Germanic spirant law

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In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law or Primärberührung is a specific historical instance of assimilation which occurred at an early stage in the history of the Germanic languages and is regarded by some as being early enough to fall into the same general context as Grimm's and Verner's law. It affects the new voiced and voiceless stops b, d, g, and p, t, k which had been produced by Grimm's and Verner's law out of different series of consonants in Proto-Indo-European. If these were immediately followed by a t, they changed to a voiceless fricative (spirant):

• bt / pt > ft
• dt / tt > ss
• gt / kt > xt

If the original kt was preceded by a nasal, this disappeared, thus:

• nkt > xt

It will be seen that this development bears some similarities to the High German consonant shift, which caused the same voiceless stops to undergo the same change (though in different phonetic environments) in German, and the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which caused a nasal to disappear before a spirant in English and Dutch. However, it is unrelated to these: it took place significantly earlier, and its causes are different.

The effect has an important consequence for the oldest weak verbs. As the preterite and participle were formed with a -t, the assimilation occurred whenever the stem ended with a stop. Thus the change took place in past tense forms, but not in the present stem. This results in a small number of irregular weak verbs which have survived into the modern languages:

• English: bring — brought
  • German: bringen — brachte
  • Dutch: brengen — bracht
• English: buy — bought (buy < OE bycgan < Germanic *bugjan)
• Dutch: kopen — kocht (ft > cht in Dutch)
• English: may — might
  • German: mögen — mochte
  • Dutch: mogen — mocht
• English: seek — sought
  • Dutch: zoeken — zocht
• English: teach — taught
• English: think — thought
  • German: denken — dachte
  • Dutch: denken — dacht
• Dutch: weten — wist

(The vowel changes in these verbs is an unrelated development caused by Rückumlaut.) However most such verbs have been restored to regularity through subsequent processes of levelling. Note that although this looks similar to Grammatischer Wechsel, which causes a superficially similar consonant alternation in strong verbs, it is unrelated.

The effect of the Germanic spirant law can also be very neatly observed by comparing certain verbs with related nouns. Some examples from German:

• geben — Gift
• pflegen — Pflicht
• wiegen — Gewicht
• tragen — Tracht
• haben — Haft
• schreiben — Schrift
• klieben — Kluft

However, German has few examples with voiceless stops, as the High German consonant shift levelled these in most cases. They can be observed in Dutch:

• weten — gewis
• lopen — bruiloft