copied from User's talk page Can you explain the change you just made to daughter please? Was something wrong with the PIE? Widsith 18:40, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
While I was tracing the word I found that there should have been a schwa (upside down e)after the the h. If the schwa is not there, it changes the way the word would be spelled/pronounced in Old English, which was 'dohter' in many, many sources.
Another source suggests that the Indo-European word for daughter was dʰugh(schwa here)ter . If this is the case, the Pre-Germanic word may have looked like /dugaÞer/ and pronounced /duγaðer/. The Early and Late Proto-Germanic along with the West Germanic word may have looked like /dogaðer/ and have been pronounced [dóγaðer]. The West Germanic of this work would be /dogader/ and pronounced [dóγader]. The γ sound is a voiced velar fricative, which is known as the “partner of x”, which is West Germanic was pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative. This is important to know because the Old English version of the word daughter is dohter. In Old English, the h was pronounced as [x] when surrounded by the letters o, as in the word Þōhte ‘thought’. Therefore, it would make sense if the West Germanic voiced γ sound in [dóγader] changed to the voiceless version [x], which was spelled with an h. This helps to explain the change from from the g spelling to the h spelling. Therefore, based on the evidence this version of the Indo-European word for daughter may be closest. In addition, if the g spelling had still been used in some areas the g later became a w in Middle English, which would also have made sense because the word would have been /dowader/. The second syllable was obviously lost at some point so the pronunciation of the word would be [dowder] which is very similar to our present day daughter.
- Yes, I am very familiar with sound changes in OE. Your argument doesn't make sense to me, because as you point out the ancestor of *dʰughəter would have been something like OE *dogaþer, whereas in fact in OE dohter there is no vowel between the velar and the alveolar. Also, you removed the subscript 2 – why? As you probably know, there were different kinds of laryngeal in PIE. This one is normally reconstructed as h₂. Can you provide a reputable source for your PIE form? I note that Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture (one of the most recent textbooks I know of) gives the form as *dʰugh₂ter-. If you are changing it you really need to cite a printed authority to back it up. Widsith 19:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
I am still researching myself. I am not talking just about the changes from Old English, I'm talking about the changes before Old English, such as Verners and Grimm's law during the Pre-Germanic and Proto Germanic times. I also know the word is related to the Greek thugatēr, as I found from The New Oxford University Press 2006. (This has three syllables)- also in order for the u to change to an o there has to be umlaut during the Early ProtoGermanic time, and since the schwa changed to an /a/ in Pre-Germanic, the u would be affected by the a and would be changed to an [o]sound. I am using the textbook by "The Origins and Development of the English Language" by Johne Algeo and Thomas Pyles. Also, I had a very hard time reading the subscript z, I didn't even realize it was a z. I'm not familiar with what exactly the h subscript z sound is. Can you explain? (When I tried to copy what it said in the original entry, it came out as a square in Microsoft word.) Can you explain how dohter could be traced from Indo-European with the way you had it?
- IE *dʰugh₂ter- > Germanic *doxter (from an earlier form *dukter) > OE dohtor > English daughter, is the usual reconstruction. Also, it is not a Z it's a number 2. There were three laryngeals in PIE (h₁, h₂, h₃) and they rarely survived into the daughter languages, usually becoming vowels as in the Greek example you mentioned. Their discovery was very important, see w:Laryngeal theory. Given that you are still researching this, I am reverting your changes for now, but I will copy this discussion to Talk:daughter for future reference. Also, please consider registering an account here, it will make things easier. Thanks! Widsith 21:20, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
- It is usually assumed that while laryngeals did vocalise (i. e., become a vowel) as *a in Germanic if they stood in the first syllable of a word, as in the word for "father", they did not vocalise (i. e., they simply disappeared) if they were in non-first syllables, as in the word for "daughter" (the laryngeal also disappeared early in Balto-Slavic). Refer to Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/dʰugh₂tḗr for the details. Apparently the laryngeal was dropped also in the oblique case forms, whence the situation in Indo-Iranian, Celtic and Anatolian, where both forms with and without vowel are attested within the same branch. --Florian Blaschke 21:00, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Race / CultureEdit
Why use a stereotype to explain the use of this word? Does it really have to be sweeping negative generalizations about "Indians and Chinese"?