Verner's law
Encyclopedia
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, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g, *gʷ.
(In Proto-Germanic, voiced fricatives *[v ð ɣ] were allophones of their corresponding voiced plosives *[b d ɡ] when they occurred between vowels, semivowel
s and liquids
, so we write them here as *b, *d, *g. But the situations where Verner's law applied resulted in fricatives in these very circumstances, so we understand these phonemes as fricatives in this context.)
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 (bilabial fricative [ɸ]), *þ (dental fricative [θ]) and *h (velar fricative [x]), 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 voiced (*b, *d 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 all the data as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it (see Neogrammarian
s).
One classic example of PIE *t → PGmc *d is the word for 'father'. PIE * (here, the macron
marks vowel length
) → PGmc *fadēr (instead of expected *faþēr). The structurally similar family term * 'brother' did indeed develop as predicted by Grimm's Law (Gmc. *brōþēr). Even more curiously, we often find both *þ and *d as reflexes of PIE *t in different forms of one and the same root, e.g. *werþanan 'to turn', preterite singular *wárþ 'he turned', but preterite plural and past participle *wurd- (plus appropriate inflections).
The *werþ- : *wurd- 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, as illustrated by German ziehen 'to draw, pull' : zogen 'to tug, drag' ← PGmc. *teuhanan : *tugōjanan ← PIE * : * '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 alternation of *s and *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 ← *keusanan : *kuzún ~ *kuzánaz ← * : * ~ * 'taste, try'. We would have chorn for chosen in Modern English
if the consonantal shell of choose and chose had not been morphologically levelled
(cf. obs. German †kiesen 'to choose' : gekoren 'chosen'). On the other hand, Vernerian *r has not been levelled out in En were ← PGmc *wēzún, related to En was. Similarly, En lose, though it has the weak form lost, also has the archaic form lorn (now seen in the compound forlorn) (cf. Dutch verliezen : verloren); in German, on the other hand, the *s has been levelled out both in war 'was' (pl. waren 'were') and verlieren 'lose' (part. verloren 'lost').
The following table illustrates 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.
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").
However, the presence of /k/ in these two words may be due to Roman scribes hearing the early Germanic *h (/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 combination of the abovementioned traditional order and the dating of Grimm's Law to the 1st century BC requires an unusually 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 his own grandparents.
Against this background, recently the thesis that Verner's Law might have been valid before Grimm's Law – maybe long before it – has been finding more and more acceptance. Accordingly this order now would have to be assumed:
If Kluge's Law
is valid, it also requires Verner's Law to precede Grimm's.
Here is a table with an alternative view of Verner's Law, occurring before the shift of Grimm's Law.
It is required to postulate aspiration in the voiceless stops, because the results of Verner's Law merge with the descendants of the voiced aspirate stops, not of the plain voiced stops. (This can however be bypassed in the glottalic theory
framework, where the voiced aspirate stops are replaced with plain voiced stops, and plain aspirated stops with glottalized stops.)
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 both to voiceless plosives *p, *t, *k and *kʷ and to the voiceless fricative *s.
Karl Verner
Karl Verner was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he discovered in 1875.Verner, whose interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Christian Rask, began his university studies in 1864. He studied Oriental, Germanic and Slavic languages,...
in 1875, describes a historical sound change
Sound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
in the Proto-Germanic language
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...
whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g, *gʷ.
(In Proto-Germanic, voiced fricatives *[v ð ɣ] were allophones of their corresponding voiced plosives *[b d ɡ] when they occurred between vowels, 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 and liquids
Liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:...
, so we write them here as *b, *d, *g. But the situations where Verner's law applied resulted in fricatives in these very circumstances, so we understand these phonemes as fricatives in this context.)
The problem
When Grimm's lawGrimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...
was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The 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) voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have changed into Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *f (bilabial fricative [ɸ]), *þ (dental fricative [θ]) and *h (velar fricative [x]), 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
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...
, Greek
Greek 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;...
, Sanskrit, Baltic
Baltic languages
The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...
, Slavic
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
etc. guaranteed PIE *p, *t or *k, and yet the Germanic reflex was voiced (*b, *d 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
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
to formulate general and exceptionless rules of sound change that would account for all the data (or as close to all the data as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it (see Neogrammarian
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians 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...
s).
One classic example of PIE *t → PGmc *d is the word for 'father'. PIE * (here, the macron
Macron
A macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
marks vowel length
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
) → PGmc *fadēr (instead of expected *faþēr). The structurally similar family term * 'brother' did indeed develop as predicted by Grimm's Law (Gmc. *brōþēr). Even more curiously, we often find both *þ and *d as reflexes of PIE *t in different forms of one and the same root, e.g. *werþanan 'to turn', preterite singular *wárþ 'he turned', but preterite plural and past participle *wurd- (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 and was therefore one of second-syllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pitā́ versus bhrā́tā).The *werþ- : *wurd- 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, as illustrated by German ziehen 'to draw, pull' : zogen 'to tug, drag' ← PGmc. *teuhanan : *tugōjanan ← PIE * : * '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
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Frisian), Verner's Law resulted in alternation of *s and *r in some inflectional paradigms, known as grammatischer Wechsel
Grammatischer Wechsel
In historical linguistics, the German term Grammatischer Wechsel refers to the effects of Verner's law when viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.-Overview:...
