Verner's Law - Newer Considerations Regarding The Dating

Newer Considerations Regarding The Dating

Some scholars today — e.g. Wolfram Euler / Konrad Badenheuer (2009), pp. 54 f. and 61-64, see below — are inclined towards preferring a new theory in which the sequence of the two changes is the opposite of what was previously assumed. This chronological reordering, however, has far-reaching implications on the shape and development of the Proto-Germanic language. The traditionally assumed order has been gradually put into question during the last few years (since ca. 1998) based on the following two main arguments:

• Several linguists have pointed out that Verner's Law may have been valid even before the first sound shift; the outcome would be the same. There is no positive evidence for the traditionally assumed reverse order.
• Strong evidence has been discovered for dating Grimm's Law only to the end of the first century BC (cf. Common Germanic). Especially the tribesname "Kimbern" (recorded as Cimbri by the Romans) and the old name of the river Waal (Vacalus) 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, that is, the change of the Greek word kannabis into Old English hænep and modern English hemp, is not stable, or at least not mandatory, anymore at all.

Moreover, the combination of the abovementioned traditional order (Grimm's before Verner's) and the dating of Grimm's Law to the 1st century BC requires an unusually fast change of the late Common Germanic at the turn of the millennium: within only a few decades the three dramatic changes mentioned below would have had to happen in quick succession. This would be the only way to explain that all Germanic languages show these changes. Such a rapid language change seems implausible. Strictly speaking, it would have caused a child to be unable to understand his own grandparents.

Against this background, recently the thesis that Verner's Law might have been valid before Grimm's Law – maybe long before it – has been finding more and more acceptance. Accordingly this order now would have to be assumed:

1. Verner's Law (possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)
2. Grimm's Law/First Sound Shift in the late 1st century BC (does not mark the formation of Germanic accordingly)
3. Appearance of initial stress (third possible boundary for Indo-European/Germanic)

If Kluge's Law is valid, it also requires Verner's Law to precede Grimm's.

Here is a table with an alternative view of Verner's Law, occurring before the shift of Grimm's Law.

It is required to postulate aspiration in the voiceless stops, because the results of Verner's Law merge with the descendants of the voiced aspirate stops, not of the plain voiced stops. (This can however be bypassed in the glottalic theory framework, where the voiced aspirate stops are replaced with plain voiced stops, and plain voiced stops with glottalized stops.)

There is, however, a phonologic argument against this dating: The traditional order makes it possible to narrow down the effect of Verner's Law to the voiceless fricatives. If on the other hand one wants to apply the First Sound Shift after Verner's Law, one has to suppose that Verner's Law applies both to voiceless plosives *p, *t, *k and *kʷ and to the voiceless fricative *s. In other words, in this scenario, Verner's law affected all obstruents, not just fricatives. As for the names Cimbri and Vacalus, it could simply be that the presence of /k/ in these two words was due to Roman scribes hearing the early Germanic *h (/x/) sound as a /k/ rather than an /h/, since their own /h/ did not often occur between vowels and was at any rate already in the process of going silent.