Brugmann's law

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Brugmann's law, named for

if it was followed by one consonant and another vowel. For example, the Proto-Indo-European noun for 'wood' was *dόru, which in Vedic became dāru. Everywhere else, the outcome was *a, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a.

Overview

The theory accounts for a number of otherwise puzzling facts.

*uhsiniz < *uhsenez, with e > i in noninitial syllables followed, in Old English, by an umlaut. This is the only Old English n-stem that certainly points to *en-vocalism, rather than *on-vocalism.

Exceptions

The rule seems to apply to only an *o that is the

. That faces particular problems in explaining the archaic form ānāśa 'he/she has reached' < *h₁eh₁noḱe, with its very idiosyncratic synchronic relation to Sanskrit √aś 'reach'.

Several exceptions can be addressed by the laryngeal theory. The form that is traditionally reconstructed as *owis "sheep" (Sanskrit ǎvi-), is a good candidate for again reconstructing, as *h₃ewi- (with an o-colouring laryngeal), rather than an ablauting o-grade.

Perhaps the most convincing confirmation comes from the inflection of the perfect: a Sanskrit root like sad- "sit" has sasada for "I sat" and sasāda for "he, she, it sat". The conventional 19th century wisdom saw it as some kind of "therapeutic" reaction to the Indo-Iranian merger of the endings *-a "I" and *-e "he/she/it" as -a, but it was troubling that the distinction was found only in roots that ended with a single consonant. That is, dadarśa "saw" is both first- and third-person singular, but a form like ˣdadārśa would have been allowed by Sanskrit syllable structure. The mystery was solved when the ending of the perfect in the first person singular was reanalyzed, on the basis of Hittite evidence as *-h₂e, beginning with an a-colouring laryngeal. In other words, while Brugmann's Law was still operative, a form of the type *se-sod-h₂e in the first-person singular did not have an open root syllable.

A problem for the interpretation is that roots that quite plainly must have ended in a consonant cluster including a laryngeal, such as jan- < *ǵenh₁- "beget" and therefore should have had a short vowel throughout (like darś- "see" < *dorḱ-) nevertheless show the same patterning as sad-: jajana first-person singular, jajāna third-person singular. Whether that is a catastrophic failure of the theory or just levelling is uncertain, but after all, those who think the pattern seen in roots like sad- has a morphological, not phonological, origin, have their own headaches, such as the total failure of this "morphological" development to include roots ending in two consonants. Such an argument would anyway cut the ground out from under the neat distributions seen in the kinship terms, the special behaviour of "ox" and so on.

Perhaps the most worrisome data are

pros (< *proti) (meaning "motion from or to a place or location at a place", depending on the case of the noun that it governs) and some other forms, all of which appear to have ablauting vowels. They also all have a voiceless stop after the vowel, which may or may not be significant.

Current status

Brugmann's Law is widely accepted among specialists in Indo-European and Indo-Iranic linguistics.[1]^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]} Jerzy Kuryłowicz, the author of the explanation of the sasada/sasāda matter (in his Études indoeuropéennes I), eventually abandoned his analysis for of an appeal to the theory of marked vs unmarked morphological categories.

Martin Joachim Kümmel compares Brugmann's Law to developments in Anatolian and Tocharian languages and to Saussure's losses of laryngeals near *o in the internal reconstruction of pre-PIE *o as longer than *e (Kümmel 2012:308).

References

Further reading

• Beekes, Robert S. P. (1997), A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan, Brill
• Brugmann, Karl (1876), "Zur Geschichte der stammabstufenden Declinationen, Erste Abhandlung: Die Nomina auf -ar- und -tar-", Curtius Studien, 9: 361–406
• Hale, Mark (2008), "Avestan", in Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas, CUP, pp. 101–122
• Hirt, H (1913), "Fragen des Vokalismus und der Stammbildung im Indogermanischen", IF, 32: 236–247
• Hoffmann, Karl; Forssman, Bernhard (2004), Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre, Innsbruck
• Jamison, Stephanie (1983), Function and Form in the -aya- Formations of the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda, Göttingen
• Kobayashi, Masato (2004), Historical Phonology of Old Indo-Aryan Consonants, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• Kulikov, Leonid (2017), "Indo-Iranian", in Kapović (ed.), The Indo-European Languages, Routledge, pp. 205–213
• Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2012), "Typology and reconstruction: The consonants and vowels of Proto-Indo-European", in Whitehead; Olander; Olsen; Rasmussen (eds.), The sound of Indo-European: phonetics, phonemics, and morphophonemics, Museum Tusculanum Press, pp. 291–330
• Lubotsky, Alexander (1990), "La loi de Brugmann et *H₃e. La reconstruction des laryngales", Bibliothèque de Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l'Université de Liège, fascicule CCLiII, Liège-Paris, pp. 129–136{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Lubotsky, Alexander (1997), Review of: Marianne Volkart, Zu Brugmanns Gesetz im Altindischen. (Universität Bern, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft. Arbeitspapier 33.) Bern 1994.
• Lubotsky, Alexander (2018), "The Phonology of Proto-Indo-Iranian", in Klein; Joseph; Fritz (eds.), Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 3, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 1875–1888
• Martínez, Javier; de Vaan, Michiel (2014), Introduction to Avestan, Brill
• Mayrhofer, Manfred (1986), "Lautlehre", in Mayrhofer (ed.), Indogermanische Grammatik, Band I, Carl Winter, pp. 73–177
• Skjærvø, Prods Oktor (2009), "Old Iranian", in Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian Languages, Routledge, pp. 43–195
• Tichy, Eva (2006), A Survey of Proto-Indo-European, Hempen
• Willi, Andreas (2018), Origins of the Greek Verb, CUP