Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Your edit on Stoppel

I've sort of reverted your edit on "Stoppel", except that I put the Latin more towards the front as you had done.

Firstly, it was not correct to say "the High German form was Middle High German stupfel", because Central German is also High German, and it uses "Stoppel".

Secondly, in modern German -- which is not a standardized dialect, but an artificial amalgam of dialects -- we very often have the case that a word comes out with a certain consonantal "irregularity" in comparison to the Upper German-based MHG. But while this is so, it's still essentially the same word and thus a native one. Because the forms Stupfel, Stopfel, Stuppel, Stoppel were all around for some while, written, read, and reproduced, and eventually Stoppel happened to become standardized.

I've been working on these "irregular" consonantisms more or less systematically for some while, and thus far I have chosen to give the MHG-OHG lineage, and then explain the specific form according to its dialectal background (usually that is Central and/or Low German). This is also what the etymological dictionaries do in many or most cases. Thereby, I treat the word as being derived both from Middle High German and Middle Low German, not as a borrowing from the latter.

I only do this in cases where the identity of different dialectal forms was obvious to writers in the formative period of modern German, who were generally quite aware of the dialectal differences. I wouldn't do it if two stems happened to be cognates, but the identity wasn't obvious (because maybe the word had become archaic in Upper German, or the Low German form was just too different). All of this, of course, based on the standard literature.

You don't need to answer, unless you disagree with this practice.