Verner’s Law

Careful investigation of Grimm’s Law revealed some inconsistencies, which were generally explained as exceptions to the rule. In some cases it is voiced stops rather than voiceless fricatives that correspond in Germanic to IE voiceless stop. For example,

Latin	Greek	Sanskrit	Gothic	Old English
Pater	pater	pitar	fadar	fæder
	[t]		[θ] ?? [d]

The Danish scholar Karl Verner was the first to explain them as the result of further development of Germanic languages. According to Verner, all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f, θ, h] which arose under Grimm’s Law, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; otherwise they remained voiceless. The voicing of fricatives occurred in early PG at the time when the stress was not yet fixed on the root-morpheme.

[f – v- b] seofon

[θ – ð – d] O Icel. hundrað – hundert

[h – g] Goth. swaihro –OE sweger

[s – z – r] Lat. auris – Goth. auso – Icel. eyra (ear)

The change of [z] into [r] is called rhotacism.

As a result of voicing, there arose an interchange of consonants in the grammatical forms of the word, termed grammatical interchange. Part of the forms retained a voiceless fricative, while other forms acquired a voiced fricative. For example, heffen (Inf.) - huob Past sg.) heave; ceosan (choose) curon (Past pl.). Some modern English words retained traces of Verner’s Law: death – dead; was- were, raise – rear.

Throughout history, PG vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. The changes were of the following kinds: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, for example [o - a] or [p – f]; quantitative changes are those which make long sounds short or short sounds long. For example,[ i – i:]; dependent changes are restricted to certain positions when a sound may change under the influence of the neighbouring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable; independent changes or regular (spontaneous) take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, that is they may affect a certain sound in all positions. In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened or lost; the distinction of short and long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. As for originally short vowels, they tended to be reduced to a neutral sound, losing their qualitative distinctions and were often dropped in unstressed final syllables (fiskaz).

Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. Long vowels tended to become closer and to diphthongize, short vowels often changed into more open vowels. IE short [o] changed in Germanic into more open vowel [a] and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE [a]; in other words in PG they merged into [o]. IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o:] and merged with [o:]. For example, Lat. nox Goth. nahts; Lat. mater OE modor; Sans. bhra:ta OE bro:ðor .

LECTURE 3/ LECTURE 4

HISTORICAL CONDITIONS

FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Early history of the British Isles

Archeological research has uncovered many layers of prehistoric population on the territory of the British Isles. According to historians, the first people to have inhabited the British Isles were Iberians, the inhabitants of the peninsula in southwestern Europe, occupied by modern Spain and Portugal. It was the Greeks who called them so, probably after the Ebro (Iberus), the peninsula's second longest river (after the Tagus).

But the earliest people whose linguistic affiliation has been established were the Celts (Note 11). They came to Britain in three waves and immediately preceded the Teutons. Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kins, kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practiced a primitive agriculture and traded with Celtic Gaul (modern France).

Normally, modern Celtic languages are divided into 2 groups, Gallo-Breton and the Gaelic. The former include Gallic, which was spoken in Gaul, and British represented by Welsh (Cymry) spoken in Wales, then Cornish in Cornwall (extinct since 18^th c.), and Breton in Brittany. The latter comprise Irish, Highland Scots (Erse), and Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man by a few hundred people.

In the 1^st century B.C Gaul was occupied by the Romans who had known about insular Celts from Pytheas’s records (see Lecture 2). Having occupied the country, Caesar made two raids on Britain, in 55 and 54 B.C. Although he failed to subjugate the Celts, Roman economic penetration to Britain grew. But it wasn’t until A.D. 43 that the country’s conquest and Romanisation started. The Roman occupation lasted nearly 400 years and came to an end in the early 5^th century A.D. when the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain due to internal and external causes. After the departure of the Romans, Britain remained unprotected from numerous enemies surrounding it such as the Picts and Scots from Scotland and Ireland and Germanic tribes from the mainland which made piratical raids on the British shores. Besides, the Britons fought among themselves which also weakened the country. So it is quite natural that they were unable to offer resistance to the enemies that attacked them in the middle of the 5^th c. A.D.

According to Venerable Bede (673-735), an ancient monastic scholar and historian who wrote the first history of Britain (Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king as assistants and allies in a local war. The newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts, and other Germanic people followed. They came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories.

According to Bede, the ‘newcomers were of three strongest races of Germany, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes (and also Frisians). It is uncertain whether they belonged to different tribes or perhaps constituted two mixed waves of invaders differing mainly in the place and time of arrival. They were called Angles and Saxons by the Romans and by the Celts but preferred to call themselves Angelcyn (English people) and applied this name to the conquered territories: Angelcynnes land (land of the English), hence England.

The conquerors settled in Britain in the following way: the Jutes or Frisians settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons occupied territories south of the Thames and some stretches north of it, and depending on location were called South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons (late also Mid Saxons). The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and most powerful of which was Wessex, the kingdom of West Saxons. The last people to settle in Britain were the Angles which occupied most of the territory north of the Thames up to the Firth of Forth, namely the districts between the Wash and the Humber, and to the North of Humber. They founded large kingdoms which absorbed their weaker neighbours: East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria

Since the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain the ties of their language with the continent were broken, and its further development went its own ways. It is at this time, the 5^th century that the history of the English language begins. The Anglos-Saxons occupied the territory of modern England and part of Scotland while Wales, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Cornwall remained Celtic.