Verner's law

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Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s and *x, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively *b, *d, *z and *g.

1 The problem
2 The solution
3 Dating Verner's law
4 Significance
5 See also
6 Further reference
7 External links

[edit] The problem

When Grimm's law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have changed into Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *f, *þ (dental fricative) and *x (velar fricative), according to Grimm's Law. Indeed, that was known to be the usual development. However, there appeared to be a large set of words in which the agreement of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Baltic, Slavic etc. guaranteed PIE *p, *t or *k, and yet the Germanic reflex was a voiced stop (*b, *đ or *g).

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 *t > PGmc *d is the word for 'father', PIE *ph₂tēr (here *h₂ stands for a laryngeal, and the macron marks vowel length) > PGmc *fađēr (instead of expected *faþēr). Curiously, the structurally similar family term *bʰreh₂tēr 'brother' developed as predicted by Grimm's Law (Gmc. *brōþēr). Even more curiously, we often find both *þ and *đ as reflexes of PIE *t in different forms of one and the same root, e.g. *werþ- 'turn', preterite *warþ 'he turned', but e.g. preterite plural and past participle *wurđ- (plus appropriate inflections).

[edit] 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 *ph₂tēr and *bʰreh₂tēr was therefore one of second-syllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pitā́ versus bhrā́tā).

The *werþ- | *wurđ- contrast is likewise explained as due to stress on the root versus stress on the inflectional suffix (leaving the first syllable unstressed). There are also other Vernerian alternations such as illustrated by Modern German ziehen | (ge)zogen 'draw' < PGmc. *tiux- | *tug- < PIE *déuk- | *duk´- 'lead'.

There is a spinoff from Verner's Law: the rule accounts also for PGmc *z as the development of PIE *s in some words. Since this *z changed to *r in the Scandinavian languages and in West Germanic (German, Dutch, English, Frisian), Verner's Law resulted in the alternation /s/ versus /r/ in some inflectional paradigms, known as grammatischer Wechsel. For example, the Old English verb ceosan 'choose' had the past plural form curon and the past participle (ge)coren < *kius- | *kuz- < *ǵéus- | *ǵus- 'taste, try'. We would have coren for chosen in Modern English if the consonantal shell of choose and chose had not been generalised (cf. German kiesen : gekoren 'choose (archaic)'). But Vernerian /r/ has not been levelled out in were < PGmc. *wēz-, related to was. Similarly, lose, though it has the weak form lost, also has the compound form forlorn (cf. Dutch "verliezen"/"verloren"; in German, on the other hand, the /s/ has been levelled out both in war 'was' (plur. waren 'were') and verlieren 'lose' (part. verloren 'lost').

[edit] Dating Verner's 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.

[edit] Significance

Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (an exception to the first sound 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").