Sievers' law
Encyclopedia
Sievers' law in Indo-European
linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster
with a glide ( or ) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable
. Specifically it refers to the alternation between and , and possibly and , in Indo-European languages. For instance, Proto-Indo-European
(PIE) became Gothic
harjis "army", but PIE became Proto-Germanic
*herdijas, Gothic hairdeis /herdĩs/ "shepherd". It differs from ablaut
in that the alternation has no morphological relevance but is phonologically context-sensitive: PIE followed a heavy syllable (a syllable with a diphthong, a long vowel, or ending in more than one consonant), but would follow a light syllable (a short vowel followed by a single consonant).
, and his aim was to account for certain phenomena in the Germanic languages
. He originally only discussed in medial position. He also noted, almost as an aside, that something similar seemed to be going on in the earliest Sanskrit
texts. Thus in the Rigveda
dāivya- "divine" actually had three syllables in scansion (dāiviya-) but satya- "true" was scanned as written.
and Latin
, and alternation between and , though the evidence is poor for all of these. Through time, evidence was announced regarding similar alternations of syllabicity in the nasal
and liquid
semivowel
s, though the evidence is extremely poor for these, despite the fact that such alternations in the non-glide semivowels would have left permanent, indeed irreversible, traces. For example, the Sanskrit "tool-suffix" -tra- (e.g. pō-tra- "drinking cup, vessel") almost always follows a consonant or long vowel and should have therefore been -tira-; but no such form as **pōtira-, either written as such or scanned thus, is actually attested in the Rigveda or any other Indic
text. How a nearly universal suffix **-tira- would have been, or even could have been, uniformly replaced by -tra- is unobvious.
( and ). He argued that not only was the syllabicity of prevocalic semivowels by context applicable to all six Indo-European semivowels , it was applicable in all positions in the word. Thus a form like "sky" would have been pronounced like this only when it happened to follow a word ending with a short vowel. Everywhere else it would have had two syllables, . Edgerton also maintained that the phonotactic rules in question applied to sequences arising across morpheme
boundaries, such as when the bahuvrīhi
prefix occurred before a noun beginning with (e.g. "well-heroed", Vedic
suvīra-). According to Edgerton, the word should have had two forms, depending on what immediately preceded it: and . This corollary he called the "converse" to Sievers' law, and is usually referred to as Edgerton's converse for short.
The evidence for alternation presented by Edgerton was of two sorts. He cited several hundred passages from the Rigveda, which he claimed should be rescanned to reveal hitherto unnoticed expressions of the syllable structure called for by his theory. But most forms show no such direct expressions; for them, Edgerton noted sharply skewed distributions that he interpreted as evidence for a lost alternation between syllabic and nonsyllabic semivowels. Thus say śiras "head" (from ) has no monosyllabic partner **śras (from ), but Edgerton noted that it occurred 100% of the time in the environments where his theory called for the syllabification of the . Appealing to the "formulaic" nature of oral poetry
, especially in tricky and demanding literary forms like sacred Vedic versification, he reasoned that this was direct evidence for the previous existence of an alternant , on the assumption that when (for whatever reason) this *śras and other forms like it came to be shunned, the typical collocation
s in which they would have (correctly) occurred inevitably became obsolete pari passu
with the loss of the form itself. And he was able to present a sizeable body of evidence in the form of these skewed distributions in both the 1934 and 1943 articles.
Edgerton's claims were immediately hailed by many in the scholarly community and enjoyed the status of orthodoxy among Indo-Europeanists for 35 or 40 years; in recent times they have not fared so well.
Parenthetically, many of Edgerton's data on this point are inappropriate: current scholarship takes śiras, for example, to be the regular reflex of PIE , the syllabicity of the resonant resulting from the fact that it was followed by a consonant in Proto-Indo-European; there never was, nor could have been, a form to yield Indic **śras. How it might be that a form that is irrelevant to Edgerton's theory might seem to "behave" in accord with it is explained below.
