Table 1

Independent Vowel Changes in Proto-Germanic

Change illustrated		Examples
PIE	PG	Non-Germanic	Germanic
			Old	Modern
0	a	L nox,/rnochd, R	Gt nahts, 0 led	Sw natt, G Nachi
		HO'Jb	natt, OHG naht
		R Mory; Most	Gt magan, OE	Sw ma, NE may
			ma3an, mae3
a:	o:	L mater, R MaTb	0 Icel mo3ir, OE	Sw moder, NE
			modor	mother
		0 Ind bhrata, L	Gt bropar, 0 lcel	Sw broder, NE
		frater, R 6paT	bro3ir, OE bro<!or	brother

§ 55. In later PG and in separate Germanic languages the vowels displayed a tendency to positional assimilative changes: the pronunciation of a vowel was modi­fied under the influence of the following or preceding consonant; sometimes a vowel was approximated more closely to the following vowel. The resulting sounds were phonetically conditioned allophones which could eventually coincide with another phoneme or develop into a new phoneme.

The earliest instances of progressive assimilation were common Germanic muta­tions; they occurred in Late PG before Its disintegration or a short time after. In certain phonetic conditions, namely before the nasal [n] and before |i] or (j] in the next syllable the short [e], [i} and [ti] remained or became close (i.e. appeared as |i] and |u]), while in the absence of these conditions the more open allophones were used: |e] and [o], respectively. Later, these phonetic conditions became irre­levant and the allophones were phonologised.

IE short [o] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a) and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE lal; in other words in PG they merged into [ol. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o: 1 and merged with lo: 1. The examples in Table 1 illustrate the resulting correspond­ences of vowels in parallels from Germanic and non-Germanic languages (more apparent in Old Germanic languages than in modern words, for the sounds have been modified in later history).

§ 56. After the changes, in Late pg, the vowel system contained the following sounds:

SHORT VOWELS i e a o u

LONG VOWELS i: e: a: o: u:⁴

It is believed that in addition to these monophthongs PG had a set of diphthongs made up of more open nuclei and closer glides: [ei], [at ], leu], [au 1 and also [iul; nowadays, however, many scholars inter­pret them as sequences of two independent monophthongs.

CONSONANTS. PROTO-GERMANIC CONSONANT SHIFT

§ 57. The specific peculiarities of consonants constitute the most re­markable distinctive feature of the Germanic linguistic group. Compa­rison with other languages within the IE family reveals regular cor­respondences between Germanic and non-Germanic consonants. Thus we regularly find [f] in Germanic where other IE languages have Ip]; cf. e.g., E full, R noAHuit, Fr plein\ wherever Germanic has Ip 1, cognate words in non-Germanic languages have Lb 1 (cf. E pool, R 6o- Aomo). The consonants in Germanic look ‘shifted’ as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic languages. The alterations of the con­sonants took place in PG, and the resulting sounds were inherited by the languages of the Germanic group.

The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated in terms of a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19th c. and are often called Grimm's Law. It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic consonant shift (to be distinguished from the 2nd shift which took place in OHG in the 9th c.).

By the terms of Grimm's Law voiceless plosives developed in PG into voiceless fricatives (Act I); IE voiced plosives were shifted to voice­less plosives (Act II) and IE voiced aspirated plosives were reflected (See Note 1 to Table 3) either as voiced fricatives or as pure voiced plo­sives (Act III).

Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.^[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:

1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.

2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).

This chain shift can be abstractly represented as:

• bʰ > b > p > ɸ

• dʰ > d > t > θ

• gʰ > g > k > x

• gʷʰ > gʷ > kʷ > xʷ

Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value. Note that within Proto-Germanic, the sounds denoted by 〈b〉, 〈d〉, 〈g〉 and 〈gw〉 were stops in some environments and fricatives in others, so bʰ > b should be understood here as bʰ > b/β, and likewise for the others. The voiceless fricatives are customarily spelled 〈f〉, 〈þ〉, 〈h〉 and 〈hw〉 in the context of Germanic.

The exact details of the shift are unknown, and it may have progressed in a variety of ways before arriving at the final situation. The three stages listed above show the progression of a "pull chain", in which each change leaves a "gap" in the phonological system that "pulls" other phonemes into it to fill the gap. But it is also conceivable that the shift happened as a push chain, where the changes happened in reverse order, with each change "pushing" the next forward to avoid merging the phonemes.

The steps could also have occurred somewhat differently. Another possible sequence of events could have been:

1. Voiceless stops are allophonically aspirated under most conditions.

2. Voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Aspirated stops become fricatives.

This sequence would lead to the same end result. This variety of Grimm's law is often suggested in the context of the glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European, which is followed by a minority of linguists. This theoretical framework assumes that "voiced stops" in PIE were actually voiceless to begin with, so that the second phase did not actually exist as such, or was not actually devoicing but a loss of some other articulatory feature such as glottalization. This alternative sequence also accounts for the phonetics of Verner's law (see below), which are easier to explain within the glottalic theory framework when Grimm's law is formulated in this manner.

§ 58. Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19th c, by a Danish scholar, Carl Vemer. They are known as Verner’s Law. Vemer*s Law explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm’s Law and were far a long time regarded as exceptions. According to Verner’s Law all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f, 0, xl which arose under Grimm’s Law, and also is] inherited from PIE, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless. The voicing occurred in early PG at the time when the stress was not yet fixed on the root-morpheme. The process of voicing can be shown as a step in a succession of consonant changes in prehistorica! reconstructed forms; consider, e.g. the changes of the second consonant in the word father: Vemer’s Law accounts for the appearance of voiced fricative or its later modifications Id] in place of the voiceless 10] which ought to be expected under Grimm’s Law. In late PG, the phonetic conditions that caused the voicing had disappeared: the stress had shifted to the first§

59. As a result of voicing uy Venter's Law there arose an interchange of consonants in the grammatical lorms of the word, termed grammatical interchange. Part of the forms retained a voiceless fricative, while other forms — with a diffe­rent position of stress in Early PG —acquired a voiced fricative. Both consonants could undergo later changes in the OG languages, but the original difference be­tween them goes back to the time of movable word stress and PG voicing. The interchanges can be seen in <he principal forms of some OG verbs, though even at that time most oi the interchanges were levelled out by analogy.