Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/ferþuz

Is German 'Förde' from Old Norse, or directly from Proto-Germanic? 80.123.16.143 12:52, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

I suspect it's a borrowing from what is originally the old plural of vōrd, the Middle Low German cognate of German Furt and English ford, that was reanalysed as a feminine singular noun still within MLG (note that Appendix:Proto-Germanic/furduz#Descendants lists Low German Föörd, which looks like a continuation of MLG vȫrde). Compare the Dutch cognate voord. See Pfeifer. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:06, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes. Already in MLG, vorde is a common singular alongside vort. Since MLG generally doesn't indicate umlaut, this spelling can easily mean vȫrde. It usually remains masculine, however. So the development into a feminine may be a later process (analogy with other words in -de). At any rate it seems clear that German Förde is a doublet of Furt. Semantically, however, it is quite possible that the sense "fjord" was influenced by Danish. 178.4.151.236 16:15, 2 January 2023 (UTC)