Exclusion of the sound laws
The absence of exception of the sound laws is a theorem of historical linguistics . Accordingly, sound shifts take place regularly in a single language or in genetically related languages, provided they take place under certain identical phonetic conditions, i.e. the sound change is realized by all speakers of a single language or in all genetically related languages.
An example of this is the first sound shift , which affects the three Indo-European voiceless plosives p, t, k , which in all Germanic languages become the voiceless fricatives f, θ, χ (cf. Latin pater : English father , German father ; Latin tres : English three ; Latin centum : German one hundred ).
The Germanist Wilhelm Scherer already took this view in 1875. The young grammarians Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann formulated this thesis in 1878 in the foreword to their work “Morphological Studies in the Field of Indo-European Languages” (Vol. 1, 1878, p. XIII) as follows :
- All sound changes, insofar as they take place mechanically, take place according to laws without exception, i.e. the direction of sound movement is always the same for all members of a linguistic community, except for the case that there is a division of dialects, and all words in which the sound is subject to the sound movement appearing under the same conditions are seized by the change without exception.
Where the principle of the absence of exception of the sound laws cannot be applied, the working of the analogy is assumed as an explanation: Thus exceptions are always regarded as an adaptation to already existing related forms.
literature
- Szemerényi, Oswald (1989): Introduction to Comparative Linguistics . 3. Completely rework. Aufl. Die Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Scientific Book Society. ( Here see especially pp. 22-23 on the sound laws and pp. 28-30 for analogy. )
- Wiese, Harald (2007): A journey through time to the origins of our language. How Indo-European Studies explains our words , Logos Verlag Berlin, 2007.