Verner's law
Ley de Verner
- Date
- 1875 · confidence high
- Place
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Credited to
- Karl Verner
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
A phonetic law explaining the exceptions to Grimm's law in Proto-Germanic: voiceless fricatives became voiced when following an unstressed syllable. It resolved an anomaly that seemed to contradict the regularity of sound change.
Published in 1877; formulated by Verner in 1875 after studying irregularities between Sanskrit and Greek versus Germanic.
What it led to
- Consolidation of the principle of regularity in sound change
- The birth of rigorous historical linguistics (the Neogrammarians)
Built on
- Grimm's law