysterokinetic type (p. 35, §9.3).

I don't really understand the argument here; why can't *bernu- equally have split off from the dative plural, or the accusative singular, for example? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:48, 28 March 2019 (UTC)