Karl Verner

Karl Verner was a Danish linguist known for identifying the sound-change rule now called Verner's law, which he published in 1875. Grimm's law, the earlier description of how certain consonants shifted between Proto-Indo-European and the Germanic languages, had left a class of apparent exceptions unexplained. Verner showed that these exceptions were not irregular at all but instead depended in a fully regular way on the position of stress in the original Proto-Indo-European word, so that a consonant's outcome differed predictably depending on whether the preceding syllable had carried the accent. The discovery was highly influential within nineteenth-century historical linguistics because it demonstrated that apparent irregularities in sound change could, with sufficiently careful analysis, be shown to follow exceptionless rules, reinforcing the broader neogrammarian view that sound change proceeds through regular, rule-governed processes rather than sporadic exceptions.