Verner’s Law in Italy – and Greece: un capitolo di storia della ricerca linguistica

The discovery by Karl Verner in 1875 of the eponymous accent-conditioned sound law explaining apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law in Germanic made a lasting impact on the discipline of historical linguistics, not only by providing decisive support for the Neogrammarian axiom of the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze, but also by sparking a trend for applying similar – often ill-advised – explanations to other languages. In this paper, I discuss some notable examples from the history of Latin and Ancient Greek studies, and I try to show that, while most explanations of seemingly irregular developments via ‘Verner-like’ effects were in fact misguided, the discredit in which such approaches have since fallen may have prevented the acceptance of other accent-based rules which nevertheless have good chances of being correct.