Lachmann's law is a somewhat disputed phonological
sound law
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic cha ...
for
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
named after German Indo-Europeanist
Karl Lachmann who first formulated it in 1850. According to it,
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s in Latin lengthen before
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...
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 refe ...
stops which are followed by another (unvoiced) stop.
Examples
*
PIE
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts ( pecan pie), fruit preserves ( jam tart ...
* 'led' > (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek
)
* PIE * 'fortified' > (cf. short vowel in Sanskrit
)
* PIE * 'covered' > (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek
)
Explanations
According to Paul Kiparsky, 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 > > .
Jay Jasanoff defends the
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians (, , ) were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change.
Overview
According to the Neogrammarian ...
analysis of Lachmann's law as analogy followed by sound change. (* ⇒ * > * > ). Although this formulation ultimately derives from
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...
, Jasanoff's formulation also explains problems such as:
* > * >
*- ⇒ *- >
* > * ⇒ * > * >
Because Lachmann's law also does not operate before PIE voiced aspirate stops,
glottalic theory
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non- pulmonic stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
A forerunner of the theory was ...
reinterprets the law as reflecting lengthening before glottalized stops, not voiced stops.
See also
*
Winter's law, a similar law operating in Balto-Slavic
References
Sources
*
* . PhD dissertation.
*
*{{Cite book , last=Weiss , first=Michael L. , title=Outline of the historical and comparative grammar of Latin , date=2020 , publisher=Beech Stave Press , isbn=978-0-9895142-7-9 , edition=Second , location=Ann Arbor
Italic sound laws