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Concept
Grimm's law
Summary
Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First discovered by Rasmus Rask but systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm, it establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages.
Grimm's law was the first discovered systematic sound change, creating historical phonology as a separate historical linguistics discipline. Friedrich von Schlegel first noted the correspondence between Latin p and Germanic f in 1806. In 1818, Rasmus Rask extended the correspondences to other Indo-European languages like Sanskrit and Greek, and to the full range of consonants involved. In 1822, Jacob Grimm put forth the rule in his book Deutsche Grammatik and extended it to include standard German. He noticed many words had consonants different from what his law predicted. These exceptions defied linguists for several decades, until they eventually received explanation from Danish linguist Karl Verner in the form of Verner's law.
Grimm's law consists of three parts, forming consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift. The phases are usually constructed as follows:
Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).
This chain shift (in the order 3,2,1) can be abstractly represented as:
→ → →
→ → →
→ → →
→ → →
Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value. Within Proto-Germanic, the sounds denoted by , , and were stops in some environments and fricatives in others, so → indicates → , and likewise for the others. The voiceless fricatives are customarily spelled , , and in the context of Germanic.
The exact details of the shift are unknown, and it may have progressed in a variety of ways before arriving at the final situation.
Official source
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