Re: [tied] Germanic prefixes and Verner's Law [was: German "ge-" be

On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 17:01:03 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>While I agree that neither scenario is impossible, I nevertheless prefer
>the first solution as the null hypothesis for the following reasons:
>
>(1) Everybody agrees that "voiceless fricatives" constitute a natural
>class. It's less certain if "non-glottalised voiced consonants" (or
>something similar) do.

But "voiceless consonants" (*p, *t, *k ~ *k^, *kW, *s) is also a natural
class. By Verner's law, they turn into their voiced counterparts *bh, *dh,
*gh ~ *g^h, *ghW, *z).

>The fact that *s was affected is, in my opinion,
>a very important argument in favour of the view that Verner's Law
>operated on the fricative output of Grimm's Law.
>
>(2) The first scenario makes no assumptions about the ordering of the
>component shifts of Grimm's Law and the phonetic nature of the pre-Gmc.
>stop series or their post-Grimm reflexes. The second scenario has to
>explain why, if *t etc. were voiced before becoming fricatives, they
>merged with *dH rather than *d.

True, but we have to explain that anyway to account for the Grimm-shift *d

> *t. If my scenario is true, then Verner's law can be formulated for

PGmc. as "if [+high tone] then [-voiced] -> [+voiced]". It follows that *t
and *dh contrasted as [-voiced] vs. [+voiced], while *t and *dh together
contrasted as [-something] to *d [+something], while *d was neutral as to
the feature [voiced] (and therefore not affected by Verner's law).


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