This feature began with an overview and has traced the attitude that every exception has a reason, analogy as an engine of change, a close reading of the preface, and the connections to Bopp, Schleicher, and Schuchardt. To close, let’s grade this nearly-140-year-old textbook from the vantage point of linguistics today.
What has genuinely held up
The attitude that every exception has a reason remains, itself, foundational to historical linguistics today. The research posture of never letting an exception to a sound change sit unexplained, and instead pursuing a systematic account, is inherited today as a matter of course. The concept of analogy also survives as one of the basic terms of modern linguistics. The phenomenon covered in the plain-language article — patterns like “sneaked” giving way to “snuck” — shows that the concept of analogy is still used, right now, to explain language change actively in progress.
What was rewritten
On the other hand, the Neogrammarians’ strongest claim — that sound laws operate without exception — faced objections from the moment it was announced, as the article on the conflict with Schuchardt showed. Modern historical linguistics treats this claim far more cautiously than it was treated at the time. A sound change doesn’t necessarily shift every word in a speech community all at once, mechanically. Rather, later research has shown that change often begins in a handful of words and spreads gradually across the vocabulary over time — a phenomenon known as “lexical diffusion.” The strong phrase “without exception” has, in effect, been rewritten into the more modest “as a rule, wherever a systematic reason can be found.”
The last thread tying eight features together
This history-series set has now traced eight figures: Jones’s single paragraph, Rask’s prize essay, Grimm’s table of correspondences, Bopp’s comparison of whole grammatical systems, Müller’s lectures, Jespersen’s synthesis, Schleicher’s natural-scientific turn, and now Brugmann.
What Brugmann’s story shows, among these eight, is a lesson that the rigor of an attitude and the specific content of a rigorous claim deserve to be graded separately. The former — never letting an exception sit unexplained — survived scrutiny and became common sense in today’s linguistics. The latter — the strong phrase “without exception” itself — was rewritten into something more cautious by later research. Working out which part of a scholarly conviction carries lasting value, and which part was simply a product of its era, remains, as ever, the work of the generations that follow — and that is the final lesson running through all eight features in this series.
Summary
| Verdict | Subject |
|---|---|
| Genuinely held up | Seeking a reason for every exception / the basic concept of analogy |
| Rewritten | “Sound laws operate without exception” — softened after the discovery of lexical diffusion |
| A limit to keep in mind | The rigor of an attitude and the specific content of a rigorous claim must be graded separately |
In a nutshell — the attitude Brugmann embodied, that every exception has a reason, remains foundational to linguistics nearly 140 years later. But the strong phrase “without exception” that once underwrote it was rewritten, by later generations, into something more humble.