Grimm's law
Grimm's Law, also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift, is a linguistic principle that explains the systematic changes in consonant sounds that occurred as Germanic languages evolved from their Indo-European roots. Formulated in the early 19th century, this law highlights how certain consonants and combinations consistently transformed when transitioning from Indo-European to Germanic forms. For example, the Indo-European sound /p/ often becomes /f/ in Germanic languages, as seen in the transition from the Sanskrit "pitar" to the English "father."
The concept emerged from the work of several linguists, notably Jacob Grimm, who is often credited with formalizing these observations in his grammar work. Germanic languages, including English, German, and Scandinavian tongues, share a common ancestry believed to trace back to a proto-Germanic language spoken in northern Europe thousands of years ago. Despite later influences from other languages, such as Latin, the consistent sound shifts identified by Grimm's Law provide insight into the linguistic connections within the Indo-European language family. This foundational understanding has furthered the study of language evolution and relationships among various linguistic groups.
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Grimm's law
Grimm's law, also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift, is the name linguists give to the explanation of why many Germanic words are so systematically different from the Indo-European words from which they originated. Developed in the early nineteenth century, the law noted that when certain consonants and consonant combinations were changed from their Indo-European roots to a new Germanic word, they always changed in the same way. These transfers corresponded to how the consonants or consonant combinations sounded. As a result, the changes documented in Grimm's law formed a pattern that allowed linguists to explain why words in Germanic languages, including English, sound the way they do.
Background
Germanic languages refer to a group of languages with similar roots that all developed in the areas around the North and Baltic Seas. They include German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Frisian, Yiddish, Afrikaans, and English. The Germanic languages are part of a larger family of languages known as the Indo-European languages.
These languages are known as cognates, or languages that come from the same root. It is believed that they come from another as of yet unknown prehistoric language. This proto-Germanic, or "precursor to Germanic" language, was spoken by people who were living in parts of Sweden and Denmark about four to five thousand years ago. They moved into Europe and were named Germans by their Roman neighbors. Eventually they spread throughout various regions in Europe. One group settled in Scandinavia; they were known as the North Germanic people. The Eastern Germanic group settled in what became parts of the Czech Republic and Poland; the version of Germanic they spoke has become extinct. The final group, the Western Germanic, were located in part of the Czech Republic and Germany. The Western Germanic people gave rise to the languages that became German and English.
Over time, these languages were influenced by encounters with people who spoke other languages; these encounters occurred because of invasion, exploration, or other means. This changed some things about the Germanic languages by adding words and altering how other words were pronounced. For example, some areas were highly influenced by the Latin spoken by the Romans as they moved throughout Europe expanding their empire, while the Angles and Saxons who made their presence felt in England between 400 and 600 CE had a significant influence on what became the English language.
Despite these changes, linguists—those who study languages—noticed that there were similarities in how some consonants and consonant combinations were pronounced. They found that these pronunciations could be consistently linked to the way certain consonants and combinations were pronounced in Indo-European languages that preceded the Germanic languages. For example, in the Indo-European language Sanskrit, bhratar is the word for "brother." The /bh/ sound in Sanskrit translates to /b/ in the Germanic languages, including English.
In the early 1800s, several individuals identified a number of patterns of sound shifts such as this between the Indo-European languages and the Germanic languages. The first to do so were German poet and literary critic Friedrich von Schlegel and Danish linguist Rasmus Kristian Rask. The two identified the sound shift in 1806 and 1818, respectively. However, credit for identifying the sound shift generally goes to the man for whom the law was named, Jacob Grimm.
Grimm was a German linguist and half of the Brothers Grimm. Along with his younger brother, Wilhelm, Grimm gathered folk tales and rewrote them into many of the world's best-known fairy tales, including the stories of Rapunzel, Snow White, and Cinderella. In addition, the brothers wrote many articles and other informative pieces about folklore and language. This was especially true of Jacob, who put his detailed theory about the sound shifts in writing in 1822 in his German grammar text. For this reason, the theory regarding the sound shift is known as Grimm's law.
Overview
Consonants are vocalized in certain specific ways that use different parts of the mouth, various breaths of air, and altered paths air can take during the vocalization. These include sounds called "stops" and known for which part of the mouth forms them; labial stops use the lips, dental stops involve the teeth, and velar stops use the back of the tongue close to the soft part of the roof of the mouth. Fricatives are consonants that are formed by narrowing the pathway air can take out of the mouth; for instance, forming the lips and teeth as in pronouncing /v/ while affricatives are combinations of stops and a fricative, such as the sounds formed in English when pronouncing /ch/.
What early linguists noticed is that when sounds pronounced in the Indo-European languages were translated into the Germanic languages, they all changed in the same way. For instance, the /p/ as pronounced in pitar, an Indo-European Sanskrit word, became /f/, as in "father" in English and the equivalent word in other Germanic languages. By studying the various patterns identified in Grimm's law, linguists were able to determine that these changes occurred gradually. A Second Germanic Sound Shift was later identified; it is called Verner's law after Danish linguist Karl Verner, who explained what appeared to be some inconsistencies in Grimm's law and proved that those situations did indeed follow the law as laid out by Grimm.
The significance of Grimm's law is that it showed that the sound changes that had been observed between Indo-European and Germanic languages were a regular and documentable process and not the result of random influences. This helped to identify the connections between these languages. It also helped to provide a framework for linguists to study the development of the Germanic languages.
Bibliography
"Death of Jacob Grimm." New York Times, 9 Oct. 1863, www.nytimes.com/1863/10/09/news/obituary-death-of-jacob-grimm.html. Accessed 26 June 2017.
"Germanic Languages." University of Texas at Arlington, www.uta.edu/english/tim/courses/4301f98/oct5.html. Accessed 26 June 2017.
"Grimm Scholarship: The First Sound Shift." Carson-Newman University, web.cn.edu/kwheeler/IE‗Main5‗Grimm.html. Accessed 26 June 2017.
"Grimm's Law and Verner's Law." Concordia College, faculty.cord.edu/sprunger/e315/grimm.htm. Accessed 26 June 2017.
Gupta, Sanjiv. "What Is Grimm's Law?" Times of India, 30 Mar. 2008, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/What-is-Grimms-Law/articleshow/2910635.cms. Accessed 26 June 2017.
Shay, Scott. The History of English. Wardja P, 2008.
"Some Cognates Illustrating Grimm's Law and the High German Sound Shift." Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/courses/lx310/handouts/handouts-09/ringe/grimm-shrt.pdf. Accessed 26 June 2017.
"The Sound Changes Which Distinguish Germanic from Indo-European." California State University at Northside, www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW2/engl400/gmcsoundchanges.pdf. Accessed 26 June 2017.