Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The explanation, published by Karl Verner in 1877, of a residue of words in which Grimm's Law appeared simply to fail. Where Grimm predicted a voiceless fricative, some Germanic words showed a voiced one instead, and the distribution looked arbitrary: Gothic brothar keeps the expected voiceless consonant while fadar, from a root of identical shape, does not. Verner found the conditioning factor in a language nobody could hear any more. Proto-Indo-European had a mobile pitch accent, preserved in Vedic Sanskrit; where that accent had not fallen on the immediately preceding syllable, the new fricative was voiced. Germanic later fixed its accent on the first syllable and destroyed the evidence, leaving the outcome without its cause. The result mattered far beyond Germanic. A class of counterexamples had been converted into a second regular law by appealing to a property recoverable only through reconstruction, which is the strongest available argument that reconstruction describes something real. Within a year the Leipzig school had generalised the moral into the doctrine that sound laws admit no exception.
3. Knowledge
4. Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
5. Sanskrit
6. Connections
7. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
8. Sanskrit
9. Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
10. Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
11. Indo-European
12. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
13. Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
14. Evidence
15. Supports the finding that the apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law are conditioned by the position of the inherited Proto-Indo-European accent. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The article is cited without pagination deliberately: the page range is not held reliably and inventing one would be worse than omitting it.
16. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.