1500: Grimm's Law Intro (g.l.1) Jan 20, 2019

This is the 1,500th Word Facts blogpost! Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback.

Jacob Grimm is perhaps best known for his work with Grimm's Fairy Tales, but he also was a linguist, still renowned today. In 1854 he put out the most comprehensive German Dictionary to this day, and he also discovered what is now know as Grimm's Law. This phenomenon began with the observation that many stop consonants in languages like Latin and Greek would become fricatives in Germanic languages, such as 'penna' (Latin) and 'pteron' (Greek) that are 'feather' and 'Feder' in English and German respectively. This expanded the way linguists looked at language families and language development generally, and the academic and social consequences of this will be looked at through the rest of this week.

As decided in a vote on Patreon.com/wordfacts, posts over this next week will be on the topic of Grimm's Law. Please consider supporting Word Facts yourself, either through Patreon, or even just sharing these posts and youtube videos.