Verner's law

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", *"đ", *"z" and *"g".

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 cause concern for scholars since 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.Fact|date=October 2007

One classic example of PIE *"t" > PGmc *"d" is the word for 'father', PIE PIE|*ph₂tēr (here Unicode|*h₂ stands for a laryngeal, and the macron marks vowel length) > PGmc *"fađēr" (instead of expected *"faþēr"). Curiously, the structurally similar family term Unicode|*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).

The solution

Karl Verner was the first scholar to note the factor governing the distribution of the two outcomes. He observed that the apparently unexpected voicing of voiceless stops 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 PIE|*ph₂tḗr and PIE|*bʰréh₂tēr 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 PIE|*déuk- | PIE|*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-" < PIE|*ǵéus- | PIE|*ǵus- 'taste, try'. We would have "corn" 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').

Here is a table illustrating the sound changes according to Verner. In the bottom row, for each pair, the sound on the right represents the sound changed according to Verner's Law.

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").

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 (Vennemann 1984:21, Kortlandt 1988:5-6) that even if the sequence was reverse the end result could have been just the same given certain conditions.

Newer considerations regarding the dating

Some 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. The traditionally assumed order has been gradually put into question during the last few years (since ca. 1998) based on the following two main arguments:

* Several linguists have pointed out that Verner's Law may have been valid even before the first sound shift; the outcome would be the same. There is no positive evidence for the traditionally assumed reverse order.
* The discovery of strong arguments for dating Grimm's Law only to the (end) of the first century AD (cf. Common Germanic). Especially the tribesname "Kimbern" and the old name of the river Waal ("Vacalus") suggest that the change from initial k to h happened only shortly before the turn of the millennium. In the new scheme, the argument for the earliest possible dating of this change to the middle of the 1st millennium BC, that is, the change of the Greek word "kannabis" into Old English "hænep" and modern German "hanf", is not stable anymore or at least not mandatory anymore at all.

However, the presence of /k/ in these two words may be due to Roman scribes hearing the early Germanic /x/ sound as a /k/ rather than an /h/, particularly since their own /h/ did not often occur between vowels and was at any rate already in the process of going silent. Moreover, the dating of Grimm's Law to the 1st century BC requiresndash considering the abovementioned traditional orderndash an enormously fast change of the late Common Germanic at the turn of the millennium: within only a few years the first three of the five dramatic changes mentioned below would have had to happen in quick succession. This would be the only way to explain that all Germanic languages show these changes although the Eastern Germanic language group had already been dissolving around the first years AD due to the replacement of Eastern Germanic. Such a rapid language change seems less plausible. Strictly speaking, it would have caused a child to be unable to understand their own grandparents.

Against the background of this, recently the thesis that Verner's Law might have been valid already before Grimm's Law, and maybe long before it, finds more and more acceptance. Accordingly this order would have to be assumed:
# Verner's Law (first possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)
# Appearance of initial stress (second possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)
# Grimm's Law/First Sound Shift in the late 1st century BC (*doesn't* mark the formation of Germanic accordingly)
# Weakening of unstressed syllables (in German only in the 10th century AD) soon thereafter if not simultaneously
# Decline/Reformation of the flexion systems

In German the steps 4 and 5 indicate the transition from Old High German to Middle High German. There is however a phonologic argument against this dating: The traditional order makes it possible to narrow down the effect of Verner's Law to the voiceless fricatives. If on the other hand one wants to apply the First Sound Shift after Verner's Law one has to suppose that Verner's Law applies to two completely different groups of sounds, namely the voiceless plosives *p, *t, and *k as well as the fricative s.

Here is a table with an alternate view of Verner's Law, occurring before the shift of Grimm's Law. The *s column is omitted because of the aforementioned dilemma.

ee also

* High German consonant shift
* Grimm's law

Further reference

#Ramat, Paolo, "Einführung in das Germanische" (Linguistische Arbeiten 95) (Tübingen, 1981)
#Kortlandt, Frederik, "Proto-Germanic obstruents." - in: Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 27, p. 3-10 (1988).
#Koivulehto, Jorma / Vennemann, Theo, "Der finnische Stufenwechsel und das Vernersche Gesetz." - in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 118, p. 163-182 (esp. 170-174) (1996)
#Vennemann, Theo, "Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch." - in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 106, p. 1-45 (1984)

External links

* [http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/read11.html A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical IE Linguistics Ch.11] "An exception to the first sound shift" by Winfred P. Lehmann - From the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin