Lexember Day 07 – to resound

Today’s word is brought to you by a bunch of those “L-Shattering” sound changes interacting within a single paradigm. The word itself, deriving from Proto-Germanic *hellaną (whence also German hellen), is fairly unremarkable aside from being phonaesthetically related to a host of other “-ell” words related to sound such as skellaną (→ OE scellan ‘clang’), hlōaną (→ low, cf. cattle), skallijaną (→ shill), gellaną (→ yell), bellaną (→ bellow and German bellen ‘bark’), and possibly even related to ‘call’ and ‘clambor’. But the really nifty bit here is how a number of distinctive sound changes are showcased in this tiny class 3 strong verb.

First, the basic forms – if you’ve been steeped in Germanic linguistics for decades like some of us, I’m talking about the “First Principal Part,” which consists of the infinitive and gerund, the present indicative and subjunctive, and the imperative forms – in this case: šul /ɕul/. This comes from MV hsjul /ʃjul/ ← OV hivl /hjul/ ← Griutungi hill ← PGmc hell. To really break it down for you, here are the important changes going on:

• hill → hiwl (Geminate sonorants go through some stuff. /ll/ becomes /wl/ before a vowel.)
• hiwl → hjul (This is a general change of /iw/→/ju/ that took place prior to the Old Valthungian era, though it was still written as ⟨iv⟩ in OV.)
• hjul → ʃjul (A change just prior to Middle Valthungian where /hj/ → /ʃj/, possibly with an intermediate /ç(j)/. Written in various ways in MV (hj, sj, hsj, shj, &c) now usually standardized as ⟨hsj⟩ to distinguish it from ⟨sj⟩ /ʃj/ from a different process.)
• ʃjul → ɕul (Palatalized consonants followed by /j/ lose the /j/, and at some point become true palatals, though not necessarily both at the same time.)

A little odd, maybe, but not too weird so far. But moving on the Second Principal Part: The preterit singular: haul /hau̯l/ ← MV hawl (/idem/) ← OV havl (/idem/) ← Grt. hall. There’s really not much going on here at all aside from the same Geminate Sonorant change from above. This one is remarkable only for its complete lack of doing anything interesting. The only other thing to note is that the second person singular, hault, is an analogous form: It should have avoided the initial Geminate Sonorant rule because it was followed by a consonant, but hallt → *halt was probably quickly assimilated to match haul.

Finally, the Third and Fourth Principal Parts are the same (as in most Class 3 strong verbs), but they get some extra weirdness from the L-Shattering Times. (The 3PP consists of the preterit plural and the past subjunctive, and the 4PP is the past participle.)

Here we start out simply enough with Griutungi hull, but the Geminate Sonorant rule has a twist when the preceding vowel is /u/, so:

• hull → hujl
• hujl → hwil (Normally, the new-found diphthong would remain /uj/ but in this case it interacts with preceding /h/, and /h-ui̯/ gets reanalyzed as /hu̯-i/. Though it is not reflected in Valthungian’s marginally more popular Romanization, ⟨hu⟩ is distinct from ⟨hw⟩ in the Valthungian script, and this form has become ⟨hw⟩.) 
• hwil → xwil (This change was never reflected in writing.)

The final jank in this putative frankenverb is that if you are familiar with Valthungian verbs at all, you may have noticed a lack of Valthungian’s distinctive “Metathetical Unpacking,” as the kids like to call it, which is where a lot of infinitives, participles, gerunds, and various other inflections tend to “flip” their final syllables, so you might be expecting **šulna, **šulnaþ, **šulnas, **šulnaþs, and so on. There’s not much to say about that except that that particular process is blocked by L in another L-Rebellion more than a thousand years after the previous one.