white

Note: Though this etymology for Germanic *hwīta- seems likely in broad outline, the details are problematic. The *-t- in the Indo-European etymon would lead one to expect a voiced or voiceless fricative in Germanic rather than a voiceless stop. The explanation for this lies in the assumption that the cluster *-tn- after the accent in the presumed pre-form *ḱu̯ei̯t-nó- produced a geminate t (Kluge's Law), which the individual Germanic languages have generally shortened after a long vowel (though this is arguably not the case for Old High German). The occasional tt spellings in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch and Middle Low German may be taken as traces of gemination. (E. Seebold, however, believes these forms are late and secondary, and points to the nominative neuter form hwitt in the Cotton Caligula manuscript of the Heliand—see Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache.) Their descendants in the modern languages in part also show a short vowel, giving rise to yet another assumption, that these forms go back to a zero-grade adjective *ḱu̯it-nó-. The older literature on *hwīta- simply accepts that its Indo-European predecessor was *ḱu̯ei̯d-, with -d- being a different root extension than the -t- evident in the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic words. See discussion and references in R. Lühr, Expressivität und Lautgesetz im Germanischen (Heidelberg, 1988), pp. 263-64; and in G. Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Brill, 2013), p. 267.