Sievers' Law - Sievers' Law in Germanic

Sievers' Law in Germanic

Within the context of Indo-European, Sievers' law is generally held to be one-way. That is, it applied only to create syllabic resonants from nonsyllabics after heavy syllables, but not the other way around after light syllables. In Proto-Germanic, however, the law came to be applied in both directions, with PIE syllabic *-iy- becoming nonsyllabic *-y- after light syllables. As a consequence, suffixal -j- and -ij- came to be in complementary distribution in Proto-Germanic, and were perceived as allophonic variants of the same suffix with the former following light syllables and the latter, heavy. Following the loss of j intervocalically, -ī- (from earlier -iji-) was also complementary to -i- in inflected forms.

The alternation is preserved in many of the older languages. In addition to the Gothic nouns cited above, Gothic strong adjectives show a light suffix -ji- following a light stem, yielding the nominative singular masculine midjis "middle", while a heavy suffix -ī- (from -iji-/-ija-) follows a long stem: wilþeis /wilþīs/ "wild".

In Old Norse, nonsyllabic -j- is preserved word-medially, but syllabic -ij- is lost like all other medial-syllable vowels. This is seen in class 1 weak verbs, which end in -ja (from Germanic *-janą) following a short stem, but in -a (from Germanic *ijanaN) following a long stem. Word-finally, the distribution is reversed. For example, following the loss of final -ą, this left neuter ja-stem nouns with syllabic -i (from *-iją) after long stems but no ending (from *-ją) after short stems.

The West Germanic languages such as English largely lost the alternation because of the effects of the West Germanic gemination, but the gemination itself was conditioned only by -j- and not by -ij-, so that the alternation is indirectly preserved. There is also some evidence that the alternation was preserved and adapted to the new syllable structure that resulted from the gemination. In the oldest attested languages, medial syllabic -ij- tends to be lost in the same way as in Old Norse, while nonsyllabic -j- (occurring only after -r-, which was not geminated) is preserved. Compare for example:

• Originally heavy syllable: Old English fēran, Old High German fuoren, Old Norse fœra < Proto-Germanic *fōrijaną
• Originally light syllable with gemination: Old English settan, Old High German sezzen, Old Norse setja < Proto-Germanic *satjaną
• Originally light syllable with no gemination: Old English werian, Old High German werien, Old Norse verja < Proto-Germanic *warjaną

It has been argued that Sievers' law is actually an innovation of Germanic. The reasons for this are two distinct innovations pertaining to Sievers' Law outcomes. The first is that the law works in both directions, not only yielding *-iya- following long stems, but instigating the reverse, decrementing etymological *-iya- to *-ya- following short stems. The second is an enlarged environment for the transformation. In Germanic, the syllabic shape *-iy- is found not only after heavy syllables, as in Vedic, but also after some polysyllabic stems. This is quite unlike anything in Indic.

The imposed conditions for the Sievers' Law reversal are specifically Germanic, not Proto-Indo-European. Thus the following two verb forms show normal Germanic distributions in good order: Proto-Germanic *wurkīþi "(s)he works", *wurkijanþi "they work" become Gothic waurkeiþ /workīþ/, waurkjand (Gothic makes no distinction between -ij- and -j- in writing); and Proto-Germanic *satiþi "(s)he sets", *satjanþi "they set" become Gothic satjiþ, satjand. But the forms in their Proto-Indo-European shape were *wŗg-yé-ti, *wŗg-yó-nti and *sod-éye-ti, *sod-éyo-nti respectively. Without Sievers' influence these would pass etymologically into Germanic as **wurkiþi, **wurkjanþi and **satīþi, **satijanþi. The regular Germanic evolution of *ur from *ṛ made a light root syllable heavy, and thus *wŗg- > *wurk- created a triggering environment for a heavy suffix, *-iji-/*-ī-, yielding Gothic waurkeiþ. The opposite occurred regarding satjiþ, where the etymological *-iji-/*-ī- (PIE *-eye-) was decremented to *-i- because the light syllable created the environment for a light suffix. So, a Proto-Germanic *satijiþi was turned to *satjiþi by Sievers' reversal, which in turn was simplified prehistorically to *satiþi. Gothic re-inserts the -j- via analogy, yielding satjiþ (contrast Old English bideð, which does not re-insert the -j- therefore not yielding **biddeð). Hence, not only are Proto-Indo-European structures not needed to account for the facts of Germanic, they actually get in the way.

Donald Ringe, in his book "From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", characterizes the origins of the different features as follows:

1. Sievers' law operates as a "surface filter"; therefore the objection concerning PIE *wŗg-yé-ti vs. Proto-Germanic *wurkīþi is not valid. That is, Sievers' law was not a sound change that took place at some particular time, but rather a phonological law that remained in the grammar of the language over time and operated on the output of various phonological processes. When PIE *ṛ changed to *ur in Proto-Germanic, Sievers' law automatically changed forms such as **wurg-yé-ti to *wurg-iyé-ti.
2. The converse of Sievers' law – which changes *iy to *y after a light syllable – was indeed a Germanic innovation that did not apply to PIE. Essentially, Proto-Germanic inherited Sievers' law from PIE and then extended it to apply in both directions. This answers the concern about *satiþi vs. *sod-éye-ti.
3. The extension of the Sievers'-law variant *-iy- to polysyllabic as well as heavy-syllable stems was another Germanic innovation.

Sievers' law in Germanic was clearly conditioned on morphological grounds as well as phonological, since suffixes were treated as separate words if they were recognised as separate morphological segments. For example, the suffix *-atjanaN had a nonsyllabic -j- because the preceding -at- was light, as in Old English -ettan, where the gemination is evidence for -j-. On the other hand, *-ārijaz had -ij- because the syllable -ār- was heavy, as in Gothic -areis, which would have been *-arjis if the suffix had contained -j- instead. This happened even though in fully formed words these -j- and -ij- would have been preceded by two syllables. Examples of the opposite - that is, multiple-syllable stems that were not segmentable - can also be found. *hamiþijaN ("shirt") clearly contained -ij-, showing that *hamiþ- in its entirety was analysed as the stem, rather than just *-iþ- since there was no such suffix in Proto-Germanic. This is evidenced by the Old High German hemidi, where *hemiddi would be expected if the original form had -j-.