 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2008) |
In historical linguistics, the German term grammatischer Wechsel ("grammatical alternation") refers to the effects of Verner's law when they are viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.
According to Grimm's law, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t, *k and *kʷ usually became Proto-Germanic *f, *θ (dental fricative), *x and *xʷ (velar fricative). Karl Verner identified the principle that they instead become the voiced consonants *b, *d, *g, *gʷ if they were word-internal and immediately preceded by an unaccented vowel in PIE. Furthermore, PIE *s, which usually came into Germanic unchanged, became *z in this position; Proto-Germanic *z later became North- and West Germanic *r.
Consequently, five pairs of consonants emerged, each pair representing a single PIE phoneme. The following table shows the precise developments from Proto-Indo-European through Proto-Germanic to Old Norse, West Germanic, Old English, Old High German and Middle Dutch. It is mainly in the dentals that those languages show significant differences in the patterns of grammatischer Wechsel. Note that the table lists only the outcome of word-internal consonants since word-initial consonants were generally not affected by Verner's law.
| PIE | PG | ON | WG | OE | OHG | MDu | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| *p | *ɸ | f | *ɸ | f/v | f | f/v | By GL p→f. |
| *β | *β | b | By VL p→β. | ||||
| *t | *θ | ð | *θ | θ/ð | d | d | By GL t→θ. Then θ→d German and Dutch. |
| *ð | *d | d | t | By VL t→ð→d. Then d→t in German. | |||
| *k | *x | – | *x/h | x/- | x/h | x/- | By GL k→x. x→h before a vowel. h is then lost between vowels in Old English and Dutch. |
| *ɣ | ɣ | *ɣ | j/ɣ | ɡ | x/ɣ | By VL k→ɣ. Then ɣ→j in English and ɣ→ɡ in German, though all 3 use spelling ⟨g⟩. | |
| *kʷ | *xʷ | – | *x/h | x/- | x/h | x/- | Parallel to *k. |
| *ɣʷ | ɣ | *ɣ | j/ɣ | ɡ | x/ɣ | Parallel to *k, but *ɣʷ had split into *ɣ and *w by late Proto-Germanic. | |
| w/- | *w | w | w | w | |||
| *s | *s | s | *s | s/z | s | s/z | GL leaves s unaffected; allophone [z] in English. |
| *z | r | *r | r | r | r | By VL s→z→r. |
In Old English, the fricatives took the voiced allophones [ð], [v] and [z] when they were word-internal, and in Middle Dutch also when word-initial; see: Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩. In Old High German, the stops were moved according to the High German consonant shift. In Dutch, the idiosyncrasies of the shift mean that Dutch (like German) experiences the shift þi id="mwlw">grammatischer Wechsel is eliminated in Dutch by the normal operation of sound laws. Likewise, [f] and [v] merged in almost all Germanic languages (except Gothic and German), eliminating this variety early on. In Old Norse, [θ] and [ð] likewise merged altogether.
Grammatischer Wechsel is the phenomenon that a verb that in PIE had a stem ending in one of thosee phonemes displays a differing reflex in different parts of the paradigm, a result of the movable nature of accent in PIE. The Germanic past tense derives from the PIE perfect aspect, which was always athematic and therefore almost always had a shift of accent between the singular indicative (where it was on the root syllable) and the remaining forms including the past participle (where it was on the ending). However, the perfect aspect was present in only primary underived verbs and so any derived verbs lacked perfect forms altogether. The latter verbs formed the base of the Germanic weak verbs and did not inherit the accent shift and so the alternation itself affects only Germanic strong verbs.
