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Sievers's law
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Sievers's law
Sievers's law in Indo-European linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide (*w or *y) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable. Specifically, it refers to the alternation between *iy and *y, and possibly *uw and *w as conditioned by the weight of the preceding syllable. For instance, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *kor-yo-s became Proto-Germanic *harjaz, Gothic harjis "army", but PIE *ḱerdh-yo-s became Proto-Germanic *hirdijaz, Gothic hairdeis /hɛrdiːs/ "shepherd". It differs from ablaut in that the alternation has no morphological relevance but is phonologically context-sensitive: PIE *iy followed a heavy syllable (a syllable with a diphthong or long vowel, or ending in more than one consonant), but *y would follow a light syllable (a short vowel followed by a single consonant).
This situation was first noticed by the Germanic philologist Eduard Sievers (1859–1932), and his aim was to account for certain phenomena in the Germanic languages. He originally discussed only *y in medial position. He also noted, almost as an aside, that something similar seemed to be going on in the earliest Sanskrit texts. Thus in the Rigveda dāivya- "divine" actually had three syllables in scansion (dāiviya-) but satya- "true" was scanned as written.
After Sievers, scholars would find similar alternations in Greek and Latin, and alternation between *uw and *u, though the evidence is poor for all of these. Through time, evidence was announced regarding similar alternations of syllabicity in the nasal and liquid consonants, though the evidence is extremely poor for these, despite the fact that such alternations would have left permanent, indeed irreversible, traces.[citation needed] For example, the Sanskrit "tool-suffix" -tra- (e.g. pā-tra- "drinking cup, vessel") almost always follows a consonant or long vowel and should have therefore been -tira-; but no such form as **pōtira-, either written as such or scanned thus, is actually attested in the Rigveda or any other Indic text. How a nearly universal suffix **-tira- would have been, or even could have been, uniformly replaced by -tra- is unobvious.
The most ambitious extension of Sievers's law was proposed by Franklin Edgerton (1885–1963) in a pair of articles in the journal Language. He argued that not only was the syllabicity of prevocalic consonants by context applicable to all six Indo-European sonorants (*l, *m, *n *r *w *y), it was applicable in all positions in the word. Thus a form like *dyēws "sky" would have been pronounced like this only when it happened to follow a word ending with a short vowel. Everywhere else it would have had two syllables, *diyēws. Edgerton also maintained that the phonotactic rules in question applied to sequences arising across morpheme boundaries, such as when the bahuvrīhi prefix *su- occurred before a noun beginning with *w- (e.g. *su-wiHro- "well-heroed", Vedic suvīra-). According to Edgerton, the word should have had two forms, depending on what immediately preceded it: *suwiHro- and *swiHro-. This corollary he called the "converse" to Sievers's law, and is usually referred to as Edgerton's converse for short.
The evidence for alternation presented by Edgerton was of two sorts. He cited several hundred passages from the Rigveda, which he claimed should be rescanned to reveal hitherto unnoticed expressions of the syllable structure called for by his theory. But most forms show no such direct expressions; for them, Edgerton noted sharply skewed distributions that he interpreted as evidence for a lost alternation between syllabic and nonsyllabic consonants (commonly called "semivowels" in the literature). Thus say śiras "head" (from *śr̥ros) has no monosyllabic partner **śras (from *śros), but Edgerton noted that śiras occurred 100% of the time in the environments where his theory called for the syllabification of the *r. Appealing to the "formulaic" nature of oral poetry, especially in tricky and demanding literary forms like sacred Vedic versification, he reasoned that this was direct evidence for the previous existence of an alternant *śras, on the assumption that when (for whatever reason) this *śras and other forms like it came to be shunned, the typical collocations in which they would have (correctly) occurred inevitably became obsolete at the same time as the loss of the form itself. And he was able to present a sizeable body of evidence in the form of these skewed distributions in both the 1934 and 1943 articles.
Parenthetically, many of Edgerton's data on this point are inappropriate: current scholarship takes śiras, for example, to be the regular reflex of PIE *ḱr̥Hos, the syllabicity of the resonant resulting from the fact that it was followed by a consonant in Proto-Indo-European; there never was, nor could have been, a form *ḱros to yield Indic **śras. How it might be that a form that is irrelevant to Edgerton's theory might seem to "behave" in accord with it is explained below.
In 1965, Fredrik Otto Lindeman (1936–) published an article proposing a significant modification of Edgerton's theory. Disregarding Edgerton's evidence (on the grounds that he was not prepared to judge the niceties of Rigvedic scansion) he took instead as the data to be analyzed the scansions in Hermann Grassmann's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda. From these he concluded that Edgerton had been right, but only up to a point: the alternations he postulated did indeed apply to all sonorants; but in word-initial position, the alternation was limited to forms like *dyēws/diyēws "sky", as cited above – that is, words where the "short" form was monosyllabic.
Edgerton's claims, once generally hailed, have not fared well. Regarding the skewed distributions in the Rigveda, Edgerton neglected to test his observations against controls, namely forms not susceptible to his theory but sharing other properties with the "test" forms such as part of speech, metrical configuration, and so on. The first scholar to look at controls was Franklin Eugene Horowitz. Horowitz noted that for example all 65 occurrences of Vedic suvīra- "well-heroed" do occur in line-initial position or follow a heavy syllable (as if in accord with Edgerton's converse), but exactly the same thing is true of e.g. supatrá- "having beautiful wings" (which can have nothing to do with Edgerton's law). And indeed such skewing in distribution is pervasive in Vedic vocabulary: śatam "100", and dozens of other forms with no bearing on Edgerton's law, have exactly the same strong preference for not following a word ending with a short vowel that e.g. śiras "head" does, presumably by reason of beginning with a single consonant followed by a light syllable.
