The Operation and Relative Chronology of Verner's Law

Abstract

manic shift of IE /p t k kw s/, but was part of it. The shift itself was a form of secondary split, the allophones that were formed with less effort becoming respectively /b S 9 g w z/ and those that were formed with more effort producing /f p x xw s/: hence IE *dek-t > *teg- > OE -tig 'decade, -ty', beside IE *d6k- > *tex- > OS tehan 'ten'. Except in initial position, the conditioning factor was the pre-Germanic primary accent. In initial position, the fixation of primary stress inhibited voicing by introducing or preserving more effort: IE *ptn6s > Go. fulls 'full'. If the accent of IE *pln6s had remained unchanged for centuries in Germanic, the Gothic would have been *bulls. Voicing was also inhibited in voiceless consonant clusters: *oktow > Go. ahtau 'eight'. Unlike initial syllables, which were word-bound and received primary stress, a proclitic was phrase-bound and never fully accented: thus IE *kom- > *gan- > *ga- > OE ge-. The voicing process was not completely uniform in Germanic because the fixation of primary stress did not occur simultaneously in all words of all dialects. The frequent absence of medial voicing in Gothic is due to an earlier fixation of initial stress and to the very early separation of Gothic from the other Germanic dialects. Conventional formulations of Verner's Law, though variously phrased and differing in amount of detail, agree that Germanic /f J] x xw s/ became voiced respectively to /b g g z/ if the nearest preceding vowel or other syllabic had not borne primary accent in pre-Germanic times. It is also agreed that the voicing did not take place initially or in the clusters /sp st sk ss ft fs xs xt/, regardless of the position in which the pre-Germanic primary accent had occurred. This statement of the law has encountered almost no opposition. To be sure, Bugge (1887:408) attempted to expand the formula by adding the stipulation that the Germanic voiceless fricatives later become voiced initially if the pre-Germanic primary accent had fallen on the third or following syllable. But only one of his examples, viz. Go. ga-, OE ge-, OHG gi- etc., is still given serious consideration (Pokorny 1953:612-3), and even this form constitutes a special problem. Like some others, Pokorny notes the precise phonologic correspondence between Lat. com- con- co- ( OE ge-, why did it occur so rarely? Furthermore, if pretonic position determined voicing in the instance of IE *kom', why was there no initial voicing in IE *pln6s > Go. fulls 'full'? If a formulation is to be regarded as valid, 219