Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 11834
Date: 2001-12-16

It is counterintuitive only if you assume that pre-Germanic accent was like the strong expiratory stress typically found in the historical Germanic languages. This is unlikely to have been the case, if you reflect that there were no vowel reductions in the millennia between PIE and the sub-historical stages of Proto-Germanic. My guess is that Proto-Germanic already began to develop demarcative (root-initial) expiratory stress while retaining the inherited pre-Germanic "pitch stress" (phonological prominence realised as a high tone). A root-initial voiceless fricative did not undergo Vernerian voicing because it was in the onset of a _stressed_ syllable. What happened word-medially or word-finally was conditioned by the pitch contour rather than expiratory strength: a preceding low tone favoured fricative voicing.
 
In the unmarked case, tonal and expiratory prominence occur together as cues for primary stress, so the further evolution of the Germanic stress system consisted in aligning _all_ kinds of phonological prominence (including the full range of vowel contrasts) with the root-initial syllable.
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 10:21 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

- Which brings us to "why Verner's law?".  On the face of it, the law
makes no sense: we have <mó:þar> vs. <fadár> > <fádar>, which is
counter-intuitive if we compare it to phenomena in English such as
<metal> ~ <metallic> (['metl] or ['medl] or ['meRl] vs. [m&'thælIk])
or <basil> ~ <basilic> (['bæzIl] vs. [b&'sIlIk] (or [b&'zIlIk])).
It seems strange that a consonant immediately before the stressed
vowel should have been lenited.