Faroese and its Relevance to the Germanic

Abstract

In Germanic, the Proto-Indo-European accusative of the feminine demonstrative, i.e. *, emerges in two different forms: Gothic versus Old Norse and Old English . Since PIE * regularly gives *ō in Germanic, it is usually assumed that the reflex developed out of * through an unstressed stage. But this view was recently questioned by Peter Schrijver. He argued that the merger of *ā and *ō was forestalled in North West Germanic by a tautosyllabic nasal, and that therefore must be regular. This solution seems to be contradicted by Faroese, however, where the demonstrative form is . This may continue an Old Norse variant with a short vowel, and thus seems to indicate that PNWGm. indeed developed out of * through an unstressed form, viz. *.