Dating The Change Described By Verner's Law
It is worth noting that the change in the pronunciation of the consonant, described by Verner's Law, must have occurred before the shift of stress to the first syllable. The voicing of the new consonant in Proto-Germanic is conditioned by which syllable is stressed in Proto-Indo-European, yet this syllabic stress has disappeared in Proto-Germanic, so the change in the consonant must have occurred at a time when the syllabic stress in earlier Proto-Germanic still conformed to the Indo-European pattern. However, the syllabic stress shift erased the conditioning environment, and made the 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.
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