The Germanic jō-Stems in Gothic

Abstract

Among the early Germanic languages, Gothic best preserves the two subtypes of jō -stem nouns, which differ only in the nom.sg , e.g. bandi ‘bond’ vs. wrakja ‘persecution’. It has been assumed since the 19th century that the distribution of the bandi and wrakja types is conditioned by weight of the nominal stem – in other words, that the nom.sg endings -i and -ja are ultimately a reflex of Sievers’s Law. The author here argues that this complementary distribution is both imperfect and a mirage, and the two subtypes rather go back to different Proto-Indo-European formations, respectively to the ablauting devī́- suffix * -ih 2 - ~ * -yeh 2 - and to invariant * -yeh 2 - . Since most of the former happened to have heavy stems, a noun like * bandijō ‘bond’ was remodeled by lexical analogy to bandi ; but the existence of mawi and þiwi with light stems on the one hand, and the loanword evidence for * ansijō ‘handle; eyelet’ on the other, indicate that stem shape was not phonologically associated with inflectional type in Proto-Germanic.