. For example, the Old English verb ceosan 'choose' had the past plural form curon and the past participle (ge)coren ← *keusanan : *kuzún ~ *kuzánaz ← * : * ~ * 'taste, try'. We would have chorn for chosen in Modern English
Modern English
Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...
if the consonantal shell of choose and chose had not been morphologically levelled
Morphological leveling
In linguistics, morphological leveling is the generalization of an inflection across a paradigm or between words. For example, the extension of the form is to persons such as I is and they is in some dialects of English is leveling, by analogy with a more frequent form, as is the reanalysis of...
(cf. obs. German †kiesen 'to choose' : gekoren 'chosen'). On the other hand, Vernerian *r has not been levelled out in En were ← PGmc *wēzún, related to En was. Similarly, En lose, though it has the weak form lost, also has the archaic form lorn (now seen in the compound forlorn) (cf. Dutch verliezen : verloren); in German, on the other hand, the *s has been levelled out both in war 'was' (pl. waren 'were') and verlieren 'lose' (part. verloren 'lost').
The following table illustrates 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.
| PIE | *p | *t | *k | *kʷ | *s | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grimm | *ɸ | *θ | *x | *xʷ | ||||||
| Verner | *ɸ | *β | *θ | *ð | *x | *ɣ | *xʷ | *ɣʷ | *s | *z |
Significance
Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (an exception to the first sound shift) in Kuhns ZeitschriftHistorische Sprachforschung
Historische Sprachforschung is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal covering Indo-European historical linguistics. It was established by Adalbert Kuhn in 1852 as the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung and obtained its present title in 1988...
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
Vilhelm Thomsen
Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen was a Danish linguist. In 1893, he deciphered the Turkish Orkhon inscriptions in advance of his rival, Wilhelm Radloff...
.
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
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians 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...
dogma that the sound laws were without exceptions ("die Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze").
Dating Verner's law
It is worth noting that 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. Put differently, the rule order "Verner's law → stress shift" was counterbleeding; 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 is reversed, the result can be just the same given certain conditions.Newer considerations regarding the dating
Some scholars today — e.g. Wolfram Euler / Konrad Badenheuer (2009), pp. 54 f. and 61-64, see below — are inclined towards preferring a new theory in which the sequence of the two changes is the opposite of what was previously assumed. This chronological reordering, 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.
- Strong evidence has been discovered 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 first 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, 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 *h (/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 combination of the abovementioned traditional order and the dating of Grimm's Law to the 1st century BC requires an unusually 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 his own grandparents.
Against this background, recently the thesis that Verner's Law might have been valid before Grimm's Law – maybe long before it – has been finding more and more acceptance. Accordingly this order now would have to be assumed:
- Verner's Law (possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)
- Grimm's Law/First Sound Shift in the late 1st century BC (does not mark the formation of Germanic accordingly)
- Appearance of initial stress (third possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)
If Kluge's Law
Kluge's Law
Kluge's Law is a Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. It describes the assimilation of an n to a preceding voiced consonant, under the condition that the n was part of a suffix which was accented in Proto-Indo-European . This law explains the origin of the Proto Germanic...
is valid, it also requires Verner's Law to precede Grimm's.
Here is a table with an alternative view of Verner's Law, occurring before the shift of Grimm's Law.
| PrePG | *pʰ | *tʰ | *kʰ | *kʷʰ | *s | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verner | *pʰ | *bʱ | *tʰ | *dʱ | *kʰ | *ɡʱ | *kʷʰ | *ɡʷʱ | *s | *z |
| Grimm | *ɸ | *β | *θ | *ð | *x | *ɣ | *xʷ | *ɣʷ | ||
It is required to postulate aspiration in the voiceless stops, because the results of Verner's Law merge with the descendants of the voiced aspirate stops, not of the plain voiced stops. (This can however be bypassed in the glottalic theory
Glottalic theory
The glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....
framework, where the voiced aspirate stops are replaced with plain voiced stops, and plain aspirated stops with glottalized stops.)
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 both to voiceless plosives *p, *t, *k and *kʷ and to the voiceless fricative *s.
Further reference
- Ramat, Paolo, Einführung in das Germanische (Linguistische Arbeiten 95) (Tübingen, 1981)
- Wolfram Euler, Konrad Badenheuer: Sprache und Herkunft der Germanen - Abriss des Protogermanischen vor der Ersten Lautverschiebung
Proto-Germanic Language prior to First Sound Shift Germanic Parent LanguageGermanic Parent Language is a term used in historical linguistics to describe the chain of reconstructed languages in the Germanic group referred to as Pre-Germanic Indo-European , Early Proto-Germanic , and Late Proto-Germanic . It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC...
>, 244 p., ISBN 978-3-9812110-1-6, London/Hamburg 2009 - Kortlandt, FrederikFrederik KortlandtFrederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in...
, Proto-Germanic obstruents. - in: Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 27, p. 3-10 (1988). - Koivulehto, Jorma / Vennemann, TheoTheo VennemannTheo Vennemann is a German linguist known best for his work on historical linguistics, especially for his disputed theories of a Vasconic substratum and an Atlantic superstratum of European languages. He also suggests that the High German consonant shift was already completed in the early 1st...
, 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, TheoTheo VennemannTheo Vennemann is a German linguist known best for his work on historical linguistics, especially for his disputed theories of a Vasconic substratum and an Atlantic superstratum of European languages. He also suggests that the High German consonant shift was already completed in the early 1st...
, Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch. - in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 106, p. 1-45 (1984)
External links
- 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
- The original article (German)