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by wickedwillie on January 24th, 2005

wickedwillie

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What is "Grimm's Law"?

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  • by Too Much Time On My Hands on April 26th, 2005

    Too Much Time On My Hands

    Grimm's Law (yes, formulated by one of the Grimm Brothers!) is a systematic explanation of how certain consonant sounds evolved in Germanic languages (including English). It accounts for some of the major differences between Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages. For example, English "foot" and German "fuss" have an "f" whereas French "pied" and Spanish "pie" have a "p". Grimm's Law involves several steps, which I'll try to explain in more detail but without using too many technical linguistic terms:

    Attempts to reconstruct the original Indo-European language suggest that it had 9 "stop consonants" (a linguistic term referring to how airflow through our mouth is controlled to produce these consonants). Those 9 are: b, d, g (the hard "g" of "gas"), p, t, k, and bh, dh, gh. The last 3 are sounds that don't exist in English, so don't worry too much about them. Note that I'm using these letters to represent sounds; there are no written records of these languages. In the transition from Indo-European to proto-Germanic (or whatever you want to call the parent of all the modern Germanic languages), the following changes occurred in this order:

    1. "bh" became a sort of "b fricative" that we don't have in English (a "b" where you prolong the sound with continuous vocal chord vibration and airflow through your mouth)," "dh" became the "th" of "there," and "gh" became a sort of "g fricative" (there's one in Arabic, but not English... too bad I can't demonstrate sounds over the Internet!)
    2. "p" became "f," "t" became the "th" of "thin," and "k" became the sort of "ch" sound that you hear in German or when Scots pronounce the name of Loch Ness.
    3. "b" became "p," "d" became "t," and "g" became "k"
    4. Remember those crazy sounds from step 1? Well, the "b" fricative became a regular "b," the "th" became a "d" and the "g fricative" became a regular hard "g".

    In between steps 2 and 3, a later discovery called Verner's Law can be added to explain some words that at first glance didn't obey Grimm's Law. But that's too complicated for now; it involves knowing which syllables are accented, among other things.

    This can be very difficult to conceptualize, although I swear it's easier than it comes off in this explanation. If you're really interested and you're more of a visual learner, go to http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~eng101/workbook/indo-euro/grimm-player/index.html and look at the demonstration. This is the college class where I learned about Grimm's Law in the first place, but I wrote out the long explanation here just in case the link stops working at a time when this course isn't being offered.

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