Verschärfung in Old Norse and Gothic

The main hypothesis presented in this paper is that the so-called Verschärfung
in Germanic (or Holtzmann’s Law) is an independent development in Gothic
and Old Norse as shown by structural similarities. The sound change was not of
Indo-European origin, but is a diphthongisation with stop articulation as the
final step. It will be shown that neither the Indo-European (IE) laryngeals nor
the IE accent played any role in the development of -ddj/-ggj and -ggw/-ggv in
Gothic and Old Norse. Germanic Verschärfung originated, we will argue, in a
structure like [eu.e/ei.e]. The conditions for the change were (i) a disyllabic
word-form, (ii) a short vowel as the first part of an -i or -u diphthong, (iii) glide
insertion [eu.we], and (iv) a change of the -u/i (or -w/j) part of the diphthong to
a fricative [ej'.we/ej'.je] as an intermediate step before stop articulation. The
fricative pronunciation occurred, we will argue, when the word-forms were in
accented position in the sentence. This resulted in an alternation between an
[ew.we] and [ej^.we], which became opaque, once the fricative changed to a
stop. This in turn leads to an analogical levelling of the stop to monosyllabic
word-forms. It will be shown, with examples from Old Norse, that the stop
articulation was original only in disyllabic word-forms, and spread to monosyllabic word forms. Crucial pairs are hçggva 'to hew’ (infinitive) and past tense
hjç. W e will show that an exact typological parallel is found in the history of
Faroese, and, with regard to accented sentence position, that we may find typological evidence from Danish dialects.