Consider the following passage:
In nineteenth-century comparative linguistics, researchers sought to explain systematic phonological shifts across Indo-European languages. In 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated Grimm’s Law, which established that Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops systematically shifted to voiceless fricatives in Proto-Germanic. However, several apparent anomalies resisted Grimm's formulation. In 1875, Danish linguist Karl Verner resolved these discrepancies by demonstrating that voiceless stops instead became voiced fricatives whenever the original accent fell on a subsequent syllable, a phenomenon termed Verner’s Law. Later, in 1879, Ferdinand de Saussure published a groundbreaking treatise positing 'sonant coefficients'—unattested theoretical consonants that accounted for irregular vowel alternations across daughter languages, later confirmed by the discovery of Hittite laryngeals.
Match each historical linguist with the specific phonological finding or theoretical contribution explicitly attributed to them in the passage.
- Jacob GrimmEstablished the systematic shift of Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives
- Karl VernerDemonstrated that accent placement determines whether voiceless stops shift to voiced fricatives
- Ferdinand de SaussureHypothesized theoretical consonants to explain irregular vowel alternations