Wiktionary talk:Proto-West Germanic entry guidelines

Ringe says the following:

1. Labiovelars were split into a velar and a following labial in Proto-West Germanic.
2. In some cases, this was accompanied by gemination of the velar, e.g. OHG quek (would be *queh if not geminated).
3. A word-final -w from such a sequence became -u like all other w.
4. Labiovelars are not palatalised in Old English, e.g. in þicce, stenc, sencan, wǣcan.
5. Gemination before j took place after change 1, and the result was a geminated velar.

I have a hard time reconciling point 1 and 5. If the sequence was indeed the way Ringe says, then there'd be a segmental sequence /kwj/ that then got geminated to /kkwj/ (or ). That seems like a really odd change to me, and it seems more likely to me that the labiovelar was geminated directly, before being split. On the other hand, /kwj/ was unique in the language, because the heavy Sievers variant /ij/ would have appeared everywhere else after two consonants. So there are no possible counterexamples.

The assertion that labiovelars split in two in Proto-West Germanic also doesn't sit well with me. We see regular attestations of -Cw- sequences all over West Germanic, so why do we never see any -w- from a former labiovelar directly attested? There is -u in cucu and wlacu, but why do we also see cwic and wlæc, and why do no other languages have -u here? Compare *balu, *skadu, *garu, which all preserve the vowel and the glide across the early languages. This suggests to me that labiovelars behave differently from -Cw- sequences, and are much more prone to simply losing the labial quality altogether.

All in all, I'm not convinced of the posited split into a sequence that Ringe proposes. —Rua (mew) 19:02, 1 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Rua: I have a hard time believing point 4 as well, since both stenc and sencan have palatalized descendants in later stages of English (modern stench for the former, and Middle English senchen for the latter). mellohi! (僕の乖離) 00:53, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

But do you explain þicce? —Rua (mew) 10:22, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Rua: That's the problem - the descendant reflexes completely contradict each other. Lean to thick, we miss stench and vice versa. mellohi! (僕の乖離) 13:26, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

But if we adopt your treatment of separating trueborn labiovelars from -Cw- sequences, this issue can be resolved, paradoxically, by stating that trueborn labiovelars did palatalize (by being stripped of labial quality in the first place) but -Cw- sequences didn't. This deals with thick, stench and senchen neatly, since stench and senchen derive from terms with trueborn labiovelars while thick didn't (since it was a reformation of a u-stem). Wǣcan didn't make it to Middle English, so it is of no help. mellohi! (僕の乖離) 15:44, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

There are close to a hundred contintental West-Germanic Runic inscriptions from the 5th-7th centuries, mainly from what is now southern Germany. A nice catalogue is found in Findell's recent book Phonological Evidence from the Continental Runic Inscriptions. Currently we seem to treat such early attestations as attestations of the later medieval language of that area, e.g. du has a Runic inscription dated to the 6th or early 7th century as an OHG attestation, on the basis of which WT:AGOH (see also my comment on its talk page) currently states a starting date of 500.

This perhaps clashes with how we are apparently treating PWGmc; is 500 really our end date for PWGmc? My impression is that the major divergences in West-Germanic came later, and consider that we are now treating Frankish as an etymology-only variant of PWGmc per that recent vote. Perhaps the cite at du should be a dialectal PWGmc entry? And the runic inscriptions catalogued in Findell 2012 could be added as attested Proto-West Germanic entries similar to how we have some Proto-Norse entries as well? How to deal w/ these? (As I do want to add the more certain readings from these runic inscriptions at some point.) — Mnemosientje (t · c) 17:32, 19 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure where you're getting 500 as an end date for PWG from? w:High German consonant shift dates the frication of voiceless stops to the 4-5th century. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain also started in the 5th century. The fronting of a to æ, common to English and Frisian but not shared with other West Germanic, must have occurred before then. As a lower bound, Ringe places the change of ē to ā, common with North Germanic, in the 2nd century. So I think that the period of PWG must be the 2nd-4th centuries.

Regarding Frankish, the problem is that it wasn't a unitary language itself. The territory from which the Franks came ranges from Low Franconian to areas bordering Alemannic. The migrations of the Franks occur at the same time as the consonant shift. In the Oaths of Strasbourg, we see the Frankish king Charles the Bald speak a relatively southern dialect. What we seemed to reconstruct as Frankish on Wiktionary was some kind of Proto-Frankish, the common ancestor of all Frankish dialects before the consonant shift, and perhaps also the form from which most Romance loanwords derived. But given the dating of the earliest stages of the consonant shift, such a dialect must be so old that it almost coincides with PWG. —Rua (mew) 17:10, 2 March 2020 (UTC)Reply

• There indeed was dialectal differentiation during the 5th-6th centuries, but there should have been a period of Common West Germanic when those dialects were still mutually intelligible, and thus, they were one abstand-language. Indeed, en-wiki argues that "judging by their nearly identical syntax, the West Germanic dialects were closely enough related to have been mutually intelligible up to the 7th century". Common Romance is included in Vulgar Latin in en-wikt, most Common Slavic is included in Proto-Slavic (although the last its century, when already a literary tradition was developing, is excluded), unfortunately I don't know about the cases outside Europe but I assume it's been common practice here. Ain92 (talk) 20:51, 19 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

The inscription kaba on the Frienstedt comb appears to provide a terminus post quem for PWG: in PWG proper, we have *kamb. The inscription (which appears to attest a still more archaic stage) is dated to the 3rd century (often "late 3rd century" or even 300 AD is given); in view of the evidence for dialect differentiation already in the 5th century, it seems that PWG began to diverge sometime in the 4th century.

