Talk:daughter

PIE form
copied from User's talk page Can you explain the change you just made to daughter please? Was something wrong with the PIE? Widsith 18:40, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

While I was tracing the word I found that there should have been a schwa (upside down e)after the the h. If the schwa is not there, it changes the way the word would be spelled/pronounced in Old English, which was 'dohter' in many, many sources.

Another source suggests that the Indo-European word for daughter was dʰugh(schwa here)ter. If this is the case, the Pre-Germanic word may have looked like /dugaÞer/ and pronounced /duγaðer/. The Early and Late Proto-Germanic along with the West Germanic word may have looked like /dogaðer/ and have been pronounced [dóγaðer]. The West Germanic of this work would be /dogader/ and pronounced [dóγader]. The γ sound is a voiced velar fricative, which is known as the “partner of x”, which is West Germanic was pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative. This is important to know because the Old English version of the word daughter is dohter. In Old English, the h was pronounced as [x] when surrounded by the letters o, as in the word Þōhte ‘thought’. Therefore, it would make sense if the West Germanic voiced γ sound in [dóγader] changed to the voiceless version [x], which was spelled with an h. This helps to explain the change from from the g spelling to the h spelling. Therefore, based on the evidence this version of the Indo-European word for daughter may be closest. In addition, if the g spelling had still been used in some areas the g later became a w in Middle English, which would also have made sense because the word would have been /dowader/. The second syllable was obviously lost at some point so the pronunciation of the word would be [dowder] which is very similar to our present day daughter.


 * Yes, I am very familiar with sound changes in OE. Your argument doesn't make sense to me, because as you point out the ancestor of *dʰughəter would have been something like OE *dogaþer, whereas in fact in OE dohter there is no vowel between the velar and the alveolar.  Also, you removed the subscript 2 – why?  As you probably know, there were different kinds of laryngeal in PIE.  This one is normally reconstructed as h₂.  Can you provide a reputable source for your PIE form?  I note that Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture (one of the most recent textbooks I know of) gives the form as *dʰugh₂ter-.  If you are changing it you really need to cite a printed authority to back it up.  Widsith 19:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I am still researching myself. I am not talking just about the changes from Old English, I'm talking about the changes before Old English, such as Verners and Grimm's law during the Pre-Germanic and Proto Germanic times. I also know the word is related to the Greek thugatēr, as I found from The New Oxford University Press 2006. (This has three syllables)- also in order for the u to change to an o there has to be umlaut during the Early ProtoGermanic time, and since the schwa changed to an /a/ in Pre-Germanic, the u would be affected by the a and would be changed to an [o]sound. I am using the textbook by "The Origins and Development of the English Language" by Johne Algeo and Thomas Pyles. Also, I had a very hard time reading the subscript z, I didn't even realize it was a z. I'm not familiar with what exactly the h subscript z sound is. Can you explain? (When I tried to copy what it said in the original entry, it came out as a square in Microsoft word.) Can you explain how dohter could be traced from Indo-European with the way you had it?


 * IE *dʰugh₂ter- > Germanic *doxter (from an earlier form *dukter) > OE dohtor > English daughter, is the usual reconstruction. Also, it is not a Z it's a number 2.  There were three laryngeals in PIE (h₁, h₂, h₃) and they rarely survived into the daughter languages, usually becoming vowels as in the Greek example you mentioned.  Their discovery was very important, see Laryngeal theory.  Given that you are still researching this, I am reverting your changes for now, but I will copy this discussion to Talk:daughter for future reference.  Also, please consider registering an account here, it will make things easier.  Thanks!  Widsith 21:20, 14 May 2006 (UTC)


 * It is usually assumed that while laryngeals did vocalise (i. e., become a vowel) as *a in Germanic if they stood in the first syllable of a word, as in the word for "father", they did not vocalise (i. e., they simply disappeared) if they were in non-first syllables, as in the word for "daughter" (the laryngeal also disappeared early in Balto-Slavic). Refer to Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/dʰugh₂tḗr for the details. Apparently the laryngeal was dropped also in the oblique case forms, whence the situation in Indo-Iranian, Celtic and Anatolian, where both forms with and without vowel are attested within the same branch. --Florian Blaschke 21:00, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Race / Culture
Why use a stereotype to explain the use of this word? Does it really have to be sweeping negative generalizations about "Indians and Chinese"?

English alternative forms
-84.161.50.33 02:15, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Is douȝter with ȝ really (Early) New English and not only Middle English?
 * Is doughter attestable as (Early) New English?

product of something
Something produced by or issuing from something else (literary): Truth is the daughter of time. --Backinstadiums (talk) 19:06, 3 October 2020 (UTC)