(1936–) published an article proposing a significant modification of Edgerton's theory. Disregarding Edgerton's evidence (on the grounds that he was not prepared to judge the niceties of Rigvedic scansion) he took instead as the data to be analyzed the scansions in Hermann Grassmann
's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda . From these he concluded that Edgerton had been right, but only up to a point: the alternations he postulated did indeed apply to all semivowels; but in word-initial position, the alternation was limited to forms like "sky", as cited above – that is, words where the "short" form was monosyllabic.
, namely forms not susceptible to his theory but sharing other properties with the "test" forms such as part of speech, metrical
configuration, and so on. The first scholar to look at controls was Franklin Eugene Horowitz . Horowitz noted that for example all 65 occurrences of Vedic suvīra- "well-heroed" do occur in line-initial position or follow a heavy syllable (as if in accord with Edgerton's converse), but exactly the same thing is true of e.g. supatrá- "having beautiful wings" (which can have nothing to do with Edgerton's law). And indeed such skewing in distribution is pervasive in Vedic vocabulary: śatam "100", and dozens of other forms with no bearing on Edgerton's law, have exactly the same strong preference for not following a word ending with a short vowel that e.g. śiras "head" does, presumably by reason of beginning with a single consonant followed by a light syllable.
A second difficulty has emerged much more recently : The actual passages from the Rigveda cited in Edgerton's two large articles in 1934 and 1943 as examples of the effects of his theory in action seriously misrepresent the facts in all but a handful of cases. No more than three Rigvedic passages cited in the 1934 article, and none at all in 1943, actually support the claims of Edgerton's law regarding word-initial sequences. This lies well within the operation of pure chance. And it has been shown also that the apparent success of Lindeman's more modest claims are not without troubling problems, too, such as the limitation of the reliable examples to vocalic semivowels (the glides and ) even though such alternations in the other four semivowels should have left robust outcomes (for example, a disyllabic form of prá "forth, away" should have been very much more frequent than the monosyllable, which would have occurred only after a word ending in a short vowel; but there is no evidence for such a disyllabic form, in Vedic or any other form of Indic); and that the syllabified alternants (e.g. ) are very much rarer than they should be: they account for only fifteen to twenty percent of the total: they should account for at least eighty percent, since the monosyllabic form would have originally occurred, like prá, only after a word ending in a short vowel. Further, only the alternants have a "distribution": the shapes show no sensitivity to phonetic environment at all. (And even that disyllabic "distribution" can be inexplicable: disyllabic dyāus in the Rigveda always and only, with one exception, occurs in line-initial position, i.e., in only one of the four environments calling for syllabification of the resonant. Nothing in Lindeman's theory accounts for this striking distribution.)
The alternation is preserved in many of the older languages. In Gothic, for example, although the alternant -ij- is consistently spelled -j-, the contraction of *-jaz in final syllables yields -jis while *-ijaz yields -eis (that is, -īs). In Old Norse, nonsyllabic -j- is preserved, but syllabic -ij- is lost. This is seen in class 1 weak verbs, which end in -ja (from Germanic *-janaN) following a short stem, but in -a (from Germanic *ijanaN) following a long stem. Word-finally, the distribution is reversed, as in neuter ja-stem nouns with syllabic -i (from *-ijaN) after long stems but no ending (from *-jaN) after short stems. The West Germanic languages such as English largely lost the alternation because of the effects of the West Germanic gemination
, but the gemination itself was conditioned only by -j- and not by -ij-, so that the alternation is indirectly preserved.
