Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
Karl Verner published an account of the residual Germanic words in which Grimm's Law appeared to fail, showing that the outcome depended on the position of the Proto-Indo-European mobile accent — a feature preserved in Vedic Sanskrit but lost in Germanic, which fixed its stress on the initial syllable and destroyed the conditioning evidence. A class of exceptions was thereby converted into a second regular law by appeal to a property recoverable only through reconstruction, which remains one of the strongest arguments that reconstruction describes a real earlier state rather than a convenient notation.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule · phenomenon · not located
- Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift · phenomenon · not located
- Sanskrit · cultural practice · South Asia · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung
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.
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung · 1877 · Partly verified
Verner, K., "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung", Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, vol. 23 (1877)
Recorded on Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
- Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
- Rask publishes the Germanic consonant correspondences
- Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
- Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.