Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are true of Grimm's Law?
Hints
- Three describe the law and its aftermath; one over-extends it.
- The law is specifically a Germanic development.
Show the answer
- A. It predicts Latin p answering to English f across the vocabulary
- B. It describes a change from voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives in Germanic
- D. Its apparent exceptions were largely explained by Verner's Law
Why
The fourth is the error: Grimm's Law is what happened in Germanic, and it is precisely because Latin did not undergo it that the correspondence with English is informative. A change shared by every branch would tell you nothing about which languages group together.
Practise A History of Linguistics
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