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But could not a horizontal process between already separated languages/dialects smoothed that out by adapting the incorporated term to its host language, so tha
by Archelaos 3y ago
But could not a horizontal process between already separated languages/dialects smoothed that out by adapting the incorporated term to its host language, so that the date of the general phonetic bifurcations of two languages and the history of a lot of their vocabulary might be very distinct?
I am thinking of such cases as certain Anglicisms that were phonetically adapted when they were incorporated into German. For example the English term "password" is in the process to replace German "Kennwort", but its final consonant is adjusted to German "Wort" as "Passwort". So phonetically "Passwort" and "Wort" vs. "password" and "word" seem to share the very same derivational process, while their actual history of adaptation is quite distinct.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoAs I said, the derivational process we find here is a very specific one involving reduplication and zero-grade ablaut of the root. If we look at the documented history of the Indo-European languages, both reduplication and ablaut had already become subject to erosion, or even total loss. It is just not realistic for those two things to have survived (and, in this particular derivational process, to survive in sync!) for thousands and thousands of years.