 Whereas the North Germanic and West Germanic languages clearly show the effects of Verner's law, those patterns seldom appear in Gothic, the representative of East Germanic.This is usually thought to be because Gothic eliminated most Verner's law variants through analogy with the unaffected consonants.Karl Verner published his discovery in the article "" (an exception to the first sound shift) in Kuhn's "Journal of Comparative Linguistic Research" in 1877, but he had already presented his theory on 1 May 1875 in a comprehensive personal letter to his friend and mentor, Vilhelm Thomsen.