On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:54:40 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<
piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>Well, to be fair to Torsten, I did tell him that Verner's Law applied to
>_fricatives_, whether inherited from pre-Germanic (*s) or produced by
>Grimm's Law (*f, *þ, *x, *xW), and I hope there's nothing controversial
>about such a statement.
Actually, there is, as far as I'm concerned. The question probably can't
be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, and it doesn't really matter
whether the development was first Grimm[1], then Verner:
Grimm Verner
*p ----> *P -----> *f
\
*bh ----> *B -----> *B ~ *b,
as you claim, or first Verner, then Grimm[1]:
Verner Grimm
*ph ----> *ph -----> *f
\
*b ----> *b -----> *B ~ *b,
as I would maintain. We cannot tell the difference. The fricative
formulation has the advantage that it can be formulated as a law applying
to voiceless fricatives, while in my version it applies to voiceless
consonants in general (whether stops or the fricative *s), or, in case
Grimm[2] came before Verner, more specifically to non-"glottalized" (or
whatever distinguished post Grimm[2] *p, *t, *k from pre-Grimm[1] *f, *þ,
*x) voiceless consonants.
My reasons for thinking Verner came before Grimm are the following:
- Verner depends on the position of the PIE accent, so it must predate or
be contemporary with the shift to initial accent in Germanic. That's
pretty old, judging by the pretty advanced state of erosion of final
syllables in the oldest Germanic. Moreover, the mechanism of Verner's law
remains inexplicable in the context of the Common Germanic stress accent,
but follows quite naturally from a situation where Proto-Germanic still had
a contour pitch accent, with falling tone (and stress) marking the
beginning of the word, rising tone marking the end of the word, and
non-initial syllables having rising tone where the syllable had been
stressed in PIE, and falling tone (falling-rising tone in case of a final
syllable) otherwise. Verner's law can then be formulated simply as *p(h),
*t(h), *k(h), *s --> *b(h), *d(h), *g(h), *z when accompanied by
rising/high tone.
- There is no evidence that Grimm[1] (the fricativization of PIE *p, *t, *k
to *f, *þ, *x) is particularly old. In fact, judging by such loans from
Celtic as wolk- > *walh- and others, chances are that it's relatively
recent... the fricativization, that is: the shift from PIE *p, *t, *k to
PGmc. aspirated *ph, *th, *kh is, _necessarily_ as old as Grimm[2] [*b, *d,
*g -> *p, *t, *k] and therefore roughly of the same antiquity as Verner.
>One has to remember that we use the symbols *b, *d, *g and *gW for
>Proto-Germanic consonants with the proviso that they cover the
>continuant allophones as well: in fact, many people prefer the notation
>*B, *ð, *G and *GW for the Germanic reflexes of *bH, *dH, *g(^)H and
>*gWH (and for the Vernerian reflexes of the corresponding voiceless
>stops), and since the distinction in Proto-Germanic was subphonemic,
>it's really a matter of taste and of typographical convenience.
I write /b/, /d/, /g/ for Spanish/Basque/Catalan [b] ~ [B], [d] ~ [D], [g]
~ [G], so my instinct is to do the same in PGmc.
>The exact distribution of the phonetic values (whether in PGmc. or in
>the daughter languages at their various stages) is uncertain and still
>debated. For example, Girvan, Campbell and Hogg argue that early OE
>initial <g-> represented a velar fricative rather than a stop. I can't
>say I'm sure how Gothic <b>, <d> and <g> were actually pronounced, even
>word-initially, and I prefer to leave some room for uncertainty. The
>fact that the Gothic letters in question were modelled on Greek "beta",
>"delta" and "gamma" hardly helps to disambiguate their manner of
>articulation.
Frisian has initial [g], medial [G], which seems pretty conservative.
>Leaving this marginal problem apart, the question remains why we don't
>get *ber-/*bra-/*bur- (no matter if the initial was phonetically *[b-]
>or *[B-]) rather than *fer-/*fra-/*fur- in unstressed prefixes.
Yes. Is *ga- the only preverb affected by Verner's law?
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...