The Germanic Accent Shift: Sound Changes Which Distinguish Germanic and Indo-European

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The Germanic Accent Shift

In Indo-European accent (or word stress) was probably indicated by pitch and could fall on any syllable in the word. The placement of the accent depended on the length of the word and the nature of the morphological elements it contained.

In Germanic, the IE movable pitch accent became a fixed accent, probably based on loudness. The Germanic accent was fixed on the root-syllable of the word. Since most IE prefixes disappeared at much the same time, the root-syllable was most often the first syllable.

The unaccented syllables which followed the accented root-syllable tended to become reduced in loudness and have tended to become less distinct or even disappear over the course of time. Since many of these syllables were grammatical endings in IE, the Germanic languages have lost many of these endings.


First Germanic Sound Shift

The First Germanic Sound Shift, better known as Grimm’s Law, was first described by Jacob Grimm in 1822. Grimm’s Law affected the Indo-European stop consonants, or stops, which could be articulated as labial, dental, or velar sounds. IE also had a few other stops, but these were not developed in Germanic.

Hence the IE dialect which gave rise to Germanic had the following stop consonants: [Read more...]