Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/aihtēr

Date of borrowing

I assume it was a late borrowing, showing loss of -h- and '-tār' instead of '-tēr'. If it was borrowed from early Germanic, presumably it could reflect *aihtār < *aihtōr, but from what I gather Samic would have preserved the velar as -k-. Although I should note I am not wholly familiar with Samic sound changes. Anglom (talk) 17:34, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

w:Proto-Samic has a lot of information. In particular the vowel shift is important. The trouble is how to account for the ai in Northern Sami. The only source that I know of for short a (as opposed to á) in Northern Sami is Proto-Samic *ë, which in turn originates from an earlier *i or sometimes *e. Of course, the word could have been borrowed after Proto-Samic times, which you already say is likely. But this brings the Germanic word into question. The PIE agent suffixes -ter- and -tor- were completely lost in Germanic. They were not productive at all, and I can't even think of any words in which they occur. They were certainly not consonantal stems in any case, so if the suffix survives, it would have to appear with another inflectional ending attached, -teraz, -taraz, -trô or the like (and of course with Verner variants þ and d). So that makes it very unlikely that a word like this occurred in Proto-Germanic. If it occurred in Pre-Germanic times (when the suffixes had perhaps not quite fallen out of use), then the shape of the Northern Sami loan becomes impossible to explain. —CodeCat 17:51, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

That makes sense. Both -Teraz and -Taraz would be easy to explain by leveling out the nominative from -tēr or -tōr. I'm not exactly 100% on the vowels of the Sami form though, as it seems to me incredibly hard to find information on Samic languages. I've only found the one dictionary so far and its in Norwegian and pretty old. I might have jumped the gun a bit as I was pretty excited to find a potential reflex of the agent suffix in Germanic. Anglom (talk) 19:13, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Northern Sami word seems to be cited in an old orthography, per Friis maybe? The modern form is indeed áittar (thus per Álgu), indicating Proto-Samic *ā and not *ë. --Tropylium (talk) 19:44, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

That's actually an extremely helpful link. Thank you. Anglom (talk) 21:03, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I've actually been dwelling on the idea that Germanic might have turned these suffixes into *-Trijô, before eventually they were simply leveled out in favor of the far more productive zero-grade n-stem formations. In that case, Old English -byrþra < *burþrijô and Germanic *murþrijô could be compared. Would a form *aihtrijô make better sense formally for the Samic forms? Anglom (talk) 19:47, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

About the suffix -tēr, is there any evidence that it would have become -Teraz or -Taraz?, since family words used the suffix as a consonantal stems, *duhtēr. 𐌷𐌻𐌿𐌳𐌰𐍅𐌹𐌲𐍃 𐌰𐌻𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍃 19:45, 9 September 2018 (UTC)