Old English Consonant System.

There were 19 consonants in Old English.

Table 1. OLD ENGLISH CONSONANTS

Manner of Articulation	Point of Articulation
Bilabial	Labiodental	Interdental	Alveolar	Alveopalatal	Velar
Stops	Voiceless Voiced	/p/ /b/	.	.	/t/ /d/	.	/k/ /g/
Affricates	Voiceless Voiced	.	.	.	.	[/c</[ʧ] /j</ [ʤ]	.
Fricatives	.	/f/	/q/	/s/	/s</ [ʃ] new sounds	/h/
Nasals	/m/	.	.	/n/	.	.
Lateral	.	.	.	/l/	.	.
Retroflex	.	.	.	/r/	.	.
Semivowels	/w/	.	.	.	/j/	.

 

The subgroup of Germanic languages contains many differences that set them apart from the other I-E languages. The following outstanding linguists made a great contribution into the development of comparative linguistics.

Rusk R. (1787-1832) Grimm J. (1785—1863)

The Germanic Consonant Shift (also known as the First Sound Shift or Grimm's Law)which, in effect, gave birth to the Germanic languages. It is considered to be Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law taken together. Grimm's Law (or the First Sound Shift) helps to explain the consonant changes from P-I-E to Germanic.

This phenomenon was first described in 1814(according to other sources in 1818) by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rusk. In 1822 it was fully formulated and investigated by the German philologist Jacob Grimm, whose name in the end, it got. Grimm's Law (together with Verner's Law) is considered one of the most well-known phonetic laws in comparative studies. Grimm's Law implies a set of relationships among the consonants of the Germanic and non-Germanic Indo-European languages. Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift:

a. Aspirated voiced stops became Unaspirated voiced stops (Bʰ, dʰ, gʰ became b, d, g)

b. Voiced stops became Voiceless stops (B, d, g became p, t, k)

c. Voiceless stops became Voiceless fricatives (P, t, k became f, θ, x (h))

Table 2. Examples illustrating Grimm's Law

		IE	Germanic		IE	Germanic		There were shortcomings. It didn’t always work.	IE	Germanic
1.	bh>b	bhratar	broþar	b>p	abel	apple	p>f	pater	fadar
2.	dh>d	madhu	medu	d>t	decem	ten	t>þ (θ)	tres	three
3.	gh>g	hostis	gast	g>k	genu	knee	k>h	noctem kerd	nahts heart

 

 

But Grimm’s realized shortcomings of his theory and expected someone else would discover why p is sometimes becoming b, t is becoming d, k is becoming g. What causes the voicing of these consonants in several cases?

Karl Verner (1846-1896) was a Danish linguist. He was well-trained in Indo-European linguistics. In 1876 he decided to address to a problem of badly shifted consonants. He liked reading his favourite book Franz Bopp’s “Comparative Grammar” which was some kind of the Bible for the 19-th century linguists. Looking at Sanskrit forms and comparing them to Germanic ones Verner noticed that the placement of STRESS (ACCENT) affected how Indo-European consonants were shifted. Then Karl published his findings in the article “An exception to the first consonant shift” in one of the prestigious linguistic research journals. Verner’s Law (A Germanic Voicing Rule) said when the following consonants p, t, k occurred in the middle of the word they would become the voiced consonants b, d, g, and not f, þ, h as predicted by Grimm. Voiceless fricatives became voiced (when they were in a voiced environment and the Indo-European stress was not on the preceding syllable).This process was called hardening. Germanic s could also be affected, when stress preceded it, it remained s. If stress was elsewhere s was changed to z and then to r. In linguistics, rhotacism is the conversion of a consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant — /z/, /d/, /l/, or /n/) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment. The most common may be of /z/ to /r/. This linguistic phenomenon is known as Rhotacism. It’s a turning of a Latin s to a Greek r.