of the underlying voiced phoneme, and spell accordingly. However, in Middle High German, these sounds were spelled differently: singular , plural . Chronology Since the High German consonant shift took place before the beginning of writing of Old High German in the 8th century, the dating of the various phases is an uncertain business. The estimates quoted here are mostly taken from the (p. 63). Different estimates appear elsewhere, for example Waterman, who asserts that the first three phases occurred fairly close together and were complete in Alemannic territory by 600, taking another two or three centuries to spread north. Sometimes historical constellations help us; for example, the fact that Attila is called in German proves that the second phase must have been productive after the Hunnish invasion of the 5th century. The fact that many Latin loan-words are shifted in German (e.g., Latin > German ), while others are not (e.g., Latin > German ) allows us to date the sound changes before or after the likely period of borrowing. However, the most useful source of chronological data is German words cited in Latin texts of the late classical and early medieval period. Precise dating would in any case be difficult, since each shift may have begun with one word or a group of words in the speech of one locality, and gradually extended by lexical diffusion to all words with the same phonological pattern, and then over a longer period of time spread to wider geographical areas. However, relative chronology can easily be established by the observation that, for example, t > tz must precede d > t, which in turn must precede þ > d; otherwise words with an original þ could have undergone all three shifts and ended up as tz. By contrast, as the form for "give" is attested in Old Bavarian, showing both > > and > > , it follows that > and > must predate phase 3. Alternative chronologies have been proposed. According to a theory by the controversial German linguist Theo Vennemann, the consonant shift occurred much earlier and was already completed in the early 1st century BC. On this basis, he subdivides the Germanic languages into High Germanic and Low Germanic. Few other linguists share this view. Geographical distribution Roughly, the changes resulting from phase 1 affected Upper and Central German, as did the dental element of phase 2 (t-