Germanic nerdism

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Germanic nerdism

Bit of a long shot, but you're the one person that comes to my mind that might know something about this topic. PGM *ne survies into Middle Low German and Dutch, also with metathesis, giving the written forms en, ne, enne, ene. I'm somewhat convinced the last two are just hypercorrectisms in dialects which have already lost /ə/. Do you have any knowledge or educated guess on how they would be pronounced? Of couse we can assume <e> to be [ə] in unstressed positions, but at least in GML monosyllables always also have a stressed form.

Korn (talk)23:17, 6 May 2015

I'm not actually sure if en reflects metathesis. What seems more likely to me is that it's an orthographic representation of syllabic /n/, with the schwa apocopated. Perhaps followed by epenthesis. I don't know about en(n)e.

CodeCat23:44, 6 May 2015