Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/-hun

Forms

This one is really hard to understand, considering the seemingly hard to reconcile forms of *-hun and *-gin. From what I can find, *-hun is usually assumed to be from PIE *kwo-, while *-gin is assumed to come from *kwe-.

Maybe it's possible that one formed following stressed *ne, while the other followed unstressed *ni?

I've also considered that maybe *-gin might have also experienced an epenthetic vowel *-u-, to give Pre-Gmc *-ukene, but I'm not really confident about that theory. Consider the Old Norse variants to hvárgi, hvárigr and hvárugr.

It might also be possible that the root of *-gin comes from an enclitic particle *-gʰe/-ǵʰe or *-gʰi/-ǵʰi, which seems to have also been attached to negation, among other things, in Sanskrit ná gha and Old Church Slavonic niže, according to Pokorny. Anglom (talk) 02:36, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

I've been running this *-hun/*-gin problem through my head more lately, I'm starting to think the original form was pre-Gmc *-kʷim-de. In early Germanic, this would have resulted in *-hwin after vowels, and would have been extended to *-ugin after consonants, with delabialization due to epenthetic *-u-. Eg. *ainṓ-hwin, against *aináz-u-gin (with original stress). In Gothic, after syncope of internal -i-, *-hw(i)n was resegmented as *-hun. In North and West Germanic, the Verner alternant dominated. Anglom (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Newer theory

After coming across the Ancient Greek modal particle ke, variants ka and ken, it's very obvious that these forms can be matched with the Germanic enclitics *-hun and *-gin, going back to earlier full grade *kem or *ken and zero-grade *km̥ or *kn̥.

The Greek forms were originally ken and ka, but with ka becoming ke under the influence of the former, reinforced by the elision of the final nasal.

What the original distribution was I am unsure. Germanic clearly attests a stressed and unstressed form, but these forms are exclusive between Northwest and East Germanic, where East Germanic speakers are known level out Verner's voicing in favor of the seemingly more primary Grimm's "voicing". Likewise, Northwest Germanic usually goes the other way. Perhaps the voicing rested on whether the speaker stressed the negation particle *ne or not *ni, although we'd surely rather expect *né aina-gun and *ni aina-hín instead...?

The semantics must have developed from "not/no (one) possible/potential ..." from its very frequent use in negatives, and thereby might represent (early) stage II of Jespersen's Cycle.Burgundaz (talk) 19:44, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps instead the distribution depended on case, that is with an accusative case: *áiną-gin, but with an oblique or dative/genitive case: *ainás-hun, depending pretty much on the word-internal accent displacement. Burgundaz (talk) 05:49, 25 April 2021 (UTC)