Note 15 — Chapter IV · END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY

Who was the discoverer of the palatal law? This has been hotly discussed, and as the law was in so far anticipated by other discoveries of the ’seventies as to be “in the air,” it is perhaps futile to try to fix the paternity on any single man. However, it seems now perfectly clear that Vilhelm Thomsen was the first to mention it in his lectures (1875), but unfortunately the full and able paper in which he intended to lay it before the world was delayed for a couple of years and then kept in his drawers when he heard that Johannes Schmidt was preparing a paper on the same subject: it was printed in 1920 in the second volume of his Samlede Afhandlinger (from the original manuscript). Esaias Tegnér had found the law independently and had printed five sheets of a book De ariska språkens palataler, which he withdrew when he found that Collitz and de Saussure had expressed similar views. Karl Verner, too, had independently arrived at the same results; see his Afhandlinger og Breve, 109 ff., 305.