Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g, *gʷ.
(In Proto-Germanic, voiced fricatives *[v ð ɣ] were allophones of their corresponding voiced plosives *[b d ɡ] when they occurred between vowels, semivowels and liquids, so we write them here as *b, *d, *g. But the situations where Verner's law applied resulted in fricatives in these very circumstances, so we understand these phonemes as fricatives in this context.)
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When Grimm's law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have changed into Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *f (bilabial fricative [ɸ]), *þ (dental fricative [θ]) and *h (velar fricative [x]), according to Grimm's Law. Indeed, that was known to be the usual development. However, there appeared to be a large set of words in which the agreement of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Baltic, Slavic etc. guaranteed PIE *p, *t or *k, and yet the Germanic reflex was voiced (*b, *d or *g).
At first, irregularities did not cause concern for scholars since there were many examples of the regular outcome. Increasingly, however, it became the ambition of linguists to formulate general and exceptionless rules of sound change that would account for all the data (or as close to all the data as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it (see Neogrammarians).
One classic example of PIE *t → PGmc *d is the word for 'father'. PIE *ph2tēr (here, the macron marks vowel length) → PGmc *fadēr (instead of expected *faþēr). The structurally similar family term *bʱrātēr 'brother' did indeed develop as predicted by Grimm's Law (Gmc. *brōþēr). Even more curiously, we often find both *þ and *d as reflexes of PIE *t in different forms of one and the same root, e.g. *werþanan 'to turn', preterite singular *wárþ 'he turned', but preterite plural and past participle *wurd- (plus appropriate inflections).
Karl Verner was the first scholar to note the factor governing the distribution of the two outcomes. He observed that the apparently unexpected voicing of voiceless stops occurred if they were non-word-initial and if the vowel preceding them carried no stress in PIE. The original location of stress was often retained in Greek and early Sanskrit, though in Germanic stress eventually became fixed on the initial (root) syllable of all words. The crucial difference between *pātḗr and *bʰrā́tēr was therefore one of second-syllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pitā́ versus bhrā́tā).
The *werþ- : *wurd- contrast is likewise explained as due to stress on the root versus stress on the inflectional suffix (leaving the first syllable unstressed). There are also other Vernerian alternations, as illustrated by German ziehen 'to draw, pull' : zogen 'to tug, drag' ← PGmc. *teuhanan : *tugōjanan ← PIE *déuke/o : *duk´-éHₐ- 'lead'.
There is a spinoff from Verner's Law: the rule accounts also for PGmc *z as the development of PIE *s in some words. Since this *z changed to *r in the Scandinavian languages and in West Germanic (German, Dutch, English, Frisian), Verner's Law resulted in alternation of *s and *r in some inflectional paradigms, known as grammatischer Wechsel. For example, the Old English verb ceosan 'choose' had the past plural form curon and the past participle (ge)coren ← *keusanan : *kuzún ~ *kuzánaz ← *ǵéusonom : *ǵus-ń̥t ~ *ǵusénos 'taste, try'. We would have chorn for chosen in Modern English if the consonantal shell of choose and chose had not been morphologically levelled (cf. obs. German †kiesen 'to choose' : gekoren 'chosen'). On the other hand, Vernerian *r has not been levelled out in En were ← PGmc *wēzún, related to En was. Similarly, En lose, though it has the weak form lost, also has the archaic form lorn (now seen in the compound forlorn) (cf. Dutch verliezen : verloren); in German, on the other hand, the *s has been levelled out both in war 'was' (pl. waren 'were') and verlieren 'lose' (part. verloren 'lost').
The following table illustrates the sound changes according to Verner. In the bottom row, for each pair, the sound on the right represents the sound changed according to Verner's Law.
| PIE | *p | *t | *k | *kʷ | *s | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grimm | *ɸ | *θ | *x | *xʷ | ||||||
| Verner | *ɸ | *β | *θ | *ð | *x | *ɣ | *xʷ | *ɣʷ | *s | *z |
Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (an exception to the first sound shift) in Kuhns Zeitschrift in 1876, but he had presented his theory already on 1 May, 1875 in a comprehensive personal letter to his friend and mentor, Vilhelm Thomsen.
It was received with great enthusiasm by the young generation of comparative philologists, the so-called Junggrammatiker, because it was an important argument in favour of the Neogrammarian dogma that the sound laws were without exceptions ("die Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze").
It is worth noting that Verner's Law comes chronologically before the Germanic shift of stress to the initial syllable, because the voicing is conditioned by the old location of stress. Put differently, the rule order "Verner's law → stress shift" was counterbleeding; the stress shift erased the conditioning environment and made the Vernerian variation between voiceless fricatives and their voiced alternants look mysteriously haphazard. Until recently it was assumed that Verner's law was productive after Grimm's Law. Now it has been pointed out (Vennemann 1984:21, Kortlandt 1988:5-6) that, even if the sequence is reversed, the result can be just the same given certain conditions.
Some scholars today — e.g. Wolfram Euler / Konrad Badenheuer (2009), pp. 54 f. and 61-64, see below — are inclined towards preferring a new theory in which the sequence of the two changes is the opposite of what was previously assumed. This chronological reordering, however, has far-reaching implications on the shape and development of the Proto-Germanic language. The traditionally assumed order has been gradually put into question during the last few years (since ca. 1998) based on the following two main arguments:
However, the presence of /k/ in these two words may be due to Roman scribes hearing the early Germanic *h (/x/) sound as a /k/ rather than an /h/, particularly since their own /h/ did not often occur between vowels and was at any rate already in the process of going silent. Moreover, the combination of the abovementioned traditional order and the dating of Grimm's Law to the 1st century BC requires an unusually fast change of the late Common Germanic at the turn of the millennium: within only a few years the first three of the five dramatic changes mentioned below would have had to happen in quick succession. This would be the only way to explain that all Germanic languages show these changes, although the Eastern Germanic language group had already been dissolving around the first years AD due to the replacement of Eastern Germanic. Such a rapid language change seems less plausible. Strictly speaking, it would have caused a child to be unable to understand his own grandparents.
Against this background, recently the thesis that Verner's Law might have been valid before Grimm's Law – maybe long before it – has been finding more and more acceptance. Accordingly this order now would have to be assumed:
If Kluge's Law is valid, it also requires Verner's Law to precede Grimm's.
Here is a table with an alternative view of Verner's Law, occurring before the shift of Grimm's Law.
| PrePG | *pʰ | *tʰ | *kʰ | *kʷʰ | *s | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verner | *pʰ | *bʱ | *tʰ | *dʱ | *kʰ | *ɡʱ | *kʷʰ | *ɡʷʱ | *s | *z |
| Grimm | *ɸ | *β | *θ | *ð | *x | *ɣ | *xʷ | *ɣʷ | ||
It is required to postulate aspiration in the voiceless stops, because the results of Verner's Law merge with the descendants of the voiced aspirate stops, not of the plain voiced stops. (This can however be bypassed in the glottalic theory framework, where the voiced aspirate stops are replaced with plain voiced stops, and plain aspirated stops with glottalized stops.)
There is, however, a phonologic argument against this dating: The traditional order makes it possible to narrow down the effect of Verner's Law to the voiceless fricatives. If on the other hand one wants to apply the First Sound Shift after Verner's Law, one has to suppose that Verner's Law applies both to voiceless plosives *p, *t, *k and *kʷ and to the voiceless fricative *s. In other words, in this scenario, Verner's law affected all obstruents, not just fricatives.
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