Grimms Law

Adam Knott, 2006

In the 17th century three Swiss brothers called Grimm wrote famous fairy tales, particularly the boy called Jacob. He invented sound changes to account for how Latin had evolved into English, German, and other Romance languages. He observed in particular how certain shapes shifted from p to f, d to ts, sc into sh, and from t to st. A piscis, for example, in Latin is called a fish by the Romans, but in English is it also called a fish, and it is called the same thing in German only with a capital letter, and also in Dutch, except there it is vis, while the French spell it posioon. Grimm wanted to account for this, which is why he wrote. His is the most famous account of p and f, and he was the first to observe these letters. He called it the First Consonant Shift, because the consonants played musical chairs, one moving in to the position just vacated by f. This was important later. Grimms account was wrong. This was proved by another German, called Heinz Werner. Werner said that Grimm couldnt explain why it was that p did not shift into the position vacated by f, particularly when f had been preceded by a syllable that was stress-free. It is difficult these days to see why Werner argued the way he did, since the syllables are no longer there. But he was right. p does not always move into the f position. This was important later. For Grimm to work at all it was necessary for languages to have stress on the first word. This is called the Law of Initials, and meant that language were all lefthanded. In fact the exceptions to Grimm came about because some words were righthanded, and therefore Grimm couldnt work. Later this was so important that two Laws were named after Grimm, Grimms Law and Werners Law. Grimms Law helps to explain why English is different from all the other languages in the Romance family, and also why it is similar. Grimm in fact has a good claim to be the first phrenologist, although Jones of India also discovered the same things, only independently. Jones, and not Grimm, invented Indo-European, which is where Grimms Law came from, although it is only relevant to the early stages of Germanic. We can still see traces of Grimm in early Northumbria, which is where writing was invented in English after it had been invented in Ireland. But these traces had been lost by the time English got written down. Irish writers, though, were monks, which is also why so much of Grimm has been obscured. This became very important later.