Grimm's law was the first discovered systematic sound change, creating historical phonology as a 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, such as 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 that many words had consonants different from what his law predicted. These exceptions defied linguists for several decades, until Danish linguist Karl Verner explained them in Verner's law.
Overview
Grimm's law consists of three parts, forming consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:
Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become Proto-Germanic voiceless stops.
Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become Proto-Germanic voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).
This chain shift (in the order 3, 2, 1) can be abstractly represented as:
bʰ → b → p → ɸ
dʰ → d → t → θ
gʰ → g → k → x
gʷʰ → gʷ → kʷ → xʷ
Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value. Within Proto-Germanic, the sounds denoted by ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ and ⟨gw⟩ were stops in some environments and fricatives in others, so bʰ → b indicates bʰ → b/β, and likewise for the others. The voiceless fricatives are customarily spelled ⟨f⟩, ⟨þ⟩, ⟨h⟩ and ⟨hw⟩ 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. The three stages listed above show the progression of a "pull chain", in which each change leaves a "gap" in the phonological system that "pulls" other phonemes into it to fill the gap. Alternatively, the shift may have occurred as a “push chain”, where the sounds changed in reverse order, with each change "pushing" the next forward to avoid merging the phonemes.
The steps could also have occurred somewhat differently. Another possible sequence of events could have been:
Voiceless stops are allophonically aspirated under most conditions.
Voiced stops become unaspirated voiceless stops.
All aspirated stops become fricatives.
This sequence would lead to the same result. This variety of Grimm's law is often suggested in the context of Proto-Indo-European glottalic theory, which is followed by a minority of linguists. This theoretical framework assumes that PIE "voiced stops" were actually voiceless to begin with, so that the second phase did not actually exist as such, or was not actually devoicing but was losing some other articulatory feature like glottalization or ejectiveness. This alternative sequence also accounts for Verner's law phonetics (see below), which are easier to explain within the glottalic theory framework when Grimm's law is formulated in this manner. Additionally, aspirated stops are known to have changed to fricatives when transiting between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Italic, so representing a plausible potential change from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.
Further changes
Once the sounds described by Grimm's law had changed, only one type of voiced consonant was left, with no distinction between voiced stops and voiced fricatives. They eventually became stops at the start of a word (for the most part), as well as after a nasal consonant, but fricatives elsewhere. Whether they were plosives or fricatives at first is therefore not clear. The voiced aspirated stops may have first become voiced fricatives, before becoming stops under certain conditions. But they may also have become stops at first, then become fricatives in most positions later.
Around the same time as the Grimm's law sounds shifted, another change occurred known as Verner's law. Verner's law caused the voiceless fricatives that resulted from the Grimm's law changes to become voiced under certain conditions, creating apparent exceptions to the rule. For example:
Proto-Indo-European *bʰréh₂tēr ("brother") > Proto-Germanic *brōþēr (Old English broþor, Old High German bruothar/bruodar)
Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr ("father") > Proto-Germanic *faðēr (Old English fæder, Old High German fatar)
Here, the same sound *t appears as *þ/θ/ in one word (following Grimm's law), but as *d/ð/ in another (apparently violating Grimm's law). See the Verner's law article for a more detailed explanation of this discrepancy.
The early Germanic *gw that had arisen from Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰ (and from *kʷ through Verner's law) further changed with various sorts:
After *n it was preserved as a labiovelar stop *gw, but later changed to a plain velar *g in West Germanic.
Following vowels, it seems to have become *w, presumably through a fricative stage *ɣʷ.
Word-initially, the most plausible reflex is labiovelar stop *gʷ at first, but the further development is unclear. In that position, it became either *w, *g or *b during late Proto-Germanic.
The regular reflex next to *u would likely have been *g, due to the labial element before a labial vowel being lost in Proto-Indo-European, which continued to act as a surface filter. (See boukólos rule)
Perhaps the usual reflex was *b (as suggested by the connection of bid < *bidjaną and Old Irish guidid), but *w appears in certain cases (possibly through dissimilation when another labial consonant followed?) like warm and wife (provided that the proposed explanations are correct). Proto-Germanic *hw voiced by Verner's law fell together with this sound and developed identically, compare the words for 'she-wolf': from Middle High German wülbe[citation needed] and Old Norse ylgr, one can reconstruct Proto-Germanic nominative singular *wulbī, genitive singular *wulgijōz, from earlier *wulgwī, *wulgwijōz.[2][failed verification]
Examples
Further changes following Grimm's law, as well as sound changes in other Indo-European languages, can occasionally obscure the law's effects. The most illustrative examples are used here.
Sanskrit: bhrātṛ, Ancient Greek: φρατήρ (phrātēr) ("member of a brotherhood"), Latin: frāter, Russian, Serbo-Croatian: брат (brat), Lithuanian: brolis, Polish: brat, Old Church Slavonic: братръ (bratr'), Old Welsh: braut, Latvian: brālis, Persian: برادر (barádar)
This process appears strikingly regular. Each phase involves one single change which applies equally to the labials (p, b, bʰ, f) and their equivalent dentals (t, d, dʰ, þ), velars (k, g, gʰ, h) and rounded velars (kʷ, gʷ, gʷʰ, hʷ). The first phase left the phoneme repertoire of the language without voiceless stops, the second phase filled this gap, but created a new one, and so on until the chain had run its course.
