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Grimm Scholarship: The First Sound Shift One of the first major puzzles 18th and 19th century scholars faced with proto-Indo-European was explaining certain sound shifts. The shift between Latin pater ("father") and Spanish padre is fairly clear to see in Romance languages--basically the /t/ has changed to a /d/. That's a fairly small step linguistically. Both /t/ and /d/ are alveolar stops, so they are basically the same sound. The only difference is that /d/ is voiced (i.e., the vocal cords vibrate) and /t/ is unvoiced (i.e., the vocal cords don't vibrate). However, a great number of words in Indo-European languages have what at first looked like inexplicable shifts with no perceivable simple pattern--especially those in the Germanic branches. How could a single source word develop into both the Old English faeder ("father") and the Latin pater? The letters /f/ and /p/ aren't closely related at all in pronunciation--since /p/ is a bilabial stop and requires lip articulation rather than a spirant or fricative like /f/. It was quite the brain-boggle for many decades. Luckily, a scholar of fairy-tales came in to save the day and rescue the puzzled philologists. The unlikely savior was the folklorist Jakob Grimm. He, along with his brother Wilhelm, studied märchen, or fairy tales. You probably have heard of Grimms' Fairy Tales or the Brothers Grimm. This Jakob Grimm fellow is the same scholar who collected them--along with his brother. The Grimm brothers were multilingual (scholars had to be to collect folklore from all over Europe in the 19th century), and they had an excellent background in philology. Jakob Grimm saw a pattern in the consonant shifts. Along with a Danish contemporary named Rask, Grimm came up with a theory in 1822 to account for correspondences between consonants found in Germanic languages with different consonants found in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. This rule is called Grimm's Law: Here it is in all its tripartite philological glory:
The idea is that initial
sounds such as /t/, /p/,
and /k/ in most Indo-European
languages (and the initial letters <f>,
<th>, and <k>
in Germanic Indo-European languages) originally came from now-vanished
aspirated vocal stops such as /bh/,
/dh/, and
/gh/, which
we no longer use much in modern languages, but which must
have
appeared in proto-Indo-European. In these examples, the <h>
after each initial letter represents a puff of air or aspiration
blown out after the consonant. While it is linguistically
unlikely
for a /p/ to change into an /f/
under normal conditions, it is fairly easy for a /bh/
to change into either a /f/ or
a /p/, and so on. This would easily
explain certain disparities and simultaneously give us a fairly
good idea of how certain words were pronounced in the lost
language of proto-Indo-European.
Let us now test-drive Grimm's Law. Here are some examples that illustrate his rule about /f/ and /p/ as cognates. In the column for proto-Indo-European, the initial asterisk indicates a hypothetical reconstruction, and a hyphen at the end indicates the word is the stem only--in normal use it would have a declension attached on the end to indicate its part of speech.
Here are some examples that illustrate Grimm's rule about /t/ and /th/ as cognates.
Here are some examples that illustrate his rule about /k/ and /h/ as cognates.
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