Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/bōþlą

RFV discussion: April 2019–September 2021
Not found in Kroonen's dictionary either, and few of the attested descendants match the reconstruction. Old English preserves -þl-, as shown in the descendants of other Proto-Germanic terms with this cluster, which rules out and. Moreover, these descendants have a short o. Old Saxon shows Proto-Germanic d, rather than þ (compare, where þ is preserved). Middle Dutch merges þ and d, so there is no evidence there either way. Old Norse indeed has a regular change þl > l, as is visible from the descendants of the other pages. All in all, I don't think there's enough evidence to clearly reconstruct this. —Rua (mew) 16:22, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Rua: I went and added source and cognates. Old Frisian also exhibits the same metathesis, so maybe just an Anglo-Frisian random variant. -- 04:26, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

This is clearly sufficiently well sourced to stay. Additionally, the short vowel in Old English can be a result of an ablauting paradigm *bʰeh₂u- > *bō- and *bʰh₂u- > *bu-. There are three similar ones:, , and. For the metathesis: “Parallel examples are Old English seld = setl, northern seþel ‘seat, settle’, also nǽld = nǽdl , *nǽþl ‘needle’, áld = ádl , *áþl ‘disease’” (OED under “bold, n.”).
 * —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 23:15, 17 September 2021 (UTC)