Behaviour in consonant clusters
When two obstruents occurred in a pair, the first was changed according to Grimm's law, if possible, while the second was not. If either of the two was voiceless, the whole cluster was devoiced, and the first obstruent also lost its labialisation, if it was present.
Most examples of this occurred with obstruents preceded by *s (resulting in *sp, *st, *sk, *skʷ), or obstruents followed by *t (giving *ft, *ss, *ht, *ht) or *s (giving *fs, *ss, *hs, *hs). The latter change was frequent in suffixes, and became a phonotactic restriction known as the Germanic spirant law. This rule remained productive throughout the Proto-Germanic period. The cluster *tt became *ss (as in many Indo-European daughter languages), but this was often restored analogically to *st later on.
Icelandic nótt[nouht] comes from Old Norse nǫ́tt, nátt, from Proto-Germanic *naht-. The Germanic *ht regularly becomes Old Norse tt, and this then becomes preaspirated in Icelandic. Thus, the [h] of the modern Icelandic form is not Germanic /h/'s direct descendant.[3] The same ancestry holds for Icelandic átta's /tt/ as well.[4]
Correspondences to PIE
The Germanic "sound laws", combined with regular changes reconstructed for other Indo-European languages, allow one to define the expected sound correspondences between different branches of the family. For example, Germanic (word-initial) *b- corresponds regularly to Latin *f-, Greek pʰ-, Sanskritbʰ-, Slavic, Baltic or Celticb-, etc., while Germanic *f- corresponds to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Slavic and Baltic p- and to zero (no initial consonant) in Celtic. The former set goes back to PIE *bʰ- (faithfully reflected in Sanskrit and modified in various ways elsewhere), and the latter set to PIE *p- (shifted in Germanic, lost in Celtic, but preserved in the other groups mentioned here).
One of the more conspicuous present surface correspondences is the English digraphwh and the corresponding Latin and Romance digraph qu, notably found in interrogative words (wh-words) such as the five Ws. These both come from kʷ. The present pronunciations have further changed, like many English varieties reducing the wh-cluster, though the spellings reflect the history more; see Interrogative word: Etymology for details.
The UralicHungarian language was also affected by a similar process, leading to a high frequency of f and h, and can be compared to Finnish, which did not change this way.
Armenian, another Indo-European language, has experienced a similar evolution.
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ. The law was formulated by Karl Verner, and first published in 1877.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
A labialized velar or labiovelar is a velar consonant that is labialized, with a -like secondary articulation. Examples are, which are pronounced like a, with rounded lips, such as the labialized voiceless velar plosive and labialized voiced velar plosive, obstruents being common among the sounds that undergo labialization.
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them “weaker” in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening". Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically. Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation, or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
In historical linguistics, the German term grammatischer Wechsel refers to the effects of Verner's law when they are viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.
The Germanic spirant law, or Primärberührung, is a specific historical instance in linguistics of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of Germanic languages.
As the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) broke up, its sound system diverged as well, as evidenced in various sound laws associated with the daughter Indo-European languages. Especially notable is the palatalization that produced the satem languages, along with the associated ruki sound law. Other notable changes include:
Proto-Indo-Iranian, also called Proto-Indo-Iranic or Proto-Aryan, is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are often connected with the Sintashta culture of the Eurasian Steppe and the early Andronovo archaeological horizon.
In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop. Although not as typical of sound change as lenition, fortition may occur in prominent positions, such as at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable; as an effect of reducing markedness; or due to morphological leveling.
The pronunciation of the digraph ⟨wh⟩ in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced, the same as a plain initial ⟨w⟩, although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation, generally realized as, a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical has become in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction.
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages. Because PIE was not written, linguists must rely on the evidence of its earliest attested descendants, such as Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, to reconstruct its phonology.
The roots of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) are basic parts of words to carry a lexical meaning, so-called morphemes. PIE roots usually have verbal meaning like "to eat" or "to run". Roots never occurred alone in the language. Complete inflected verbs, nouns, and adjectives were formed by adding further morphemes to a root and potentially changing the root's vowel in a process called ablaut.
Kluge's law is a controversial Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. It purports to explain the origin of the Proto-Germanic long consonants *kk, *tt, and *pp as originating in the assimilation of *n to a preceding voiced plosive consonant, under the condition that the *n was part of a suffix which was stressed in the ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The name "Kluge's law" was coined by Kauffmann (1887) and revived by Frederik Kortlandt (1991). As of 2006, this law has not been generally accepted by historical linguists.
Thurneysen's law is a proposed sound law concerning the alternation of voiced and voiceless fricatives in certain affixes in Gothic. It was first posited in 1896 and published in 1898 by Rudolf Thurneysen, a comparative linguist more famous for his work on the Celtic branch of Indo-European and in particular for his Handbuch des Altirischen.
This glossary gives a general overview of the various sound laws that have been formulated by linguists for the various Indo-European languages. A concise description is given for each rule; more details are given in their respective articles.
Adjarian's law is a sound law relating to the historical phonology of the Armenian language: in certain dialects, initial-syllable vowels are fronted after the consonants which reflect the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced aspirates. It was named after its discoverer, Hrachia Acharian, whose surname was also romanised in a Western Armenian form as Adjarian.
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