Unstable fricatives: On Gothic pliuhan and Old English flēon

Abstract

There has been an almost century-long debate about the origin of Gothic pliuhan ‘to flee’ and its relations to semantically cognate words like Old English flēon, Old High German fliohan and Old Icelandic flýia. Traditionally it has been assumed that fl- developed out of pl-, and that the Gothic word hence represents a more original state than the West and North Germanic forms, but another school of thought contends that the change took place in the opposite direction,fl-being original and pl- secondary. The conflict is as yet unresolved.

The present paper attempts to throw some light on the problem by placing it in a more general context and asks the question, If fl- > pl- and pl- > fl- are both theoretically possible, which change or substitution is intrinsically the more probable one? Material from Latin, Russian, German and English is adduced to suggest that [θ] relatively frequently changes into [f] or is replaced by [f] but that the opposite rarely if ever happens. Reference is then made to studies of sound substitutions, acquisition rates and salience phenomena. As they lend support to the assumption that the predominance of the change or substitution [θ] > [f] over the opposite one, [f] > [θ], is natural rather than accidental, it is concluded that we are justified in allowing this tendency to play a part in the debate about the origin of the ‘flee’ words and in seeing it as an argument in favour of the traditional explanation.