It has been argued that Sievers' law is actually an innovation of Germanic. The syllabic shape is found not only after heavy syllables, as in Vedic, but also after some polysyllabic stems. This is quite unlike anything in Indic. More significantly, the conditions for the alternation are specifically Germanic, not Proto-Indo-European. Thus Proto-Germanic *wurkīþi "(s)he works", *wurkijanþi "they work" (Gothic waurkeiþ /workīþ/, waurkjand) and *satiþi "(s)he sets", *satjanþi "they set" (Gothic satjiþ, satjand), with Sievers' distributions in good order. But the forms in their Proto-Indo-European shape were , and , respectively, which should have resulted in **wurkiþi, **wurkjanþi and **satīþi, **satijanþi. However, the regular Germanic evolution of *ur from made a light root
syllable heavy; the Germanic change of to *-ī- ( in unstressed syllables regularly became *i) set the stage for the truncation of inherited (intermediate) *satijiþi to Sievers' proto-form *satjiþi, which finally became *satiþi. In other words, not only are Proto-Indo-European structures not needed to account for the facts of Germanic, they actually get in the way.
Donald Ringe
, in his book "From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", answers these objections as follows:
Sievers' law in Germanic was clearly conditioned on morphological grounds as well as phonological, since suffixes were treated as separate words if they were recognised as separate morphological segments. For example, the suffix *-atjanaN had a nonsyllabic -j- because the preceding -at- was light, as in Old English -ettan, where the gemination
is evidence for -j-. On the other hand, *-ārijaz had -ij- because the syllable -ār- was heavy, as in Gothic -areis, which would have been *-arjis if the suffix had contained -j- instead. This happened even though in fully formed words these -j- and -ij- would have been preceded by two syllables. Examples of the opposite - that is, multiple-syllable stems that were not segmentable - can also be found. *hamiþijaN ("shirt") clearly contained -ij-, showing that *hamiþ- in its entirety was analysed as the stem, rather than just *-iþ- since there was no such suffix in Proto-Germanic. This is evidenced by the Old High German hemidi, where *hemiddi would be expected if the original form had -j-.
Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...
linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
with a glide ( or ) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
. Specifically it refers to the alternation between and , and possibly and , in Indo-European languages. For instance, Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
(PIE) became Gothic
Gothic language
Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...
harjis "army", but PIE became Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
*herdijas, Gothic hairdeis /herdĩs/ "shepherd". It differs from ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
in that the alternation has no morphological relevance but is phonologically context-sensitive: PIE followed a heavy syllable (a syllable with a diphthong, a long vowel, or ending in more than one consonant), but would follow a light syllable (a short vowel followed by a single consonant).
Discovery
This situation was first noticed by the Germanic philologist Eduard SieversEduard Sievers
Eduard Sievers was a philologist of the classical and Germanic languages. Sievers was one of the Junggrammatiker of the so-called "Leipzig School"...
, and his aim was to account for certain phenomena in the Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
. He originally only discussed in medial position. He also noted, almost as an aside, that something similar seemed to be going on in the earliest Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
texts. Thus in the Rigveda
Rigveda
The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns...
dāivya- "divine" actually had three syllables in scansion (dāiviya-) but satya- "true" was scanned as written.
Extension to other branches
After Sievers, scholars would find similar alternations in GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, and alternation between and , though the evidence is poor for all of these. Through time, evidence was announced regarding similar alternations of syllabicity in the nasal
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
and liquid
Liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:...
semivowel
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...
s, though the evidence is extremely poor for these, despite the fact that such alternations in the non-glide semivowels would have left permanent, indeed irreversible, traces. For example, the Sanskrit "tool-suffix" -tra- (e.g. pō-tra- "drinking cup, vessel") almost always follows a consonant or long vowel and should have therefore been -tira-; but no such form as **pōtira-, either written as such or scanned thus, is actually attested in the Rigveda or any other Indic
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
text. How a nearly universal suffix **-tira- would have been, or even could have been, uniformly replaced by -tra- is unobvious.
Edgerton
The most ambitious extension of Sievers' law was proposed by Franklin Edgerton (1885–1963) in a pair of articles in the journal LanguageLanguage (journal)
Language is a peer-reviewed quarterly academic journal published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics...