Generally, proto-language reconstructions only reflect a short period (and a limited geographical reach, even if neither can be determined with precision, and the reconstructions themselves are of course limited by our knowledge), because sound changes and other changes affect languages all the time and they therefore do not remain static for centuries; and after dialectal differentiation has begun, even if mutual intelligibility is unaffected (all of Germanic may have remained mutually intelligible as late as the 5th or even 6th century), reconstructions do not apply anymore in many cases. Early Proto-Norse of c. 200 AD (or even 400 AD) is certainly more archaic than the PNG that can be reconstructed on the basis of the attested Old Norse dialects; on the other hand, while attested Old Norse seems to have still been fully mutually intelligible, it cannot be identified with PNG anymore, which may be identified with a stage as late as c. 700. In view of all this, it would probably be less misleading to describe our reconstructions as proto-dialects. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 09:14, 17 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

Ringe himself doesn't believe that PWG was a single unitary language, but rather a group of closely related, not quite identical dialects that shared many developments. Some WG-wide changes must postdate dialectal ones in Ringe's chronology. And even our (Ringe's) reconstruction of PWG misses some of the common changes, most notably the loss of short unstressed vowels after heavy syllables. This change must postdate the application of umlaut in the northernmost dialects, but not in the southern ones. —Rua (mew) 16:15, 17 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

Why does the Wiktionary standard do this when there are likely West Germanic inscriptions that still retain the final vowel? Example: https://www.runesdb.eu/find-list/d/fa/q////6/f/175/c/85fb2e17234798acb700000dc42d0365/ ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 19:28, 22 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

The Illerup inscriptions are even from the time that Proto-West Germanic would have been spoken, so why aren't they listed under the heading? Many of them are impossible to tell apart from Proto-Norse since the language at the time was so similar. This could motivate creating a "Proto North-West Germanic" header for sorting the various Runic inscriptions under. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 19:29, 22 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Mårtensås, my understanding of the inscription ᛚᚨᚷᚢᚦᛖᚹᚨ (laguþewa), if it indead reflects PWG, is appended with an agent suffix, i.e. *-ō. I haven't given it any thought beyond that. -- Sokkjō

It seems much more plausible for it to be the cognate of Old Norse -þér in names such as Eggþér, and Old English þēow attested in names like Ecgþēow (directly cognate with the Old Norse), Ongenþēow. It is further securely attested already in two Runic forms from the same context: ᛟᚹᛚᚦᚢᚦᛖᚹᚨᛉ (owlþuþewaʀ) and ᚲᛖᛚᛒᚨᚦᛖᚹᚨᛊ (kelbaþewas). There is no real reason for delegating these early Runic inscriptions to Proto-Norse, i.e. implying that they are exclusively North Germanic. ᛙᛆᚱᛐᛁᚿᛌᛆᛌ ᛭ Proto-Norsing ᛭ Ask me anything 21:59, 22 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

And the second element is still very well likely derived from *þewaz, but in this case, perhaps specifically from WG *þewō (“servant”), whence OE þēowa. Or, it's just a genitive form with a dropped S. 🤷 -- Sokkjō 01:00, 23 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

I am also curious about this. On Wikipedia's w:West Germanic Languages, under Morphology and Vocabulary, the paradigmatic examples all end in the vowel -a. Wiktionary is therefore not in line with its sister encyclopedia. While a vowelless form very well may have existed alongside the vowelled form, the simpler form should not be the default lemma. If the suffix is ultimately -(a), its presence should be assumed by default.

A chain of Proto-Germanic hundaz -> Proto-WGermanic hunda -> Old English hund much more clearly demonstrates the trajectory of the -az nominative suffix than Proto-Germanic hundaz -> Proto-WGermanic/Old English hund. This second sequence would lead an untrained researcher to assume the suffix had already died out completely by the proto-West Germanic era. --2603:3017:102:6D00:DDDC:1400:3062:A6BE 17:01, 24 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

In numerous entries, the Proto-Germanic form has been removed and in its place the Proto-West Germanic one has been inserted. In many cases, the etymology is led only to PWG and stops there. A particularly egregious case that I've just stumbled upon is reckon, where the Germanic etymology is led only to PWG and then jumps directly to PIE. I even wondered for a second if this is an attempt to promote some fringe theory that PG didn't exist and PWG, Proto-Norse and Gothic developed separately from PIE, but it is more likely all of this is the result of some Wiktionary editor(s) who decided to make entries about PWG and then, in love with the fruit of their labours, wanted to make the results of their work as visible and prominent as possible at the expense of everything else. No harm in noting the PWG forms as well, but not having PG at all is absurd. PG is a far more important milestone than PWG. 62.73.72.3 14:53, 21 March 2025 (UTC)Reply