Reconstruction talk:Proto-West Germanic/pīnā

If this is real, why did it still have /p/ in early OHG?

I'd always assumed this was a loan that spread from Latin northward, surviving only in Dutch and English. This would mean the OHG listing is a loan too, and probably of a late enough date to have missed the High German consonant shift. This applies to both the tree and the pain meanings, since they apparently have the same reflexes.

Alternatively, the German words could have been loaned from the northern dialects after the shift took place, but this roundabout route seems less likely unless we have reason to believe that both a tree name and the word for pain were borrowed from Latin into Frankish at about the same time, and then into High German. —Soap— 20:19, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: OHG notoriously relatinized many borrowings, a process that continued across all of Middle Germanic, making them sometimes difficult to date. We treat Frankish as a dialect of West Germanic, and, by extension, early High German. Consequently, instead of having to choose an origin point of borrowing, we can use PWG as a catch-all, much like is done in Proto-Slavic borrowings from Latin. -- Sokkjō 21:01, 5 September 2023 (UTC)