Talk:Verner's law

merge?

dab (ᛏ) 18:37, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

This article needs some work done on it, and before there is any merge, we need to think a bit about what shape it is to have. The equivalent article in the German Wiki is very different; in terms of its description of VL it is in fact completely deficient, but that is not our problem here. What it does have is a long and fascinating discusion of chronology. This relates not only to VL but also to Grimm and other changes, so I am not sure how much of that material would belong here, and where the rest should go, but at any rate some of it would be good in this article. (What that German wiki discussion does not go into is the possibility that GL and VL were simultaneous!) Also, if it is true that VL is older than GL, then it does not make sense to discuss VL in the context of GL, except in a short opening note about how it came to be discovered. I would like to see more examples. And the sound changes could be more fully described. I suggest these diachronic issues need to be dealt with fully first, and then we will see whether it is sensible to further lengthen this article with the synchronic material at GW, or whether they are better left separate. --Doric Loon 13:58, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Fricatives or stops?

This article seems to vacillate between calling the results of Verner's law stops (or, at least, using notation which is traditionally used for stops, i.e. b d z g) and calling them fricatives (or using a fricative symbol -- the only such example is đ). It should be more consistent. 24.159.255.29 01:11, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, the Germanic reflexes of both the voiced aspirated series and the voiced reflexes of PIE *ptkkʷ were presumably voiced fricatives to start with but, owing to the unanimity among the groups, apparently became voiced stops very early in initial position and immediately following consonantal resonants (nasals and liquids). Gothic uses a single set of symbols for what we're pretty sure were stops and fricatives in complementary distribution (thus bindan [bindan], "to tie", fadar [faðar] "father" (1x, voc.) but presumably /fadar/. It's the kind of thing that calls out for special vigilance to be consistent and clear in one's use of symbols. I'll see if I can clean it up. Alsihler 23:30, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Dating Verner's law

The section "Dating Verner's law" should maybe explain that if Verner's law took effect before Grimm's, we would talking about e.g. a shift of /t/ > /d/ (or /ð/), rather than /þ/ > /d/. I hope that makes sense to someone other than myself. Also, it says "Many details on these questions are given in the article about Verner's law in German Wikipedia." Could we get those details translated and put into the English one? (I know the article is up for a merge or rewrite anyway...) 24.159.255.29 01:14, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe. I have seen attempts to argue that the effects of Verner's Law (whatever exactly they were) affected PIE *ptkkʷ before they fricativized in Proto-Germanic, but since Verner's Law affects *s as well as the outcomes of the PIE voiceless stops, the simplest formulation of it is in terms of voiceless fricatives (since "voiceless fricatives" is a more compact natural class than "voiceless obstruents"). By definition such a formulation would presuppose at least part of Grimm's Law. (As a matter of taste, I've never been particulary fascinated by the debates over what might be called the etiology of Grimm's Law -- push-chain vs drag chain, what went first, and so on, since the critical articulatory details are unobservable.)

Regarding the muddle of fricatives and stops, such confusions will arise easily enough (given the facts); I'll be happy to try to wrestle that into consistency and luminous clarity.

Alsihler 23:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

When did this occur?

Hi, when in pre-history did this sound-change occur? --Kjoonlee 23:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Absolute dating (i.e. to a particular year A.D. or B.C.) would not really be possible without datable inscriptions or external borrowings. Ordinary methods of linguistic reconstruction can only really establish relative dating. AnonMoos 19:32, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Gothic

The complications of Verner's Law and Gothic should probably be mentioned. AnonMoos 19:32, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

þ or θ?

The statement of Grimm’s law has /t/ becoming /þ/. Shouldn’t that be /θ/ (the IPA for a voiceless dental fricative)? Axnicho (talk) 17:24, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

It might be a good idea to write it that way, but there's no rule saying everyone has to use IPA only, so þ isnt really wrong; it's just a different convention. Soap ^Talk/_{Contributions} 21:17, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Not only that, it is, for better or worse, the convention almost universally used in Germanic philology. Since we can only hypothesise about the exact realisation of sounds in ancient languages, this is not a phonetic but a phonemic transcription, so perhaps IPA is inappropriate anyway. But I do concede that it must be confusing for newcomers to the topic. --Doric Loon (talk) 10:48, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

conflicting dates

Strong evidence has been discovered for dating Grimm's Law only to the (end) of the first century AD (cf. Common Germanic). Especially [...] suggest that the change from initial k to h happened only shortly before the turn of the first millennium. In the new scheme, the argument for the earliest possible dating of this change to the middle of the 1st millennium BC ...

