Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Grassmann's law
Summary
Grassmann's law, named after its discoverer Hermann Grassmann, is a dissimilatory phonological process in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which states that if an aspirated consonant is followed by another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, the first one loses the aspiration. The descriptive version was given for Sanskrit by Pāṇini.
Here are some examples in Greek of the effects of Grassmann's law:
/thú-ɔː/ θύω 'I sacrifice (an animal)'; /e-tú-thɛː/ ἐτύθη 'it was sacrificed'
/thrík-s/ θρίξ 'hair'; /tríkh-es/ τρίχες 'hairs'
/thápt-ein/ θάπτειν 'to bury (present)'; /táph-os/ τάφος 'a grave'
In reduplication, which forms the perfect tense in both Greek and Sanskrit, if the initial consonant is aspirated, the prepended consonant is unaspirated by Grassmann's law. For instance /phu-ɔː/ φύω 'I grow' : /pe-phuː-ka/ πέφυκα 'I have grown'.
The fact that deaspiration in Greek took place after the change of Proto-Indo-European *bh, *dh, *gh to /ph, th, kh/ and the fact that all other Indo-European languages do not apply Grassmann's law both suggest that it was developed separately in Greek and Sanskrit (although quite possibly by areal influence spread across a then-contiguous Graeco-Aryan–speaking area) and so it was not inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
Also, Grassmann's law in Greek also affects the aspirate /h-/ < developed specifically in Greek but not in Sanskrit or most other Indo-European. (For example, > > ἔχω /ékhɔː/ "I have", with dissimilation of , but the future tense > ἕξω /hék-sɔː/ "I will have" was unaffected, as aspiration was lost before /s/.) The evidence from other languages is not strictly negative: many branches, including Sanskrit's closest relative, Iranian, merge the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated and unaspirated stops and so it is not possible to tell if Grassmann's law ever operated in them.
According to Filip De Decker, Grassmann's law had not operated in Mycenaean Greek yet, and it is almost certain that it occurred later than 1200 BC; it might even postdate the Homeric Greek period.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.