N. E. Collinge (1921–2011)

An alphabetic listing of the various “laws” of Info-European linguistics, such as Grimm’s Law describing the fate of PIE stop consonants in Germanic. It’s rather idiosyncratic, badly out of date in parts, and in the days of Wikipedia of limited relevance as a reference. It’s perhaps of greatest interest to historians of science, since it deals with the intra-scientific debate about the validity and scope of the laws back to their original formulations, often in the 19C.

It should be noted that many important regularities of IE linguistics have never been formally been named as “laws”, and thus aren’t included here. Of those that have, a remarkable proportion concern Baltic-Slavic accentuation, apparently simply because specialists within that field happen to be particularly prone to name their observations as “laws”.… (plus d'informations)