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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 152
Functional Load
Madonia (1969: 84) summarises the notion of functional load as ‘the worth of
an opposition in a given language’ 2 (My translation). Madonia considers only
the functional load of phonemic distinctions, which she measures either by the
frequency of the opposition in words which can appear in the same context or
by the frequency of the phonemes in discourse. This is viewed as part of the
economy of linguistic structure. Phonemes with a higher functional load are
more stable, i.e. more resistant to change.
Grassmann’s Law
Grassmann’s Law was set out in Grassmann (1863). It concerns the deaspiration
of the first of a sequence of two aspirated consonants in Sanskrit.
Grimm’s Law
Grimm’s Law is essentially a statement of regular correspondences between
certain consonants in Indo-European (inherited in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and
other Indo-European languages) and those in the Germanic languages. The
implication is that there was a change which set Germanic off from its Indo-
European parent language, and that change is usually called the first Germanic
Consonant Shift. The correspondences are set out in (1).
(1) Indo-European voiced plosives correspond to voiceless plosives in
Germanic.
(e.g. Latin dens, dentis corresponds to Danish tand, English tooth.)
Indo-European voiceless plosives correspond to voiceless fricatives in
Germanic.
(e.g. Latin tres corresponds to English three.)
Indo-European voiced aspirated plosives correspond to voiced fricatives
(often to voiced plosives in the modern languages) in Germanic.
(e.g. Indo-European *bhrāter- corresponds to English brother.)
This correspondence was stated in Grimm (1822). There has been some discussion
of the extent to which Grimm’s Law was really discovered by Grimm
and the extent to which it was really discovered by Rasmus Rask, but it seems
clear that the statement of the shift as a unitary process is properly Grimm’s.
For an extension to Grimm’s Law, see Verner’s Law.
2 ‘Par rendement fonctionnel, on entend l’importance d’une opposition dans une
langue donnée.’