Sound Laws

Abstract

‘Sound law’ is a loan translation of the German Lautgesetz . This terminology derives from the 19th century, when the elucidation of sound laws was self-consciously equated with discoveries of the natural sciences, such as Boyle's Law or the laws of gravity. A sound law is defined as a descriptive rule formulating the input and output of a usually language-specific sound change under specified conditions. To modern historical linguists the term sound law connotes strict adherence to the regularity principle (i.e., the belief that sound laws have no exceptions), but this was not always the case. For much of the 19th century sound laws were understood merely as general tendencies, mainly due to the many unmotivated exceptions they seemed to admit. But gradually, principled explanations for these exceptions were discovered too, accompanied by significant advances in the study of phonetics. By the 1870s a consensus had emerged in favor of a more rigorous methodology, and after the discovery of Verner's Law (1875; published 1877), the Neogrammarian position on sound change was made explicit: “every change, inasmuch as it happens mechanically, takes place according to exceptionless laws ” (Osthoff and Brugmann, 1878: xiii; their emphasis). Several notable Indo-European sound laws are discussed below.