Latin pater and piscis against English father and fish; Latin pes against English foot
Voiceless p becoming f — the most quoted instance of the shift
General knowledge · Words & language
Grimm's law
Described 1818; named 1822
Historical linguistics — the first Germanic sound shift
The regular set of consonant changes that split the Germanic languages away from the rest of Indo-European, and the reason English has father where Latin has pater, and horn where Latin has cornu. Rasmus Rask described the pattern in Danish in 1818; Jacob Grimm, better known for the fairy tales he collected with his brother, set it out systematically in the second edition of his Deutsche Grammatik in 1822 and got his name attached to it. The apparent exceptions were cleared up by Karl Verner in 1876, and the whole episode became the founding demonstration that sound change is regular.
How to spot them
- ▸Latin p, t and k answering to English f, th and h
- ▸The Dane got there first; the German got the name
- ▸The law of 1876 that explains the leftovers by asking where the old accent fell
- ▸The first shift; a second, later one turned Low German appel into High German Apfel
Key facts
Latin cornu against English horn, and Latin genu against English knee
Voiceless k becoming h; the silent k of knee is a much later English development
First described in a Danish prize essay of 1818 on the origin of Old Norse (1818)
Rasmus Rask, whose priority is universally acknowledged even though the name is not his
Published in the second edition of the Deutsche Grammatik, by a man far better known for a book of fairy tales (1822)
Jacob Grimm, who with his brother Wilhelm published the Kinder- und Hausmärchen
Karl Verner rescued the exceptions in 1876 by showing that they turned on where the accent had stood in the parent language (1876)
Verner's law — it explains the alternation in was/were and seethe/sodden
It fails to operate after s, which is why spit, stand and skirt keep their hard consonants
A conditioning environment that blocks the change
The Leipzig school took its regularity as proof that sound laws admit no exceptions
The Neogrammarian slogan, Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze
Key ideas
- The change is a chain in three parts: voiceless stops p, t, k become the fricatives f, th, h; voiced b, d, g become voiceless p, t, k; and the voiced aspirates become plain voiced stops. Each set moves into the slot the set before it has just vacated.
- Because b was vanishingly rare in the parent language, English has very few native words beginning with p. Almost every p-word in English is a borrowing from Latin, French or Greek.
Quick-fire facts
- •Rasmus Rask described the correspondences in 1818, four years before Jacob Grimm's account
- •Grimm published it in the second edition of Deutsche Grammatik in 1822; the German term is Lautverschiebung
- •Proto-Indo-European voiceless p, t, k become Germanic f, th and h
- •Proto-Indo-European voiced b, d, g become Germanic p, t, k — hence Latin duo against English two, and Latin genus against English kin
- •The voiced aspirates bh, dh, gh become Germanic b, d, g — hence Latin frater against English brother
- •The shift is blocked after s and after another stop
- •Verner's law of 1876 explained the residue by the position of the original Proto-Indo-European pitch accent
- •Verner's law underlies the alternation of was and were, and of lose and forlorn — a change usually called rhotacism
- •The High German consonant shift, or second sound shift, is a separate and later change affecting only German
- •Jacob Grimm also began the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German counterpart of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was not completed until 1961
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Sources
- Lyle Campbell — Historical Linguistics: An Introduction
- David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language