Fine details in a language can be the starting point
for interesting journeys through their history
For example, why, in German, does one say "schneiden", but "geschnitten"?
Let's look into that.
German is a West Germanic language,
so it is very similar to other West Germanic languages, like Dutch or English.
The reason for this similarity is,
that 1500 years ago they all were dialects of a common ancestor.
These days they've evolved apart, so that there are noticeable differences as well.
Whereas in Dutch on says "slapen" and in English "sleep", in German the word is "schlafen".
Similarly, Dutch "scherp" and English "scharp" are the equivalent of German "scharf".
The p sound became a f sound in the evolution of German,
but not in that of its close relatives.
Around the same time, lots of other sounds shifted as well:
t became ts, th (which German used to have) became d and so on.
This sound shift was an important part
of German's splitting of from its relatives.
Because of this, it is called the "High German consonant shift".
However, German is not only a West Germanic language.
Together with a bunch of other languages,
like Swedish, Icelandic, and the now extinct Gothic, it's part of the larger, Germanic language family.
These too, are descended from a common ancestor: proto-Germanic.
However, proto-Germanic itself was related to Latin, Greek,
most other European languages, and Sanskrit, India's Latin.
Together they are part of the even bigger family of Indo-European languages.
And just like how German split of from its relatives through the High German consonant shift,
so too did proto-Germanic split of from its ancestor through the Germanic sound shift.
Early in the development of proto-Germanic, a bunch of sounds shifted to other sounds.
Because this could have cause confusion, at the same time, those sounds too shifted to other sounds,
which, like dominoes, shifted even further.
Those last sounds didn't originally exist in the language,
so confusion was no longer possible.
So in the beginning, there were these sounds, and at the end these.
Each row shifted to the next one.
And as the High German consonant shift explains differences like sharp/scharf,
so too does the Germanic sound shift explain certain differences
between the Germanic languages and the other Indo-European languages.
For example between, the German "Neffe" and the Latin "nepos".
German has a f where Latin has a p,
because the Indo-European p became a f in the Germanic language, but not in Latin.
Latin had its own little sound shifts.
For example, the Indo-European b became an f at the beginning of words in it.
This explains that difference between German "Bruder" and Latin "frater".
However, that German has a d where Latin has a t is again the result
of the Germanic and High German sound shifts.
Indo-European t became a th in proto-Germanic, and later a d in German.
All that is pretty neat,
and you could spend your time finding further such examples,
like Schottish-Gaelic "treas" vs. German "drei", or Greek "kardia" vs. German "herz",
but then you find Latin: "pater", German: "Vater", and here something's off.
f instead of p makes sense, but shouldn't German have a d where Latin has a t?
Like it was with "frater" and "Bruder"? Something's definitely off.
The solution to this problem was found in 1875 by Danish linguist Karl Verner,
and is called "Verner's law" after him.
There simply was another sound shift after the Germanic sound shift.
It affected the sounds f, th, ch und chʷ, which had just formed from p, t, k und kʷ,
and turned them into... these sounds, which we cannot pronounce.
It also affected s, turning it into z.
However, what's interesting is less which sounds shifted, but more where and in which words they did.
Because the deciding factor here is, where stress was in the original words.
In modern German, stress is almost always n the first syllable of the root.
We say Menschen, Leben, Tanzen, Welt, and: Bruder and Vater.
But Proto-Indo-European had a much more flexible stress.
In "father", stress was on the second syllable.
Verner's law only applied, when stress was not on the previous syllable.
So the t in "Vater" was influenced, but the t in "Bruder" was not, because of the different stress.
Some time later, the modern stress arose,
which causes us to no longer stress "Bruder" and "Vater" differently.
But we can still see that we used to,
because the old stress pattern left traces because of Verner's law,
and German has maintained these traces through the ages.
g bar became a normal g; ch became h; d bar became d, which became t in the HGCS;
th became d; b bar became b;
f remained as it was, and s became z, and z became r.
So although the sounds changed,
the difference Verner's law had created remained.
In other Germanic languages that isn't the case.
In Dutch, for example, f and b bar both became [v],
and the d bar and th both turned into d.
So the Dutch words for "Bruder" and "Vater", "broeder" and "vader", don't have the difference.
However, in German we can now fully trace the evolution of the difference.
Proto-Indo-European t first became th in both words.
In "Bruder" it stayed there, becoming a d during the HGCS.
"Vater" was affected by Verner's law due to its different stress pattern.
It turned the th into a d bar, which later became a normal d,
which the HGCS turned back into a t.
In the meantime, proto-Germanic had lost its flexible stress,
so that the d/t distinction is the only indication
for the earlier stress distinction.
Other pairs of words too were affected by Verner's law, especially verb conjugations.
This is because all the pre- and suffixed could easily induce a stress difference.
Examples are the difference between "ziehen" and "gezogen", or "verlieren" and "Verlust",
and our starting point: "sneiden" and "geschnitten".
Verner's law also hides in "heben" (to lift) and "Hefe" (yeast).
"Hefe" used to mean "the lifter".
There used to be a whole lot more pairs like this,
but many disappeared due to analogy.
For example, "frieren" used to be "friesen", which, together with "gefroren", is a clear Verner pair.
But humans like order, so they eventually adapted the infinitive to the conjugation.
Our language ancestors apparently were not capable of ordering orderly,
so analogy affects different words (and never all of them) in different languages.
In Dutch, for example, it's still friesen – gefroren,
or, more precisely, vriezen – gevroren.
So this human desire for order, paradoxically, creates yet more disorder, in the form of exceptions.
Now, one could get upset over this apparent inefficiency,
but let us propose a different view.
Language is not just a tool for communicating; it is also a sort of collective work of art,
a painting, created by all those who speak or have spoken it.
Here they added or are adding color, there they scraped or are scraping some of.
So small bits of color which reach the surface could be very old,
the remains of an ancient part of the image, which has now been covered by new
(equally beautiful and complex) layers of paint.
The same goes for Verner's law.
Small irregularities, which have been preserved to the present day,
show us systems and forces, which, millennia ago, were part of our language:
the Germanic and High German sound shifts,
analogy, flexible stress, Sound which we can't even pronounce any more,
and, of course, Verner's law.
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