( and ). He argued that not only was the syllabicity of prevocalic semivowels by context applicable to all six Indo-European semivowels , it was applicable in all positions in the word. Thus a form like "sky" would have been pronounced like this only when it happened to follow a word ending with a short vowel. Everywhere else it would have had two syllables, . Edgerton also maintained that the phonotactic rules in question applied to sequences arising across morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
boundaries, such as when the bahuvrīhi
Bahuvrihi
A bahuvrihi compound is a type of compound that denotes a referent by specifying a certain characteristic or quality the referent possesses. A bahuvrihi is exocentric, so that the compound is not a hyponym of its head...
prefix occurred before a noun beginning with (e.g. "well-heroed", Vedic
Vedic
Vedic may refer to:* the Vedas, the oldest preserved Indic texts** Vedic Sanskrit, the language of these texts** Vedic period, during which these texts were produced** Vedic pantheon of gods mentioned in Vedas/vedic period...
suvīra-). According to Edgerton, the word should have had two forms, depending on what immediately preceded it: and . This corollary he called the "converse" to Sievers' law, and is usually referred to as Edgerton's converse for short.
The evidence for alternation presented by Edgerton was of two sorts. He cited several hundred passages from the Rigveda, which he claimed should be rescanned to reveal hitherto unnoticed expressions of the syllable structure called for by his theory. But most forms show no such direct expressions; for them, Edgerton noted sharply skewed distributions that he interpreted as evidence for a lost alternation between syllabic and nonsyllabic semivowels. Thus say śiras "head" (from ) has no monosyllabic partner **śras (from ), but Edgerton noted that it occurred 100% of the time in the environments where his theory called for the syllabification of the . Appealing to the "formulaic" nature of oral poetry
Oral poetry
Oral poetry can be defined in various ways. A strict definition would include only poetry that is composed and transmitted without any aid of writing. However, the complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain, and oral...
, especially in tricky and demanding literary forms like sacred Vedic versification, he reasoned that this was direct evidence for the previous existence of an alternant , on the assumption that when (for whatever reason) this *śras and other forms like it came to be shunned, the typical collocation
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression strong tea...
s in which they would have (correctly) occurred inevitably became obsolete pari passu
Pari passu
Pari passu is a Latin phrase that literally means "with an equal step" or "on equal footing." It is sometimes translated as "ranking equally", "hand-in-hand," "with equal force," or "moving together," and by extension, "fairly," "without partiality."...
with the loss of the form itself. And he was able to present a sizeable body of evidence in the form of these skewed distributions in both the 1934 and 1943 articles.
Edgerton's claims were immediately hailed by many in the scholarly community and enjoyed the status of orthodoxy among Indo-Europeanists for 35 or 40 years; in recent times they have not fared so well.
Parenthetically, many of Edgerton's data on this point are inappropriate: current scholarship takes śiras, for example, to be the regular reflex of PIE , the syllabicity of the resonant resulting from the fact that it was followed by a consonant in Proto-Indo-European; there never was, nor could have been, a form to yield Indic **śras. How it might be that a form that is irrelevant to Edgerton's theory might seem to "behave" in accord with it is explained below.
Lindeman
In 1965, Fredrik Otto LindemanFredrik Otto Lindeman
Fredrik Otto Lindeman is a Norwegian linguist. He is professor emeritus in historical linguistics at University of Oslo.Lindeman works mainly with Indo-European languages...
(1936–) published an article proposing a significant modification of Edgerton's theory. Disregarding Edgerton's evidence (on the grounds that he was not prepared to judge the niceties of Rigvedic scansion) he took instead as the data to be analyzed the scansions in Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now also admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher...
's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda . From these he concluded that Edgerton had been right, but only up to a point: the alternations he postulated did indeed apply to all semivowels; but in word-initial position, the alternation was limited to forms like "sky", as cited above – that is, words where the "short" form was monosyllabic.
