Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/wai

Etymology
I modestly posit further, the lengthened grade of etc. (q.v.), as per  Zezen (talk) 21:10, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * How would the PIE form evolve into the Germanic form? —CodeCat 21:15, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Noun?
Looking at its descendants (en., de. , nl. , etc. are all nouns), and the fact that woe is something that befalls people in its common use as an interjection (woe on thee! wai þus! etc.), would this not be a noun first, from which its use as an interjection later originated? In Gothic (although it is never inflected) we never find wai by itself: it is always combined with a dative pronoun to indicate that it is a thing that befalls someone. It even seems to have a combining form in the compound, which I would not expect to be the case with an indeclinable interjection (which surely would combine as is, as ?). — Kleio (t · c) 18:08, 13 March 2017 (UTC)