Germanic *maþl- ‘council, court of law, tribunal, popular assembly, (public) speech, verbal (interpersonal) agreement’ is clearly a central piece of institutional vocabulary, but its etymology and, hence, its further cultural associations have long remained cryptic. It is argued that there is but one formally comparable and semantically contiguous form as a conceivable source for a Gmc. *maþl-, and that is Etruscan meθlum.

The distribution of geminates resulting from North and West Germanic consonant gemination suggests that velar obstruents were the segments most favored by the change, while r was least favored and blocked the operation altogether. In an attempt to account for this behavior, the phonetic characteristics of these sounds are examined in the context of the geminating environments. It is demonstrated that these preferences can be accounted for through coarticulatory and acoustic effects of the trigger on the preceding consonant and vice versa. Although many previous analyses have glossed over the details of consonant gemination in West Germanic, it is argued here that in order to understand sound change, coarticulation, perception, and allophonic variation must be taken into account.

During much of the Early New High German period, a small group of verbs with stem-initial g− and k− commonly formed their past participle without the prefix ge-.The standard account attributes this development to Upper German syncope. Quantitative data from a large collection of Nuremberg texts strongly suggests that this account is untenable, and a careful examination of the modern dialects shows that it is in fact the nonsyncopating Central German dialects that most strongly resemble the Early New High German situation. This paper proposes an alternative account involving inflectional haplology as the mechanism responsible for the loss of the prefix in the g-lk- verbs. This analysis answers many questions that the standard account raises, as well as explaining some striking patterns that the previous literature does not mention.

Yiddish provides a compelling argument that uvular [R] was present early in German (well before any possible French influence). Eastern European Yiddish r was uvular despite the fact that the r of eastern European languages sharing territory with Yiddish has always been overwhelmingly apical. Jews came from Germany to eastern Europe between 1100 and 1650. Thus, the testimony of Yiddish provides independent confirmation of other recent arguments for early uvular [R] on German-speaking territory. The weight of all the evidence leads to one conclusion: the theory that German uvular [R] came from France is no longer tenable.