A process of levelling has meant that there are only a few examples in the modern languages. In East and North Germanic, the levelling was almost complete before the earliest records, but Gothic and Old Norse had traces of grammatischer Wechsel. In Old English, too, the levelling had already begun to the extent that in some verbs the preterite singular had taken the consonant of the preterite plural. The only surviving example in Modern English is was-were, but a trace can also be seen in the adjective forlorn, which reflects the old participle of the verb to lose, or sodden, which is originally a participle of seethe. This latter is parallelled by German sieden, sott, gesotten. German also features d-t in leiden, litt, gelitten ("to suffer") and schneiden, schnitt, geschnitten ("to cut"). One example of h:g is ziehen, zog, gezogen ("to pull"). All other cases have been levelled. Apart from the English copula mentioned above, the only occurrences of s-r in the modern languages are in Dutch: verliezen, verloor, verloren ("to lose") and verkiezen, verkoos, verkoren ("to choose"). [1]
Here are some examples:
NB. Not all consonant apophony in Germanic verbs is caused by grammatischer Wechsel. The consonant alternation in certain weak verbs that typically goes along with the Rückumlaut phenomenon (think:thought, German denken:dachte) is a result of a later development in Germanic known as the Germanic spirant law. Likewise, the terminal devoicing that produces a fortis-lenis alternation in Dutch (wrijven:wreef) is an unrelated historical phenomenon.
In PIE, causative verbs (meaning "to cause to") were derived from verb roots with a suffix *-éye-, and the root vowel was changed to the o-grade. Verbs with this suffix eventually became part of the first weak class (*-jan verbs). This suffix always bore the accent, and the verb root never did, while in regular strong verbs the verb root was accented in the present tense. This caused Verner alternation between the original verbs and the causative verbs derived from them.
Examples are numerous in the older languages but are less frequent today, because some levelling has occurred, and in some cases, one verb or the other was lost.
heffen ("to lift/raise", from the strong verb *habjaną) - hebben ("to have", from the weak verb *habjaną)
The term Grammatischer Wechsel was originally applied to any pair of etymologically-related words that had different accent placement, including also Proto-Indo-European athematic nouns. The alternations in nouns were largely eliminated early on in Germanic, but a few cases exist of parallel forms being still preserved in different Germanic languages (such as English glass and Icelandic gler, an example of the s-z alternation). No attested language, old or modern, shows any alternation in noun paradigms, however.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
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.
Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ. The law was formulated by Karl Verner, and first published in 1877.
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and are therefore often regarded as the norm. They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by an inflection containing a, , or /ð/ sound rather than by changing the verb's root vowel.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic.
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel (ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix, and are known as weak verbs.
A-mutation is a metaphonic process supposed to have taken place in late Proto-Germanic.
In English, the digraph ⟨th⟩ represents in most cases one of two different phonemes: the voiced dental fricative and the voiceless dental fricative (thing). More rarely, it can stand for or the cluster (eighth). In compound words, ⟨th⟩ may be a consonant sequence rather than a digraph, as in the of lighthouse.
A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb corresponding to the English verb to be.
In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases. It probably began between the third and fifth centuries and was almost complete before the earliest written records in High German were produced in the eighth century. From Proto-Germanic, the resulting language, Old High German, can be neatly contrasted with the other continental West Germanic languages, which for the most part did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which remained completely unaffected.
The Germanic spirant law, or Primärberührung, is a specific historical instance in linguistics of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of Germanic languages.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
In historical linguistics, phonological change is any sound change that alters the distribution of phonemes in a language. In other words, a language develops a new system of oppositions among its phonemes. Old contrasts may disappear, new ones may emerge, or they may simply be rearranged. Sound change may be an impetus for changes in the phonological structures of a language. One process of phonological change is rephonemicization, in which the distribution of phonemes changes by either addition of new phonemes or a reorganization of existing phonemes. Mergers and splits are types of rephonemicization and are discussed further below.
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages. Because PIE was not written, linguists must rely on the evidence of its earliest attested descendants, such as Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, to reconstruct its phonology.
Holtzmann's law is a Proto-Germanic sound law originally noted by Adolf Holtzmann in 1838. It is also known by its traditional German name Verschärfung.
Kluge's law is a controversial Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. It purports to explain the origin of the Proto-Germanic long consonants *kk, *tt, and *pp as originating in the assimilation of *n to a preceding voiced plosive consonant, under the condition that the *n was part of a suffix which was stressed in the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The name "Kluge's law" was coined by Kauffmann (1887) and revived by Frederik Kortlandt (1991). As of 2006, this law has not been generally accepted by historical linguists.
Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan and French.
Historical linguistics has made tentative postulations about and multiple varyingly different reconstructions of Proto-Germanic grammar, as inherited from Proto-Indo-European grammar. All reconstructed forms are marked with an asterisk (*).