Verner, Karl Adolf

Related Category: Language and Linguistics: Biographies

(vûr´nər, Dan. kärl ä´dôlf vĕr´nər), 1846–96, Danish philologist. Verner was a librarian at the Univ. of Halle (now in E Germany) and a professor of Slavonic languages at the Univ. of Copenhagen. His fame rests on Verner's law, a linguistic formulation showing that certain consonantal alternations in Germanic languages are the result of patterns of alternation in the position of word accent in the parent language. This formulation contained modifications of Grimm's law.