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Lachmann's law is a somewhat disputed phonological sound law for Latin named after German Indo-Europeanist Karl Lachmann who first formulated it in 1850. According to it, vowels in Latin lengthen before Proto-Indo-European voiced stops which are followed by another (unvoiced) stop.
Examples
- PIE *h₂eǵtos 'led' > āctus (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek ágō)
- PIE *ph₂gtos 'fortified' > pāctus (cf. short vowel in Sanskrit pajrás)
- PIE *tegtos 'covered' > tēctus (cf. short vowel in Ancient Greek stégō)
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 (*h₂eǵtos → *h₂eḱtos 'forced, made'). Lachmann's law, however, did not act upon the result of the assimilation, but on the deep structure *h₂eǵtos > *agtos > āctus.
Jay Jasanoff defends the Neogrammarian analysis of Lachmann's law as analogy followed by sound change. (*aktos ⇒ *agtos > *āgtos > āctus). Although this formulation ultimately derives from Ferdinand de Saussure, Jasanoff's formulation also explains problems such as:
- magism̥os > *magsomos > māximus /māksimus/
- aksī- ⇒ *agsī- > āxī- /āksī-/
- pōds > *pōs(s) ⇒ *ped-s > *pēts > pēs(s)
Because Lachmann's law also does not operate before PIE voiced aspirate stops, glottalic theory 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
- Weiss 2020, p. 190.
- Kiparsky 1965.
- Jasanoff 2004.
Sources
- Jasanoff, Jay (2004), "Plus ça change. . . Lachmann's Law in Latin" (PDF), in J. H. W. Penney (ed.), Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 405–416, ISBN 978-0-19-925892-5, archived from the original (PDF) on 6 April 2017
- Kiparsky, Paul (1965), Phonological Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PhD dissertation.
- Matasović, Ranko (1997), Kratka poredbenopovijesna gramatika latinskoga jezika, Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, ISBN 953-150-105-X
- Weiss, Michael L. (2020). Outline of the historical and comparative grammar of Latin (Second ed.). Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press. ISBN 978-0-9895142-7-9.