On the resilience of Edgerton's Law

Abstract

In a series of articles published between 1934 and 1962, Franklin Edgerton proposed several revisions to Sievers's Law. Edgerton's revisions were in fact so far-reaching that the relevant sound law became known as ‘Sievers–Edgerton,’ or as ‘Edgerton's Law.’ Edgerton's Law rapidly gained acceptance among linguists, was standard dogma for several decades, and is still defended sometimes today, even though a number of scholars have argued that it cannot be sustained. This article examines Edgerton's Law from a historiographical perspective, focusing on the following question: if Edgerton's Law is not supported by the data, why has it survived for so long? This article presents four main arguments for the resilience of Edgerton's Law: Edgerton's scholarly prestige and the law's appeal to structuralist sensibilities led to its rapid acceptance, and the higher level of regularity it imposed on Sievers's Law and the elegance of the solution have allowed it to survive the various attacks on it – although it remains to be seen if Edgerton's Law can survive the latest attack, that of Sihler (Edgerton's Law: The phantom evidence, Winter, 2006).