Germano-European, Breaking the Sound Law Book

Relying on the most up-to-date findings in dynamic phonetics and phonology, Griffen has created a radical reconstruction of Indo-European/Germano-European linguistics.

Griffen's dynamic, nonsegmental model of phonology demonstrates certain relationships among phonetic details that make Grimm's Law extremely unlikely. Whereas the Indo-European reconstructions shift to the fortis Germanic consonants, the nonsegmental phonetic detail of the environment would require a change to the lenis—the opposite move. In this work, Griffen reconstructs a consonant system in which the changes from the protoforms to the language groups are much more in keeping with phonetic detail and phonetic plausibility than in traditional systems. No arbitrary sound law is necessary to account for variations among the language groups. These variations can be handled from the reconstruction and regular, observed tendencies in sound change and variation supported by definable phonetic justifications.