In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law, sometimes referred to by the German term 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. It 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): Assimilation, from Latin assimilatio meaning to render similar, is used to describe various phenomena: The process of assimilating new ideas into a schema (cognitive structure). ... Jump to: navigation, search The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. ... Jump to: navigation, search Grimms law (also known as the [First] Germanic Sound Shift; German: Erste Deutsche (Germanische) Lautverschiebung) was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered; its formulation was a turning-point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of rigorous methodology in... Verners 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. ... The Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, a prehistoric people of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

• bt / pt > ft
• dt / tt > ss
• gt / kt > xt

If the original kt was preceded by a nasal, this disappeared, thus:

• nkt > xt

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 phonological environments) in German, and the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which caused a nasal to disappear before a spirant in English and Dutch. However it is unrelated to these, it is significantly earlier, and its causes are different. Jump to: navigation, search In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or Second Germanic consonant shift (German: hochdeutsche or zweite germanische Lautverschiebung) was a phonological development (sound change) which took place in the southern dialects of German in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD... In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (also called the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic nasal spirant law) is a description of a philological development in some dialects of West Germanic, which is attested in Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. ...

The effect has an important consequence for the oldest weak verbs. As the preterite and participle were formed with a -t, the assimilation occured whenever the stem ended with a stop. Thus the change took place in past tense forms, but not in the present stem. This results in a small number of irregular weak verbs which have survived into the modern languages:

• English: bring - brought
  • German: bringen - brachte
  • Dutch: brengen - bracht
• English: buy - bought
• Dutch: kopen - kocht (ft > cht in Dutch)
• English: may - might
  • German: mögen - mochte
  • Dutch: mogen - mocht
• English: seek - sought
  • Dutch: zoeken - zocht
• English: teach - taught
• English: think - thought
  • German: denken - dachte
  • Dutch: denken - dacht
• Dutch: weten - wist

(The vowel changes in these verbs is an unrelated development caused by Rückumlaut.) However most such verbs have been restored to regularity through subsequent processes of levelling. Note that although this looks similar to Grammatischer Wechsel, which causes a superficially similar consonant alternation in strong verbs, it is unrelated. Ä ä Ö ö Ãœ ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ... In historical linguistics, the German term Grammatischer Wechsel (grammatical alternation) refers to the effects of Verners law when viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb. ... In the Germanic languages, strong verbs are those which mark their past tenses by means of ablaut. ...

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
• heben - Haft
• schreiben - Schrift
• kleiben - 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