Can this be rewritten so that it doesn't seem to say "The evidence points to AD 100; the evidence points to AD 1000; the evidence points to 1000 BC" ? —Tamfang (talk) 02:09, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Can minimal pairs be given in support of the statement: "Strictly speaking, it would have caused a child to be unable to understand his own grandparents." A lack of minimal pairs for ambiguity would indicate that the child would have no problems comprehending what is spoken by a great-grandparent. Presumably children would be in constant contact with their grandparents in an extended family, and maybe even share their grandparents' habits -- including speech.Botuzhaleny-sodamo (talk) 09:43, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

"Newer considerations"

Can someone provide some evidence that this section is not in violation of WP:UNDUE? I only know of Vennemann as the proponent of this theory (though some stuff from Griffen might have been tossed in the mix as well; it's hard to tell, as the whole section is unsourced), and I've seen him roundly criticized for it. At any rate, attribution is needed here before someone comes along and eliminate the whole section as WP:OR. --Aryaman (talk) 23:10, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

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β doesnt italicize

this is most likely a problem with the template. i use color-highlighting so the lack of italics makes it stand out a lot more to me than to other readers, but still i think it would be nice if we could fix this. the lede sentence does not italicize the β phoneme. is this because it is a non-Roman letter? Thanks, —Soap— 03:02, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Conflict with another article

The section Verner's law#Dating the change described by Verner's law contains several (unsourced) assertions that the Grimm's law sound shift occurred in the first century BC. However, the article about the Negau helmet (which is from the fourth or fifth century BC) states: "Harigast constitutes an attestation of the Germanic sound shift, probably the earliest preserved, preceding Tacitus perhaps by some two centuries." --ZeegoTheDeer (talk) 16:50, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

The problem is that the article on the helmet overstated the evidence. If you look at the source cited, you will find it does not in fact say what it is quoted as saying - it says almost the opposite, that the evidence is weak. You are right, that the Negau evidence has not been conclusively refuted, and if it is true, it contradicts the theories of a late date for Grimm, but since all that is said in this article is that the dating of Grimm/Verner is speculative, I don't really see a problem with leaving the articles as they are. Doric Loon (talk) 19:48, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

In that case, both articles have a problem: the first century BC dating for Grimm's law in this article isn't cited at all! Frankly I'm inclined to delete these unsourced statements altogether, but I wanted to start this discussion first so I wouldn't accidentally ignite an edit war. ZeegoTheDeer (talk) 20:51, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

@ZeegoTheDeer Dating is so controversial that I wouldn't mind if you delete it, but it might be better to keep the fact that various dates have been postulated. Of course, a source is always better. Doric Loon (talk) 13:30, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I just deleted this part:

Having Verner's law act before Grimm's law may help explain the little evidence that there is for the earliest Germanic phonology. There is some evidence for dating Grimm's law changes only to the end of the first century BCE. In particular, the tribal name recorded as Cimbri by the Romans and the river-name recorded as Vaculus (now known as the Waal) suggest that the change from k to h had still not happened around the first century BCE, when Romans were rendering those words into Latin (unless they were rendering the early Germanic *h (/x/) sound as a /k/ because their own /h/ did not often occur between vowels and was at any rate already in the process of going silent). If Grimm's law was operative only in the first century BCE and Verner's law applied after it (followed in turn by the shift of stress to initial syllables), then three dramatic changes would have had to happen in quick succession. Such a rapid set of language changes seems implausible to some scholars.

Cimbri and Vaculus make perfect sense if the Romans preferred to write [x] as c rather than h. In English, after all, the same thing happens (sure, more scholarly transcriptions use kh or ch, but the phonetic/phonemic outcome is still k this side of Scotland). And languages that lack /h/ are even capable of interpreting [h] as /k/; Portuguese internet laughter is kkkkk, i.e. [kakakakaka], because that's the closest most kinds of Portuguese can get to [hahahahaha]. All these spellings show, then, is that the Germanic /x/ had not yet become [h] in prevocalic position. They don't tell us anything about how much earlier than that the shift from [k] to [x] had happened. The lack of citations means I don't need to argue with actual published sources and can just assert this on my own.

I don't think the inscription on that one helmet from Negova in Slovenia is Germanic either, BTW. As commonly interpreted, it combines a Pre-Germanic with a West Germanic feature, it's geographically in an odd place (though the Amber Road mitigates that), the other helmets have inscriptions in Venetic, Rhaetic and Celtic, and if you assume that the ei (that would be the Pre-Germanic feature) is an error for ie, you can read it as Harigas Titieva, combining a Venetic with a Rhaetic name.

Too bad both Grimm's and Verner's laws are invisible in the loans into Finnic. All they can tell us is that Germanic developed [h] later than Finnic did, and that's not much more informative than the Roman spellings. David Marjanović (talk) 18:11, 5 July 2023 (UTC)