Cowgill's law (Germanic)
Proto-Germanic sound law
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Cowgill's law[1] says that a PIE laryngeal /h₃/, and possibly /h₂/, turns into /k/ in Proto-Germanic when directly preceded by a sonorant and followed by /w/. This law is named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill.
This law is still controversial, although increasingly accepted. Donald Ringe (2006) "tentatively" accepts it;[1]: 70 Andrew Sihler (1995) is noncommittal.[2]: 168
Examples are fairly few:
- Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz "alive" (whence English quick) < PIE *gʷih₃-wós (cf. Latin: vīvus, Sanskrit: jīvás)
- Proto-Germanic *unki acc. du. "us two" (cf. Gothic: unkis, Old English: unc, Old Norse: okkr) < PIE *n̥h₃wé (cf. Greek: nṓ; Ved. āvā́m acc. du. "us two" < *āva-ám)
- Possibly Old English: tācor "husband's brother" < PIE *dayh₂wḗr (cf. Greek: dāḗr, Ved. devṛ́, Latin: lēvir)
The first two examples, however, have good alternative explanations which don't involve Cowgill's law:
- Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz < PIE *gʷi-gʷh₃-(w)ó-.[3]
- Proto-Germanic *unki < PIE *n̥h₁ ge acc./dat. du. "us two at least" (other accusative personal pronouns may have been built the same way: Proto-Germanic *miki acc. sg. "me", *þiki acc. sg. "you (sg.)", and *inki acc./dat. du. "you two" ).[4]
If the sound law becomes generally accepted, the relative chronology of this law could have consequences for the possible reconstructed phonetic values of /h₂/ and /h₃/. If it occurred before Grimm's law, then its immediate output must have been /g/, as /k/ would have become /x/ by Grimm's law. This would have been more likely if the affected laryngeals were voiced velar obstruents to begin with.[1]: 70 [5]: 143n1 Ringe does believe that Cowgill's Law applied before Grimm's, but his reasoning relies on the 'brother-in-law' example (and thus the conclusion about the laryngeals being voiced would apply to /h₂/ as much as /h₃/). If that example is considered invalid, he admits that either relative chronology is then possible.
History
Hirt (1931)[6] observed that PIE *w was reflected as *k in a handful of words in Germanic, but was unable to explain the phenomenon. Austin (1946, 1958)[7][8] attributed this to the presence of a preceding laryngeal, and proposed many additional examples, which have been described as "questionable" by Ringe[1]: 69 . His version of the law applied to any laryngeal, and to *y as well as *w, but also required the laryngeal to be preceded by an accented vowel; when an unaccented vowel preceded, he believed Holtzmann's law would apply instead.
Cowgill (1965)[5]: 143n1, 170n58, 178n72 accepted Austin's hypothesis in a modified form, stating it as applicable to *w only, and describing the conditioning as 'not yet fully worked out'. He mentioned only two examples, the words for 'alive' and 'us two'; the former, but not the latter, had already been mentioned by Austin. Katz (1998)[9] accepted 'us two' as an example and explained its development in greater detail. The term "Cowgill's Law" was used by Ringe (2006)[1]: 68 ; others have referred to it as "laryngeal hardening", e.g. Stiles (2017).[10]: 898–899