Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule

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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.

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