16.1. Grassmann’s Law

Another famous sound change that happened in the history of Indo-European is called Grassmann’s Law.

Grassmann’s law describes a regular process of dissimilation that happened in Greek and Sanskrit.

If a Proto-Indo-European word had two aspirated stops the first dissimilated to an unaspirated stop (with the same place of articulation).

Greek trikhós ‘hair’ (genitive singular) derives from an earlier *thrikh-ós.

Grassmann’s Law applied to *thrikh-ós, resulting in dissimilation of the first aspirated stop to an unaspirated stop.

However, the nominative singular form of the Greek word for ‘hair’ is thríks; the kh of the root lost its aspiration due to the following segment s. (This deaspiration before s was also a regular change in the history of Greek.) Grassmann’s Law therefore did not apply, and the initial apical stop retained its aspiration.

Exercise

Given the following two pre-Greek forms *threph-s-ō ‘I will rear’ and *threph-ō ‘I rear’, what are the expected Greek forms?

Show answer

16.2. Links

A good etymological dictionary of English is the Online Etymological Dictionary. The other one referred to in the Guide to further reading section of the chapter can be downloaded from here.

On the topics of pejoration and language taboos, see the TV interview with Keith Allan and Kate Burridge.