Germanic spirant law

In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law or Primärberührung is a specific historical instance of assimilation which occurred at an early stage in the history of the Germanic languages and is regarded by some as being early enough to fall into the same general context as Grimm's and Verner's law.

General description

The law affects the new voiced and voiceless stops "b, d, g", and "p, t, k" which had been produced by Grimm's and Verner's law out of different series of consonants in Proto-Indo-European. If these were immediately followed by a "t", they changed to a voiceless fricative (spirant):
*"bt / pt > ft"
*"dt / tt > ss"
*"gt / kt > xt"If the original kt was preceded by a nasal, this disappeared, thus:
*"nkt > xt"The presence of the nasal left its mark in a compensatory vowel lengthening. Compare:
*"akt > axt"
*"ankt > āxt"

It will be seen that this development bears some similarities to the High German consonant shift, which caused the same voiceless stops to undergo the same change (though in different phonetic environments) in German, and the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which caused a nasal to disappear before a spirant in English, Dutch, and Frisian. However, it is unrelated to these: it took place significantly earlier, and its causes are different.

Reflex in verb paradigms

The effect has an important consequence for the oldest weak verbs. As the preterite and participle were formed with a -t, the assimilation occurred in these forms in all verbs with stems ending with a stop. However, this change took place only in past tense forms, but not in the present stem, resulting in a consonant alternation (apophony). This must originally have affected a large number of verbs. However most of these have been restored to regularity through subsequent processes of levelling. The following table contains only those which have survived into the modern languages: the medieval languages had many more. (The forms in brackets have been levelled and no longer show the effect.)

Although this looks similar to Grammatischer Wechsel, which causes a superficially similar consonant alternation in strong verbs, it is unrelated. Note that the vowel ideosyncracies in these verbs are mostly a result of the separate and much later development of Rückumlaut. Only when an /n/ disappeared with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel did the spirant law itself result in vowel alternation. Hence Middle High German "denken" (think) and "decken" (cover) had the preterites "dāhte" and "dahte" respectively.

Reflex in verb-noun alternations

The effect of the Germanic spirant law can also be very neatly observed by comparing certain verbs with related nouns. Some examples from German:

*geben — Gift
*pflegen — Pflicht
*wiegen — Gewicht
*tragen — Tracht
*haben — Haft
*kleben — Kluft

However, German has few examples with voiceless stops, as the High German consonant shift levelled these in most cases. They can be observed in Dutch:

*weten — gewis
*lopen — bruiloft

Notes