Consonants. Proto-Germanic consonant shift

The consonants in Germanic look ‘shifted’ as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic Ls. 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. Grimm’s Law had three acts: 1. The IE voiceless stops [p], [t], [k] became Germanic voiceless fricatives [f], [th], [x]; 2. IE voiced stops [b], [d], [g] became Germanic voiceless stops [p], [t], [k]; 3. PIE aspirated voice stops [bh], [dh], [gh] became PG voiced stops [b], [d], [g] without aspiration.

Verner’s Law explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm’s Law and were for a long time regarded as exceptions. According to Verner’s Law all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f,q,h] which arose under Grimm’s Law, and also [s] inherited from PIE, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed: f → b, q → d, s → z and h → g.

I-mutation and its traces in Modern E.

Mutation – a change of one vowel to another one under the influence of a vowel in the following syllable.

Palatal mutation (or i-Umlaut) happened in the 6^th -7^th c. and was shared by all Old Germanic Ls, except Gothic (that’s why later it will be used for comparison).

Palatal mutation – fronting and raising of vowels under the influence of [i] and [j] in the following syllable (to approach the articulation of these two sounds). As a result of palatal mutation: [i] and [j] disappeared in the following syllable sometimes leading to the doubling of a consonant in this syllable; new vowels appeared in OE ([ie, y]) as a result of merging and splitting:

before palatal mutation	after palatal mutation
a à o à æ à	e
a: à	æ:
ŏ/ō à	ĕ/ē
ŭ/ū à	ŷ/ỹ (labialised) (new!)
ĕă/ēā à ĕŏ/ēō à	ĭě/īē (new!)

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