Grimm's law

Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift or the Rask's-Grimm's rule) named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As it is presently formulated, Grimm's Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift [cite book |last=Campbell |first=Lyle |title=Historical linguistics | edition=2nd ed. |publisher=MIT Press |location=Cambridge |year=2004 |isbn=0262532670 |pages=49] :

#Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
#Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
#Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced fricatives; ultimately, in most Germanic languages these voiced fricatives become voiced stops.

The voiced aspirated stops may have first become voiced fricatives before hardening to the voiced unaspirated stops "b", "d", and "g" under certain conditions, however some linguists dispute this. See Proto-Germanic phonology.

Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered in linguistics; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historical linguistic research. The "law" was discovered by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806 and Rasmus Christian Rask in 1818, and later elaborated (i.e. extended to include standard German) in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, in his book "Deutsche Grammatik".

In detail

Further changes following Grimm's Law, as well as sound changes in other Indo-European languages, can sometimes obscure its effects. The most illustrative examples are used here.The most recalcitrant set of apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law, which defied linguists for a few decades, eventually received explanation from the Danish linguist Karl Verner (see the article on Verner's law for details).

Correspondences to PIE

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. For example, Germanic (word-initial) *b- corresponds regularly to Latin *f-, Greek "Unicode|pʰ-", Sanskrit "Unicode|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 *Unicode|bʰ- (faithfully reflected in Sanskrit and modified in various ways elsewhere), and the latter set to PIE *p- (shifted in Germanic, lost in Celtic, but preserved in the other groups mentioned here).

ee also

* Verner's law
* High German consonant shift
* Glottalic theory
* The Tuscan gorgia, a similar evolution differentiating the Tuscan dialects from Standard Italian.
* The Uralic Hungarian language was also affected by a similar process, leading to a high frequency of "f" and "h", and can be compared to Finnish, which did not change this way.

References