Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001 13:16:42 -0000, "tgpedersen"
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>Verner's law, as stated here, has a disjoint condition: "if ... or it
>is initial". First, perhaps on might say that this is valid only in
>English north of the South Counties, Friesian and North Germanic, in
>German, Dutch and South Counties, the latter condition doesn't apply
>(unless this is a later process?).

What do you mean? Dutch has replaced initial f- and s- with v- and z-
(although pronounced f- and s- in Northern Dutch). Std. German writes
v- (pronounced f-) and s- (pronounced z-). Initial þ- is d- in Dutch
and German, but then so is medial /þ/. Initial x- has become h-
everywhere. In English, þ- remains (except in a more or less closed
category of words where it is ð-), and southern dialects indeed have a
tendency to weaken f- > v- (s- > z- ?). I don't recall if Vennemann
says anything about this in his Verzweigungstheorie, but I can look it
up later. I'd say these are more recent phenomena, nothing to do with
Verner's (which worked in all of Germanic, even if Gothic has leveled
out most of the grammatical implications).

>Second, where valid, the "initial"
>part of the condition could be replaced by:
>
>1. To separate words Germanic has a laryngeal ("knacklaut")
>
>2. Laryngeal unvoices following fricative.

The glottal stop is only there when there's an initial vowel.
In view of what I wrote yesterday about the origin of Verner's law, it
would be interesting to have a glottal stop / high tone marking the
*right* edge of the word boundary. What's the story on the stød
(Danish and Vestjysk) again?

>This could explain why in ON poetry, words beginning with vowel are
>considered as beginning with the same consonant. One more thing, the
>timing precision of the "attack" on a note is very important in rock
>music, for which this sudden release of the vocal chords is perfect
>(and I have it on the authority of Philip Glass, that rock music only
>works in Germanic languages).

Nie pierdol!

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...