1501: Sound Shifts over Time (g.l.2) Jan 21, 2019

As mentioned yesterday in the first of the in the Grimm’s Law series, Jacob Grimm noticed a pattern of related terms across Indo-European languages wherein certain vowels could shift over time, in predicable ways. Some of the most important pattern found:
1) [b] → [p] → [f]
2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin')
3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German)

These trends helped to show the way in which older Indo-European have shifted over time, certainly from ancient languages to more modern ones, but the two major shifts in German sounds, as not only will a different dialects separate from each other and become new languages over time, but even a language on its own will eventually become unrecognizable to itself. For this reason, while the examples yesterday compared Latin to German, this also helps to show how English and German have split from each other over time, such as the English ‘penny’ and the German ‘Pfennig’.

Over the rest of this week, there will be posts about how this helps to date languages, trace proto languages, as well as track how languages change from each other generally, and much more, so make to follow to stay tuned, and support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts.