Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift

Assembled from 27 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The set of consonant changes that separates the Germanic languages from the rest of Indo-European, and the first sound change ever stated as a system rather than a list. Inherited voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives — p, t, k to f, th, h; inherited voiced stops became voiceless — b, d, g to p, t, k; and the inherited breathy-voiced series became plain voiced stops. Its effects are visible in any pair of English and Latin words descended from the same root: Latin pater against English father, Latin decem against English ten, Latin cornu against English horn, Latin genus against English kin. The shift was described by the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask before Jacob Grimm, in work Grimm himself acknowledged; the law carries Grimm's name because his 1822 formulation in the Deutsche Grammatik presented it as a connected chain in which each series moved into the position vacated by another. That framing is what made it a law rather than a collection — it implied that changes were structured, and therefore that they could be predicted and violated.
3. Knowledge
4. The regularity of sound change
5. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
6. Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
7. Jacob Grimm
8. Connections
9. Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
10. Jacob Grimm
11. The regularity of sound change
12. Rask publishes the Germanic consonant correspondences
13. Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
14. Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
15. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
16. Sanskrit
17. Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
18. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
19. Rask publishes the Germanic consonant correspondences
20. Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
21. The comparative method
22. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
23. Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
24. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
25. Evidence
26. Supports the attribution to Grimm of the systematic, series-based statement of the first Germanic consonant shift. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No section or page of the Grammatik is cited, and the example word-pairs given in this pack are drawn from the standard textbook presentation rather than from Grimm's text.
27. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.