Learning Celebrations

Richard Powell - Fall 2024 - Intro to Linguistics

Grimm’s Law

Grimm’s law was formulated by Jacob Grimm, more famous for his and his brother’s folklore collections, in 1822 to describe consonant shifts between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. It expanded on earlier observations by linguist Rasmus Rask.

Grimm’s Law describes three major shifts:

First, voiceless stops (p, t, k) became voiceless fricatives (f, θ, h), as in PIE pisk- (“fish”) becoming Old English fisc.
Second, voiced stops (b, d, g) became voiceless stops (p, t, k), as in PIE déḱm̥ (“ten”) becoming Old English tīen.
Lastly, voiced aspirated stops (bʰ, dʰ, gʰ) became voiced stops or fricatives (b, d, g), as in PIE bʰrāter (“brother”) becoming Old English brōþor.

Examples

The result of these changes is that English and other Germanic languages look and sound different than their cognates in non-Germanic languages. Here are some examples:

PIE Sound Change	Greek	Italian	Spanish	English	German
p > f	pódos	piede	pie	foot	Fuß
t > θ (th)	tría	tre	tres	three	drei*
k > h	kárdos	cuore	corazón	heart	Herz
d > t	déka	dieci	diez	ten	zehn
g > k	génos	genere	género	kin	Kind

*Note: German does not have a [θ] sound, but the Proto-Germanic word, “þrīz,” did.

Conditioned Change

Grimm’s law is a conditioned change, meaning that it does not happen universally but depends on the circumstances. For instance, When two consonants occured in a cluster, only the first was changed by grimm’s law. This can be seen in words like Ancient Greek ὀκτώ (oktō), English eight, and German acht. The [k] here becomes a [x] (and eventually, in English, is dropped altogether) while the [t] remains unchanged.

There are also instances that look like inconsistencies at first. This is because Verner’s Law further changed some voiceless fricatives into their voiced counterparts.

Grimm’s Law

Examples

Conditioned Change

Further Reading