 A letter shows that Eduard Sievers had hit on the same explanation by 1874, but did not publish it.Verner's theory was received with great enthusiasm by the young generation of comparative philologists, the so-called , because it was an important argument in favour of the Neogrammarian dogma that the sound laws were without exceptions ("").The change in pronunciation described by Verner's Law must have occurred before the shift of stress to the first syllable