Newer developments
Edgerton's claims, once very generally hailed, have not fared well. Regarding the skewed distributions in the Rigveda, Edgerton neglected to test his observations against controlsControlling for a variable
Controlling for a variable refers to the deliberate varying of the experimental conditions in order to see the impact of a specific variable when predicting the outcome variable . Controlling tends to reduce the experimental error...
, namely forms not susceptible to his theory but sharing other properties with the "test" forms such as part of speech, metrical
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
configuration, and so on. The first scholar to look at controls was Franklin Eugene Horowitz . Horowitz noted that for example all 65 occurrences of Vedic suvīra- "well-heroed" do occur in line-initial position or follow a heavy syllable (as if in accord with Edgerton's converse), but exactly the same thing is true of e.g. supatrá- "having beautiful wings" (which can have nothing to do with Edgerton's law). And indeed such skewing in distribution is pervasive in Vedic vocabulary: śatam "100", and dozens of other forms with no bearing on Edgerton's law, have exactly the same strong preference for not following a word ending with a short vowel that e.g. śiras "head" does, presumably by reason of beginning with a single consonant followed by a light syllable.
A second difficulty has emerged much more recently : The actual passages from the Rigveda cited in Edgerton's two large articles in 1934 and 1943 as examples of the effects of his theory in action seriously misrepresent the facts in all but a handful of cases. No more than three Rigvedic passages cited in the 1934 article, and none at all in 1943, actually support the claims of Edgerton's law regarding word-initial sequences. This lies well within the operation of pure chance. And it has been shown also that the apparent success of Lindeman's more modest claims are not without troubling problems, too, such as the limitation of the reliable examples to vocalic semivowels (the glides and ) even though such alternations in the other four semivowels should have left robust outcomes (for example, a disyllabic form of prá "forth, away" should have been very much more frequent than the monosyllable, which would have occurred only after a word ending in a short vowel; but there is no evidence for such a disyllabic form, in Vedic or any other form of Indic); and that the syllabified alternants (e.g. ) are very much rarer than they should be: they account for only fifteen to twenty percent of the total: they should account for at least eighty percent, since the monosyllabic form would have originally occurred, like prá, only after a word ending in a short vowel. Further, only the alternants have a "distribution": the shapes show no sensitivity to phonetic environment at all. (And even that disyllabic "distribution" can be inexplicable: disyllabic dyāus in the Rigveda always and only, with one exception, occurs in line-initial position, i.e., in only one of the four environments calling for syllabification of the resonant. Nothing in Lindeman's theory accounts for this striking distribution.)
Sievers' law in Germanic
Within the context of Indo-European, Sievers' law is generally held to be one-way. That is, it applied only to create syllabic resonants from nonsyllabics after heavy syllables, but not the other way around after light syllables. In Proto-Germanic, however, the law came to be applied in both directions, with PIE syllabic becoming nonsyllabic after light syllables. As a consequence, suffixal -j- and -ij- came to be in complementary distribution in Proto-Germanic, and were perceived as allophonic variants of the same suffix. Following the loss of j before i, -ī- was also complementary to -i- (from earlier -iji- and -ji- respectively) in inflected forms of words that had -ij- and -j- otherwise.The alternation is preserved in many of the older languages. In Gothic, for example, although the alternant -ij- is consistently spelled -j-, the contraction of *-jaz in final syllables yields -jis while *-ijaz yields -eis (that is, -īs). In Old Norse, nonsyllabic -j- is preserved, but syllabic -ij- is lost. This is seen in class 1 weak verbs, which end in -ja (from Germanic *-janaN) following a short stem, but in -a (from Germanic *ijanaN) following a long stem. Word-finally, the distribution is reversed, as in neuter ja-stem nouns with syllabic -i (from *-ijaN) after long stems but no ending (from *-jaN) after short stems. The West Germanic languages such as English largely lost the alternation because of the effects of the West Germanic gemination
West Germanic Gemination
West Germanic gemination is a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages, around 300 AD. All single consonants except were geminated before . The second element of the diphthongs iu and au was still underlyingly at this time and therefore was still considered a consonant, so...
