The verbal reduplicating prefix. If the verbal stem in Gothic contained an initial cluster of two consonants, only the initial consonant was transferred to the prefix, except for the indivisible clusters sk and st (no examples of sp are recorded). The few cases of these two types of transference preserved in Wulfila's Gothic are: type 1 fraisan ‘to attempt’: faífrais, gretan ‘to weep’: gaígrot, flokan ‘to lament’: faíflok, slepan ‘to sleep’: saíslep; type 2 skaidan ‘to divide’: skaískaiþ, ga-staldan ‘to acquire: ga-staístald. The digraph ƕ must have also represented two indivisible phonemes hw (and will here be so written for convenience), since hw, not h alone, was transferred to the prefix: hwopan ‘to boast': hwaíhwop. The indivisibility of the clusters sk and st may have been due to the fact that the IE stops *k and *t after s were not shifted, and hence could not be divorced from the preceding s. But this was not the case with the initial clusters fr, gr, fl, sl. To explain the loss of the second phonemes in the prefix we are justified in assuming that in pre-Gothic (i.e. in Proto-Germanic) these clusters were transferred to the prefix, but that the second phonemes r, l were later lost through dissimilation: *fraífrais > faífrais, etc. This loss brought the form of the prefix into the pattern of the more frequent type of reduplication with a single initial consonant; thus, faífrais like faífalþ (from falþan ‘to fold'), saíslep like saíso (from saian ‘to sow'), etc. One may object to this explanation on the ground that analogy alone could have produced the same result, since the great majority of reduplicating verbs in Gothic had a single initial consonant. Perhaps the safest assumption is that the leveling was brought about by a combination of phonetic change and analogy.