Sal-Frankish NUM-NUM Compounding in the Lex Salica

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Abstract This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds to the Roman numeral D, being half of M ‘1000’. With this analysis, the Sal-Frankish numbers become transparent, even the two higher values of the so-called chunnas. The neologism sunde was a back formation from tusunde ‘thousand’, which was analysed as tu ‘two’ + sunde ‘500’. This back formation was possible in the contact language Sal-Frankish for both segmental reasons (ongoing occlusion of [θ] to [t]) and stress, but not in Old Low Franconian, Old Middle Franconian, Old Saxon or OHG.