Grimm's law

Grimm's law (also known as the Germanic Sound Shift; German: "Erste Deutsche (Germanische) Lautverschiebung") was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered; its formulation was a turning-point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of rigorous methodology in historical linguistic research. The "law" was discovered by Friedrich von Schegel in 1806 and Rasmus Christian Rask in 1818. These rules were later elaborated on (i.e. extended to include High German) in 1822 by Jakob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm in his book 'Deutsche Grammatik'. Some scholars use the term Rask's-Grimm's rule. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives (see: Consonant) and the stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As formulated nowadays, Grimm's Law describes the development of inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family). It consists of three parts (the presentation below is simplified for the sake of clarity):

Related Topics:
Sound change - Friedrich von Schegel - 1806 - Rasmus Christian Rask - 1818 - Jakob Grimm - Brothers Grimm - Germanic - Stop - Fricative - Consonant - Indo-European languages - Latin - Greek - Proto-Indo-European - Proto-Germanic

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• Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives:

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::Note 1: *þ stands for "th" as in thick, *x for Scots "ch" as in loch)

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::Note 2: Here, and in the other parts of Grimm's Law, the place of articulation remains roughly the same, so that a labial stop (*p) becomes a labial fricative (*f), etc.

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• Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless:

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• Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lose their aspiration and change into plain voiced stops:

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For example:

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There are some subtle complications, ignored here (e.g. voiceless stops are exempted from the change if preceded by *s). They were either accounted for by Grimm himself or patiently sorted out by later scholars. The most recalcitrant set of apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law, which defied linguists for a few decades, eventually received a brilliant explanation from the Danish linguist Karl Verner (see the article on Verner's law for details).

Related Topics:
Karl Verner - Verner's law

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The Germanic "sound laws", combined with regular changes reconstructed for other Indo-European languages, allow one to define the expected sound correspondences between different branches of the family.

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For example, Germanic (word-initial) *b- corresponds regularly to Latin *f-, Greek ph-, Sanskrit bh-, Slavic, Baltic or Celtic b-, etc., while Germanic *f- corresponds to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Slavic and Baltic p- and to zero (no initial consonant) in Celtic. The former set goes back to PIE *bh- (faithfully reflected in Sanskrit and modified in various ways elsewhere), and the latter set to PIE *p- (shifted in Germanic, lost in Celtic, preserved in the other groups mentioned here).

Related Topics:
Sanskrit - Slavic - Baltic - Celtic

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