Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Lexember Day 31 - confront

This is an interesting example of a weird thing that happens to the Germanic geminate /rr/ cluster. You can see that it started out in Proto-Germanic as /rn/, which was then assimilated to /rr/ in Gothic. Now, if Griutungi had had ‑j‑ in the stem (**storrjan), it would have been degeminated to **storjan and nothing particularly interesting would have happened, so the addition of J must have happened after 700ᴀᴅ, when geminate intervocalic R was degeminated through metathesis, giving us *stroran, and before 800ᴀᴅ when said ‑j‑ would have caused I/J umlaut, giving us Old Valthungian *strørjan (which would likely have been spelt ⟨streorjan⟩). Later, a little before 1200ᴀᴅ, two instances of R within a single syllable of each other causes dissimilation. Usually the first R would change to L, but in cases where this is phonotactically impossible (/stl/ is not a valid sequence in this stage of the language), the second changes instead, giving us *strøljən and eventually Middle Valthungian strœljen.

It’s been a great Lexember this year, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone’s lexica grow on Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, and various other corners of the internet. I’ve also enjoyed spending some mental time muddling over some conundra that have bothered me for a while, and while I still haven’t solved all of my “L-Problems,” I’ve solved many of them and I have a plan to knock out the rest in the new year. Happy New Year—I hope 2025 is less bad than I think it’s going to be!

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