|
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives
The problem When Grimm's law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops At first, irregularities did not give scholars sleepless nights as long as there were many examples of the regular outcome. Increasingly, however, it became the ambition of linguists to formulate general and exceptionless rules of sound change that would account for all the data (or as close to the ideal as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it. One classic example of PIE The solution Karl Verner was the first scholar who put his finger on the factor governing the distribution of the two outcomes. He observed that the apparently unexpected voicing of voiceless fricatives occurred if they were non-word-initial and if the vowel preceding them carried no stress in PIE. The original location of stress was often retained in Greek and early Sanskrit, though in Germanic stress eventually became fixed on the initial (root) syllable of all words. The crucial difference between and was therefore one of second-syllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pitā́ versus bhrā́tā). The There is a spinoff from Verner's Law: the rule accounts also for PGmc gekoren 'choose (archaic)'). But Vernerian /r/ has not been levelled out in were < PGmc. Dating Verners law It is worth noting that the Verner's Law comes chronologically before the Germanic shift of stress to the initial syllable (because the voicing is conditioned by the old location of stress). The stress shift erased the conditioning environment and made the Vernerian variation between voiceless fricatives and their voiced alternants look mysteriously haphazard. Until recently it was assumed that Verner's law was productive after Grimm's Law. Now it has been pointed out that even if the sequence was reverse the end result could have been just the same given certain conditions. Scholars today are inclined towards preferring the new theory postulating a sequence reverse to the classical one. This change, however, has far reaching implications on the shape and development of the Proto-Germanic language. Many details on these questions are given in the article about Verner's law in German Wikipedia. Significance Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (an exception to the first consonant shift) in Kuhns Zeitschrift in 1876, but he had presented his theory already on 1 May, 1875 in a comprehensive personal letter to his friend and mentor, Vilhelm Thomsen. It was received with great enthusiasm by the young generation of comparative philologists, the so-called Junggrammatiker, because it was an important argument in favour of the Neogrammarian dogma that the sound laws were without exceptions ("die Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze"). See also Further reference | ||||||||
|
| |||||||||
 |
|
| |