On 2007-01-23 02:36, mkelkar2003 wrote:
> "For instance the Gothic strong verb where we find the voiceless
> variant in the root-final stage militates against Verner's law.
No more than Mod.Eng. chosen for expected *corn (well, we actually have
OE coren and even ME cor(e)n beside innovated <chosen>). The source of
the voiceless variant is obvious: the analogy of the present tense and
the root-stressed preterite singular. Biblical Gothic went a long way
towards the elimination of Vernerian alternations wherever analogy could
get at them, but the elimination was not complete, and in isolated
lexemes (where analogy couldn't be applied) no substitution took place.
> If
> Sanskrit does not necessarily retain the archaic feature of PIE
> stress---there is no evidence that it does—Verner's application of
> shifting stress to Germanic raises problems. Stress is not
> characteristic of spoken Sanskrit and modern Indic languages; the
> uddatta ("raised" and svarita (a combination of udatta and anudatta )
> discussed by Panini in his Grammar are musical tones, and not a matter
> of stress.
What's that got to do with the Germanic situation? The role of Vedic
(_not_ of Classical Sanskrit, let alone any Modern Indic languages)
consists only in the fact that the location of accent in Vedic is
_helpful_ (in combination with other evidence) in determining the
location of accent in PIE, which in turn was roughly preserved in
pre-PGmc., where it became part of a constraint on the occurrence of
voiceless fricatives.
> Verner's comparison of shifting Sanskrit syllabic
> lengthening to shifting Germanic stress is highly questionable simply
> because no voicing or unvoicing takes place in the Sanskrit verbs,
> such as pat, cit, vrt and vep, unlike in some Germanic verbs (Thundy
> 1991, p. 1180)."
>
> Thundy, Zacharias P. (1991), The Future of Grimm's Law. PMIA, Vol. 106(5)
And what of that? Nobody in his right mind would expect Sanskrit to have
behaved exatly like PGmc. If the initial conditions fully determined the
development of languages, we would have no linguistic diversity at all.
Sound changes are not deterministic laws that MUST apply in any language
that happens to have the right context. You must just as well argue that
non-rhoticity in standard British English can't be due to the regular
loss of final or preconsonantal /r/ because such /r/'s have not been
lost in General American.
Piotr