Xaydarova Odina Group : 445 Seminar 3

Xaydarova Odina

Group : 445

Seminar 3


1. The essence of Grimm’s law is that the quality of some sounds (namely plosives) changed in all Germanic languages while the place of their formation remained unchanged. Thus, voiced aspirated plosives (stops) lost their aspiration and changed into pure voiced plosives, voiced plosives became voiceless plosives and voiceless plosives turned into voiceless fricatives.

bh dh gh —> b d g Sanskrit bhrata —> Goth brodar, Old English brodor (brother);

b d g -> p t k Lith. bala, Ukr. болото -> Old English pol;

Lat. granum —* Goth. kaurn. Old English corn;

p t k -> f 6 h Lat. pater —> Goth fadar. Old English fasder

Aspirated plosives are now lost almost in all European languages, and we take for comparison words from Sanskrit. Present-day Hindi has it, and we may find them in well-known place-names in India.

1. Another exception was formulated by a Danish linguist Karl Adolph Verner (1846— 96) in 1877: if an Indo-European voiceless stop was preceded by an unstressed vowel, the voiceless fricative which developed from it in accordance with Grimm's law became voiced, and later this voiced fricative became a voiced plosive (stop). That is: p t k —> b d g. Greek pater has a Germanic correspondence fadar; feder because the stress in the word was on the second syllable, and so voiceless plosive was preceded by an unstressed vowel. Verner's law explains why some verbs in Old English changed their root consonant in the past tense and in the Participle II - originally, these grammatical forms had the stress on the second syllable. Hence the basic forms of such verbs as snidan (cut) and weordan (10 become) were sni dan — sndd - snidon - sniden; weordan - weard - wurdon - worden.



2. The problem was that there were exceptions. ‘Brother’ changes t > θ as Grimm predicts, but ‘father’ does not!

Proto-Indo-European *bʰréh₂tēr ("brother") > Proto-Germanic *brōþēr (Old English broþor, Old High German bruothar/bruodar)Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr ("father") > Proto-Germanic *fadēr (Old English fæder, Old High German fatar)

Grimm couldn’t come up with a rule for the exceptions, but in 1875, Danish linguist Karl Verner found it. Verner’s Law states that in Proto-Germanic, unvoiced fricatives and stops became voiced (reversing Grimm’s Law in some cases) when they immediately followed an unstressed syllable in the same word. Since the earlier (Proto-Indo-European) version of *ph₂tḗr ("father") had the stress on the second syllable, and*bʰréh₂tēr ("brother") didn’t, this explained the t >d change.

Verner’s Law must have happened before the Germanic languages changed their stress to a fixed first-syllable rule, but probably after they developed stress accent. (Proto-Indo-European accent is thought to have been pitch rather than stress.)



RHOTACISM

Besides the voiceless spirants [f, θ, h], the consonant [s] is effected.

After an unstressed vowel, [s] in Germanic languages becomes voiced [z].

This [z] becomes [r] in West Germanic and North Germanic languages (but not in Gothic). This change ([z > r]) is termed ‘rhotacism’ (the Greek letter ‘rho’).

Lith. ausis, Gth. auso > OE. ēare, ModE. ear

Gth. maiza > OE. māra, ModE. more

ABLAUT

A vowel change, characteristic of Indo-European languages, that accompanies a change in grammatical function; for example, i, a, u in sing, sang, sung.

begin-began-begun

break-broke-broken

choose-chose-chosen

come-came-come

eat-ate-eaten

fly-flew-flown



UMLAUT

In linguistics, umlaut (from German "sound alteration") is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined in connection with the study of Germanic languages, as it had occurred prominently in the history of many of them (see Germanic umlaut). While a common English plural is umlauts, the German plural is Umlaute

child-children

goose-geese

man-men

mouse-mice

woman-women