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Sievers's law
Sievers's law in Indo-European linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide (*w or *y) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable. Specifically, it refers to the alternation between *iy and *y, and possibly *uw and *w as conditioned by the weight of the preceding syllable. For instance, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *kor-yo-s became Proto-Germanic *harjaz, Gothic harjis "army", but PIE *ḱerdh-yo-s became Proto-Germanic *hirdijaz, Gothic hairdeis /hɛrdiːs/ "shepherd". It differs from ablaut in that the alternation has no morphological relevance but is phonologically context-sensitive: PIE *iy followed a heavy syllable (a syllable with a diphthong or long vowel, or ending in more than one consonant), but *y would follow a light syllable (a short vowel followed by a single consonant).
This situation was first noticed by the Germanic philologist Eduard Sievers (1859–1932), and his aim was to account for certain phenomena in the Germanic languages. He originally discussed only *y in medial position. He also noted, almost as an aside, that something similar seemed to be going on in the earliest Sanskrit texts. Thus in the Rigveda dāivya- "divine" actually had three syllables in scansion (dāiviya-) but satya- "true" was scanned as written.
After Sievers, scholars would find similar alternations in Greek and Latin, and alternation between *uw and *u, though the evidence is poor for all of these. Through time, evidence was announced regarding similar alternations of syllabicity in the nasal and liquid consonants, though the evidence is extremely poor for these, despite the fact that such alternations would have left permanent, indeed irreversible, traces.[citation needed] For example, the Sanskrit "tool-suffix" -tra- (e.g. pā-tra- "drinking cup, vessel") almost always follows a consonant or long vowel and should have therefore been -tira-; but no such form as **pōtira-, either written as such or scanned thus, is actually attested in the Rigveda or any other Indic text. How a nearly universal suffix **-tira- would have been, or even could have been, uniformly replaced by -tra- is unobvious.
The most ambitious extension of Sievers's law was proposed by Franklin Edgerton (1885–1963) in a pair of articles in the journal Language. He argued that not only was the syllabicity of prevocalic consonants by context applicable to all six Indo-European sonorants (*l, *m, *n *r *w *y), it was applicable in all positions in the word. Thus a form like *dyēws "sky" would have been pronounced like this only when it happened to follow a word ending with a short vowel. Everywhere else it would have had two syllables, *diyēws. Edgerton also maintained that the phonotactic rules in question applied to sequences arising across morpheme boundaries, such as when the bahuvrīhi prefix *su- occurred before a noun beginning with *w- (e.g. *su-wiHro- "well-heroed", Vedic suvīra-). According to Edgerton, the word should have had two forms, depending on what immediately preceded it: *suwiHro- and *swiHro-. This corollary he called the "converse" to Sievers's law, and is usually referred to as Edgerton's converse for short.
The evidence for alternation presented by Edgerton was of two sorts. He cited several hundred passages from the Rigveda, which he claimed should be rescanned to reveal hitherto unnoticed expressions of the syllable structure called for by his theory. But most forms show no such direct expressions; for them, Edgerton noted sharply skewed distributions that he interpreted as evidence for a lost alternation between syllabic and nonsyllabic consonants (commonly called "semivowels" in the literature). Thus say śiras "head" (from *śr̥ros) has no monosyllabic partner **śras (from *śros), but Edgerton noted that śiras occurred 100% of the time in the environments where his theory called for the syllabification of the *r. Appealing to the "formulaic" nature of oral poetry, especially in tricky and demanding literary forms like sacred Vedic versification, he reasoned that this was direct evidence for the previous existence of an alternant *śras, on the assumption that when (for whatever reason) this *śras and other forms like it came to be shunned, the typical collocations in which they would have (correctly) occurred inevitably became obsolete at the same time as the loss of the form itself. And he was able to present a sizeable body of evidence in the form of these skewed distributions in both the 1934 and 1943 articles.
Parenthetically, many of Edgerton's data on this point are inappropriate: current scholarship takes śiras, for example, to be the regular reflex of PIE *ḱr̥Hos, the syllabicity of the resonant resulting from the fact that it was followed by a consonant in Proto-Indo-European; there never was, nor could have been, a form *ḱros to yield Indic **śras. How it might be that a form that is irrelevant to Edgerton's theory might seem to "behave" in accord with it is explained below.
In 1965, Fredrik Otto Lindeman (1936–) published an article proposing a significant modification of Edgerton's theory. Disregarding Edgerton's evidence (on the grounds that he was not prepared to judge the niceties of Rigvedic scansion) he took instead as the data to be analyzed the scansions in Hermann Grassmann's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda. From these he concluded that Edgerton had been right, but only up to a point: the alternations he postulated did indeed apply to all sonorants; but in word-initial position, the alternation was limited to forms like *dyēws/diyēws "sky", as cited above – that is, words where the "short" form was monosyllabic.
Edgerton's claims, once generally hailed, have not fared well. Regarding the skewed distributions in the Rigveda, Edgerton neglected to test his observations against controls, namely forms not susceptible to his theory but sharing other properties with the "test" forms such as part of speech, metrical configuration, and so on. The first scholar to look at controls was Franklin Eugene Horowitz. Horowitz noted that for example all 65 occurrences of Vedic suvīra- "well-heroed" do occur in line-initial position or follow a heavy syllable (as if in accord with Edgerton's converse), but exactly the same thing is true of e.g. supatrá- "having beautiful wings" (which can have nothing to do with Edgerton's law). And indeed such skewing in distribution is pervasive in Vedic vocabulary: śatam "100", and dozens of other forms with no bearing on Edgerton's law, have exactly the same strong preference for not following a word ending with a short vowel that e.g. śiras "head" does, presumably by reason of beginning with a single consonant followed by a light syllable.