Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> 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.

This also seems to explain initial Verner voicing in the ga- prefix
and a few other unstressed prefixes/particles; that is, no initial
stress to suppress voicing.

IKP

> 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
>
>
> From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>
> - 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.