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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. Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ...
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. ...
Karl Adolf Verner (* 7. ...
Sound change or phonetic change is a historical process of language change consisting in the replacement of one speech sound or, more generally, one phonetic feature by another in a given phonological environment. ...
Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. ...
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). Grimms law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) sometime in the 1st millennium BC. It...
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, believed to have been spoken around 4000 BC in Central Asia (according to the Kurgan hypothesis) or millennia before that in Anatolia (according to the Anatolian hypothesis). ...
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ...
Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...
The Sanskrit language (Skt. ...
The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. ...
Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup...
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. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. ...
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). The laryngeals were three consonant sounds that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language. ...
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ...
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'). The North Germanic languages (also Scandinavian languages or Nordic languages) is a branch of the Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia, parts of Finland and on the Faroe Islands and Iceland. ...
West Germanic is the largest branch of the Germanic family of languages, including such languages as English, Dutch, and German. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
Frisian (Frysk) is a Germanic group of closely related languages, spoken by about half a million members of an ethnic group living on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. ...
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. ...
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. Grimms law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) sometime in the 1st millennium BC. It...
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. Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. ...
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. Historische Sprachforschung (HS) is a German journal of Indo-European studies, established by Adalbert Kuhn in 1852. ...
1876 (MDCCCLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ...
1875 (MDCCCLXXV) was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ...
Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen (1842-1927) was a Danish linguist. ...
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"). The Neogrammarians (also Young Grammarians, German Junggrammatiker) were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change. ...
Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...
See also 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, and was almost complete...
Grimms law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) sometime in the 1st millennium BC. It...
Further reference - Ramat, Paolo, Einführung in das Germanische (Linguistische Arbeiten 95) (Tübingen, 1981)
- 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)
1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld (May 27, 1937 - ) is a German linguist known best for his work on historical linguistics. ...
1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...
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