Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.
Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.
In Proto-Greek, Cowgill's law [1] says that a former /o/ vowel becomes /u/ between a resonant (/r/, /l/, /m/, /n/) and a labial consonant (including labiovelars), in either order.
Examples:
Note that when a labiovelar adjoins an /o/ affected by Cowgill's law, the new /u/ will cause the labiovelar to lose its labial component (as in Greek : núks and Greek : ónuks/ónukh-, where the usual Greek change */kʷ/ > /p/ has not occurred).
Cowgill's law in Germanic [2] has no relation to Cowgill's law in Greek other than having been named after the same person. It says that a PIE laryngeal /h₃/, and possibly /h₂/, turns into /k/ in Proto-Germanic when directly preceded by a sonorant and followed by /w/. This law is still controversial, although increasingly accepted. Donald Ringe (2006) accepts it; [2] Andrew Sihler (1995) is noncommittal. [1]
Examples are fairly few:
The first two examples, however, have good alternative explanations which don't involve Cowgill's law:
If the sound law becomes generally accepted, the relative chronology of this law could have consequences for a possible reconstructed phonetic value of /h₃/. Since Germanic /k/ results from earlier PIE /g/, and since the change occurred before Grimm's law applied (according to Ringe), the resulting change would be actually /h₃w/ > /gʷ/. This would have been more likely if /h₃/ was a voiced velar obstruent to begin with. If /h₃/ was a voiced labiovelar fricative as is occasionally suggested, the change would therefore have been: /ɣʷw/ > /ɡʷ/.
Grimm's law is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm but previously remarked upon by Rasmus Rask, it establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages.
The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that:
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.
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