Lachmann's law is a somewhat disputed phonological sound law for

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

named after German Indo-Europeanist

Karl Lachmann Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann (; 4 March 1793 – 13 March 1851) was a German philologist and critic. He is particularly noted for his foundational contributions to the field of textual criticism. Biography Lachmann was born in Brun ...

who first formulated it sometime in the middle of the 19th century. According to it,

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s in Latin lengthen before

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

stops which are followed by another (unvoiced) stop. Compare: * PIE * 'led' > (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek ) * PIE * 'fortified' > (cf. short vowel in Sanskrit ) * PIE * 'covered' > (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek ) According to Lachmann's law is an example of a sound law that affects ''deep'' phonological structure, not the surface result of phonological rules. In Proto-Indo-European, a voiced stop was already ''pronounced'' as voiceless before voiceless stops, as the assimilation by voicedness must have been operational in PIE ( → 'forced, made'). Lachmann's law, however, did not act upon the result of the assimilation, but on the deep structure > > . Indo-Europeanists reject this explanation, generally believing that the voiced finals were analogically restored in the appropriate forms before being deleted again. For example, defends the Neogrammarian analysis of Lachmann's law as analogy followed by sound change (* ⇒ * > * > ). Although this formulation ultimately derives from de Sausurre (1885: 256), Jasanoff's formulation also explains problems such as: * > * > *- ⇒ *- > * > * ⇒ * > * > The law also does not operate before PIE voiced aspirate stops. Based on this, the

glottalic theory The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions. A forerunner of the theory was proposed by the Danish lingu ...

reinterprets the law not to reflect lengthening before voiced stops, but before glottalized stops. In that case the assumption that we are dealing with an example of a sound law that affects deep phonological structure is not required.

References

* * . PhD dissertation. * {{citation , authorlink=Ranko Matasović , last= Matasović , first= Ranko , title= Kratka poredbenopovijesna gramatika latinskoga jezika , publisher= Matica hrvatska , year= 1997 , location= Zagreb , isbn= 953-150-105-X Sound laws

See also

References