Who was the first to explain the irregularities in the First Consonant Shift?

When Grimm's law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its

operation. The Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have

changed into Proto-Germanic *f, *þ (dental fricative) and *χ (velar fricative),

according to Grimm's Law. However, there appeared to be a large set of Germanic

words in which voiced stops (*b, *đ or *g), rather than voiceless fricatives,

correspond to IE voiceless stops. For example, Latin pater, Greek patēr, Sanscrit

pitat and Gothic fadar, Old English fæder. It is a Germanic d that corresponds to

IE t.

Karl Verner was the first scholar who observed that the shift of a consonant

depended upon the primitive Germanic stress. 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 law, which

has since been termed Verner’s law, adds the following note to Grimm’s law. If an

IE voiceless stop was preceded by an unstressed vowel, the voiceless fricative

which developed from it in accordance with Grimm’s law became voiced, and

later this voiced fricative became a voiced stop.

This also affected the existing unvoiced fricative [s], which similarly changed

to [z] in these circumstances. Eventually this [z] becomes [r] in Western Germanic

and Northern.

e.g. Gothic wesun (were) – Old English waran

10. How long is the history of the English language?

The earliest period of the history of the English language begins with the

migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth

century A. D., though no records of their language survive from before the seventh

century.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1146