No way. Gothic eliminated nearly all
paradigmatic alternations caused by Verner's Law, so e.g. in the conjugation of
<kiusan> 'choose' we have <kaus> 'I/he chose', <kusum> 'we
chose', <kusans> 'chosen' as opposed to Old English <c^e:osan, c^e:as,
curon, coren>, which preserves the Vernerian contrast *s : *z (> /s/ :
/r/). But that was achieved through the analogical levelling-out of verb
paradigms AFTER Verner's Law. Lexical alternations are preserved very well,
e.g. <fadar> 'father' : <brôþar> 'brother', also in pairs of related
words: <tehun> 'ten' : <tigus> 'decad', <fahêþs>
'gladness' : <faginôn> 'rejoice', <tunþus> 'tooth' :
<ehWa-tundi> 'sweetbrier' (literally "horsetooth"), etc. To sum up, Gothic
shows the same sequence of changes as any other Germanic language.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 12:43 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: kuningas <-> knyaz
Gothic has no Verner alternation. Theoretically, at least, it
could have had stress shift first and Grimm later.