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Grimm's Law: Karl Verner
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The Germanic Consonant Shift (... known as the First Sound Shift or Grimm's Law) occurred in five steps. Step 3 is called Verner's Law. Each step was completed before the next began, so there was no overlapping or repetition of the changes.
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Grimm's law is important in that it demonstrates the development from the old Germanic languages of more recent languages such as English, Dutch, and Low German. It ... shows that changes in a language and in groups of languages come about gradually and not as a result of random word changes. Grimm based his research on the 1818 treatise of the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask, a discussion of the origin of Old Norse. Grimm's work was augmented by the explanations of stress shifts formulated by the Danish philologist Karl Adolf Verner. See Verner's Law.
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Karl Verner noted a seeming "problem" with the operation of Grimm's Law in the development of the Germanic languages, and postulated a solution , in reality merely a supplement to Grimm's Law that provides an important exception to the sound changes. According to Grimm, the Indo-European consonants [p, t, k, s] developed into Germanic [f, th, x, s] in word-initial, medial, or final position. Verner noted... that in many cases these consonants did not remain voiceless, but instead developed into their voiced counterparts [b, d, g, z]. Through deductive reasoning, Verner showed that the Indo-European placement of stress was the deciding factor in this development: if the immediately preceding syllable did not bear primary stress, then the alternate forms (the voiced versions) were produced. (The reasons behind this are complicated; Bennett summarizes it as explaining that stress requires greater articulation and thus produced a fortis (voiceless) consonant, while no stress produced the lenis (voiced) variant.) Voiceless consonant clusters with an initial 's' retained their voiceless quality, so [sp], [st] and [sk] are not affected. Thus, we see [p] -> [f] in IE klépo, Go. hlifa "I steal", but [p] -> [b] in Sk. kapálam, Go. háubith "head"; [t] -> [th] in IE wérto, Go. waírtha "I become", but [t] -> [d] in IE wentós, Go. winds "wind"; [k] -> [x] in Gk.
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Grimm's law (Jakob Grimm, 1822): voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives, voiced stops to voiceless stops, voiced aspirated stops to voiced stops (e.g. pater/father); exceptions to Grimm's law: preservation of voiceless stops after another voiceless stop; Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877): reversal of Grimm's Law, voiceless stops to voiced stops (when surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by unaccented vowel), r instead of s, explained by original IE accent falling after consonant in question (e.g. centum/hundred)
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Karl Verner