1506: Effects of Grimm's Law to Linguistics (g.l.7) Jan 26, 2019
Over this last week with the special series on Grimm's Law, it's definition, it's ramifications in linguistics and wider society, and its shortcomings, but it is still notable, not just as a precursor to Verner's Law, but as the start to historical phonology as a branch of historical linguistics. The basic explanation—that observations between the use of [p] in Latin and [f] in German suggests how languages naturally shift over time—albeit perhaps over simplified is straightforward enough, but these sorts of ideas which laid the groundwork for much of historical linguistics as it is used today. Theories that are now widely accepted as common knowledge today were either small-scale or fringe before the publication of Jacob Grimm's 'Deutsche Grammatik'. This is the final instalment in the Grimm's Law series, but make sure to follow for more content every day.
Watch more on Historical Linguistics here.
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1505: Verner's Law (g.l.6) Jan 25, 2019
According to Grimm's Law, plosive consonants, particularly as the onset of a word first first become stops, and then become fricatives, like:
b^w -> p -> f
but looking to modern Germanic languages, this is not always true. There is one major exception, wherein looking at counterparts in Latin, Greek, and or Sanskrit, the Germanic equivalent was a b, d or g, which only changes voicing but does not become a fricative as expected. Karl Verner, however, posited that this would relate to other features he outlines, including word-initial stressing. This addition was a very important one, but it relied on the assumption that any sound-law would have to be without exception, which is a matter of theory in some regards as well.
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1504: Greater Impact Grimm's Law (g.l.5) Jan 24, 2019
Over the last few days this blog has talked about the linguistic aspects of Grimm's Law, and while these may seem minor, at the time even to a non-linguistic community this was earth-shattering. While the notion of the Indo-European language family was posited as early as 1786, some of the most conclusive evidence came with Grimm's Law. This suggested that there was once a common language, culture, and genealogy to most of the peoples across Europe, and some of the Middle East and India, which, in an age of legalized racism and colonialism did not sit well with many people. However, as discussed in the post about the term 'aryan', this idea was quickly adopted by both sides of any extreme view on the issue.
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1503: Push or Pull Chains (g.l.4) Jan 23, 2019
No one is quite sure about why sound shift like those described in Grimm's Law took place. What this means, however, is not that people are looking for social and cultural factors as to why this happened, because language doesn't necessarily change from those sorts of influences. Instead, looking at the chains like:
1) [b] → [p] → [f]
2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin')
3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German)
it is a matter of figuring out whether the newer forms changed first and other sounds had to replace the gap, or whether it was the other way around, and some sounds had to change in order to differentiate words that now sounded the same. It is largely thought to be the former, but ultimately both sides can be argued for.
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1502: Tracing Languages Systematically (g.l.3) Jan 22, 2019
The idea of comparing an older form of a language with the more modern one, it’s possible to get a sense for what sounds and other features change and what stays the same, but this is only useful for specific examples. However, with the acceptance of Grimm's Law, it became possible to systematically estimate language change over time. People could make educated guesses as to how, if there were certain ways that languages would tend to split systematically, then linguists could predict the earlier steps and create a proto-language. This was how Proto-Germanic was recreated, but also even more ambitious theories, like the recreation of Proto-Indo-European. These same principles were used in the creation and acceptance of fairly robust proto-languages from all over the world.
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.
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.