, but the gemination itself was conditioned only by -j- and not by -ij-, so that the alternation is indirectly preserved.
It has been argued that Sievers' law is actually an innovation of Germanic. The syllabic shape is found not only after heavy syllables, as in Vedic, but also after some polysyllabic stems. This is quite unlike anything in Indic. More significantly, the conditions for the alternation are specifically Germanic, not Proto-Indo-European. Thus Proto-Germanic *wurkīþi "(s)he works", *wurkijanþi "they work" (Gothic waurkeiþ /workīþ/, waurkjand) and *satiþi "(s)he sets", *satjanþi "they set" (Gothic satjiþ, satjand), with Sievers' distributions in good order. But the forms in their Proto-Indo-European shape were , and , respectively, which should have resulted in **wurkiþi, **wurkjanþi and **satīþi, **satijanþi. However, the regular Germanic evolution of *ur from made a light root
Root (linguistics)
The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
syllable heavy; the Germanic change of to *-ī- ( in unstressed syllables regularly became *i) set the stage for the truncation of inherited (intermediate) *satijiþi to Sievers' proto-form *satjiþi, which finally became *satiþi. In other words, not only are Proto-Indo-European structures not needed to account for the facts of Germanic, they actually get in the way.
Donald Ringe
Donald Ringe
Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist.He received Ph.D in linguistics at the Yale University in 1984 under the supervision of the late Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985, and since 1985 he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the...
, in his book "From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", answers these objections as follows:
- Sievers' law operates as a "surface filterSurface filterIn linguistics, a surface filter is type of sound change that does not operate on a single set of sounds at a particular point in time, but continues to operate over a longer period. Surface filters normally affect any phonetic combination that is not permitted according to the language's phonetic...
"; therefore the objection concerning PIE vs. Proto-Germanic *wurkīþi is not valid. That is, Sievers' law was not a sound change that took place at some particular time, but rather a phonological law that remained in the grammar of the language over time and operated on the output of various phonological processes. When PIE changed to *ur in Proto-Germanic, Sievers' law automatically changed forms such as to . - The converse of Sievers' law – which changes to after a light syllable – was indeed a Germanic innovation that did not apply to PIE. Essentially, Proto-Germanic inherited Sievers' law from PIE and then extended it to apply in both directions. This answers the concern about *satiþi vs. .
- The extension of the Sievers'-law variant to polysyllabic as well as heavy-syllable stems was another Germanic innovation.
Sievers' law in Germanic was clearly conditioned on morphological grounds as well as phonological, since suffixes were treated as separate words if they were recognised as separate morphological segments. For example, the suffix *-atjanaN had a nonsyllabic -j- because the preceding -at- was light, as in Old English -ettan, where the gemination
West Germanic Gemination
West Germanic gemination is a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages, around 300 AD. All single consonants except were geminated before . The second element of the diphthongs iu and au was still underlyingly at this time and therefore was still considered a consonant, so...
is evidence for -j-. On the other hand, *-ārijaz had -ij- because the syllable -ār- was heavy, as in Gothic -areis, which would have been *-arjis if the suffix had contained -j- instead. This happened even though in fully formed words these -j- and -ij- would have been preceded by two syllables. Examples of the opposite - that is, multiple-syllable stems that were not segmentable - can also be found. *hamiþijaN ("shirt") clearly contained -ij-, showing that *hamiþ- in its entirety was analysed as the stem, rather than just *-iþ- since there was no such suffix in Proto-Germanic. This is evidenced by the Old High German hemidi, where *hemiddi would be expected if the original form had -j-.