Verner’s Law in Italy – and Greece: un capitolo di storia della ricerca linguistica

• Roberto Batisti ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Bologna

     University of Bologna

     Bolonia, Italia

     
• Localización: Archivio glottologico italiano, ISSN 0004-0207, Vol. 106, Nº. 2, 2021, págs. 129-163
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The discovery by Karl Verner in 1875 of the eponymous accent-conditioned sound law explaining apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law in Germanic made a lasting impact on the discipline of historical linguistics, not only by providing decisive support for the Neogrammarian axiom of the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze, but also by sparking a trend for applying similar – often ill-advised – explanations to other languages. In this paper, I discuss some notable examples from the history of Latin and Ancient Greek studies, and I try to show that, while most explanations of seemingly irregular developments via ‘Verner-like’ effects were in fact misguided, the discredit in which such approaches have since fallen may have prevented the acceptance of other accent-based rules which neverthe-less have good chances of being correct.