*Mōdurz Brōþēr

Verner’s law in PIE nominal accent reconstruction

Indo-Europeanists often rely on the the marked accent of Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Balto-Slavic languages in order to reconstruct the lexical accent system of Proto-Indo-European. In contrast to the afforementioned languages, the Germanic languages underwent a huge shift in accentuation to root-initial stress in all words. However, Germanic language data remain invaluable to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European accent, thanks to the relics of accent that appear in Verner’s law alternations. Verner’s law describes a process through which Proto-Indo-European voiceless plosives become voiced when following an originally unaccented syllable (i.e. after syllable that was unaccented before the Germanic shift in stress).

An oft noted example of this is the contrast between the consonants present in Germanic

The voiced consonant *d which appears in the latter words *mōdēr & *fadēr, in light of Verner’s law, is evidence that the Proto-Indo-European *t from which it evolved did not follow an accented syllable (i.e. these forms evolve from PIE *meh₂térs & *ph₂térs); conversely, the voicelessness of the consonant in *brōþēr suggests that the syllable prior to it was accented (i.e. it evolves from PIE *bréh₂ters.

Occasionally, Verner alternations can be reconstructed within the paradigm of declension for the same word in Proto-Germanic, though the daughter languages almost always exhibit some form of leveling. One example of a retained alternation is between different case forms of the Old High German term for ‘fever, shivering,’ where the nominative singular is rīdo (← Proto-Germanic *hrīþô ← PIE *kréytons), while the dative singular is riten (← Proto-Germanic *hridini ← PIE *kritnéy). Other such alternations are typically scattered across Germanic languages, such as the reflexes of nominative singular *kumþiz ‘arrival, coming’ beside genitive singular *kundīz: ther former is reflected in Gothic gaqumþs while the latter is retained in the Old Norse samkund. Occasionally, one language will even retain generalizations of both stems as variants with the same meaning, such as OE studu & stuþu ‘post, pillar, support,’ which reflect genitive singular *studiz (← *stutés) and nominative singular *stuþs (← *stúts), respectively.

While the Germanic languages underwent a dramatic shift in accentuation from that of the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, the results of Verner’s law still allow us to use words in the Germanic languages as data points in the reconstruction process.

philology