Specific Phase names for the Germans

[Thalatta]

I wasn't satisfied having just said "regarding something in particular": I mentioned Kroonen before because he gives þurpa meaning as "crowd", "which anyway blatantly contradicts your “singular first” interpretation". Then I ended up finding quite some interesting stuff:

In the 2023 dissertation "Unde vēnistī? The Prehistory of Italic through its Loanword Lexicon", by A. M. Wigman, one of Kroonen's PhD students, one can find:

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Sabellic attests to a verbal root *treb- ‘to dwell’, with a root noun *trēb- ‘house’ with cognates in PCelt. *trebā- ‘settlement’ (e-grade), PGm. *þurpa- ‘crowd, settlement’ (zero-grade), and PBalt. *trōb- (o-grade lengthened by Winter’s Law)

It doesn't seem Kroonen disagreed much with his own student for that to end in the PhD thesis… not that we didn't know what "crowd" seemed to support already.

Later on, it's stated that:

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It is interesting to note that most of the Germanic comparanda, where they contain a diagnostic phoneme, can be shown to have entered Germanic before the operation of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws. It is a pre-Proto-Germanic stage when their consonantism can be reconstructed to match that of the other comparanda most closely

And the relevant row compares Proto-Germanic *þurpa- with Proto-Celtic *treb- (a footnote states that "a note of caution is that it cannot be ruled out that reconstructions involving the operation of Verner’s Law might be misinterpretations", showing that, although a possibility, this is not a mainstream view, unlike what's in the main text).

Finally, it's stated that many things there come "as no surprise if Grimm's Law operated in the mid-first millennium BCE", which shows this is already considered, and bears no major problem towards the reconstructions provided, making evident that this is not an issue:

On 05/11/2026 at 2:07 AM, Genava55 said:

deriving *þurpą from *treb- requires accounting for an unexpected voiceless stop (*p) where a voiced aspirate or plain voiced stop (*b / *bʰ) would regularily be expected under Grimm's Law

Here, why are you only considering one change? There are more as part of Grimm's Law, as From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, by D. Ringe, states: "by the second change subsumed under Grimm's Law PIE voiced stops became PGmc voiceless stops". This turns *b into *p, as expected, and the third example in that very same page is in fact:

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PIE *treb- ~ *tr̥ b- ‘building’ (cf. OIr. atreba ‘(s)he dwells’; secondary zero grade in Lat. trabs ‘beam’) in PGmc *þurpą ‘farmstead, village’ (cf. ON þorp; Goth. þaúrp ‘field’);

Which also includes village as one of the meanings of *þurpą.