As can be seen,
snı¯
†
an has an unexpected change in consonant in the past
plural and past participle. This is a result of a Germanic sound change
known as
Verner’s Law, after the nineteenth-century Danish linguist
Karl Verner. What Verner discovered was that wherever a voiceless frica-
tive occurred between voiced sounds, then that fricative became voiced
provided that it was not preceded by the accent. After Verner’s Law
had operated, the stress patterns of the Germanic languages changed
so, broadly speaking, stress always applied on the initial syllable. But
previously the first syllables of past plural and past participles had been
unstressed. Hence the alternations seen above.
Verner’s Law predicts the following changes:
f
→
v;
θ
→
e
; x
→
; s
→
z
However, mostly because of later sound changes, but also because of the
Old English spelling system, the results of Verner’s Law are frequently
obscured. The easiest examples to follow are as in the paradigm of
Dostları ilə paylaş: