Reconstruction talk:Proto-West Germanic/knappō
Just idle speculation, but ...[edit]
I think it's likely that we're looking at two homophonous words, here, not a word that can mean either "knob" or "boy". My guess would be that the original word meaning boy was *knabô, and *knappô was the diminutive, which just also happened to be the diminutive of some other word, possibly with a different stem, whose non-diminutive form disappeared from the language. This would explain why German has both Knabe and Knappe. Soap (talk) 07:39, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
- Or the "boy" sense could be a joking sort of affectionate nickname along the lines of pumpkin or squirt. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:11, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
High German[edit]
If the reconstruction with West Germanic -pp- were correct, we must assume that the word was originally lacking in Upper German and later spread from Central German (where -pp- is preserved). This does seem possible as the two only Old High German attestations are apparently both Rhenish. 78.55.97.69 20:27, 3 May 2021 (UTC)