Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

The internal periodisation of Grimm's Law is somewhat uncertain, and my favoured (but, needless to say, tentative) is different from yours. I do not think it is profitable to attempt to connect Grimm's Law with the Armenian consonant shift. They are superficially similar parallel developments. My opinion is that the core part of Grimm's Law is the replacement of a glottal configuration contrast (most likely [-/+ constricted], if PIE *d was laryngealised, e.g. creaky-voiced) with a manner-of-articulation one ([+/- continuant]). The precursor of Grimm's Law may have been the tendency to spirantise *dH (as in Italic), with the obligatory spirantisation of both [- constr] series (*dH, *t > *ð, *þ) at a later date. Verner's Law took place either then (applying to all voiceless _fricatives_, including *s), or later.

The change *d > *t, completing Grimm's Law, was a consequence of [+ constr] being reencoded a [- cont]. As there was only one stop series left, its phonation type evolved from marked to maximally unmarked. The development of stop allophones in the voiced fricative series took place after Verner's Law; one of its results was a new [+/- voice] contrast in the system of stops.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 1:31 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

Yes, that's it. Except I still want to keep Verner before Grimm-II (fricativization of the aspirates). It's the Punjabi thing, but the other way around. In Punjabi, the inherited "voiced aspirates" /bh/, /dh/, /gh/ are pronounced voiceless, with low tone on the following vowel (e.g. <ghor.a:> "horse" is pronounced /kòr.a:/. As demonstrated by Haudricourt ("Les mutations consonantiques (occlusives) en indo-européen"), it is the case in general that (voiced) aspiration (/dh/) is associated with low tone, whilst (voiced) glottalization (/?d/) is associated with high tone. This is simply because the vibrations of the vocal chords are lowest for breathy consonants (/dh/), average for plain voiced (/d/) and highest for creaky/laryngealized (/d~/). Voiceless consonants [vocal chords too far apart] and the glottal stop [vocal chords too tight] of course have no vibration at all. Now if indeed Proto-Germanic combined a stress accent on the first syllable with pitch tone in the rest of the word, we would get: *'ma:tè:r vs. *'paté:r, resulting in: *'mo:the:r vs. *'phad(h)e:r, where /t(h)/ + high tone > /dh/ or /d/ [breathy to modal voice], and finally: mo:þar vs. fadar. For the other positions (word final, third-syllable), we can imagine that Proto-Germanic perhaps utilized a rising tone to mark word boundaries (as is the case in e.g. Bambara) [i.e. contours: *\ma:\te:r/, *\pa/te:r/]