Jacob Grimm

person · earth

German philologist (1785–1863), known outside linguistics for the collection of folk tales made with his brother Wilhelm and inside it for the Deutsche Grammatik, the first systematic historical grammar of the Germanic languages. In its second edition of 1822 he set out the consonant correspondences now called Grimm's Law as an ordered shift in which whole series of sounds move together. The distinction between what Grimm did and what Rasmus Rask had already done is instructive about how a discipline forms. Rask had established essentially the same correspondences in work published in 1818, and Grimm credited him. What Grimm added was the framing: presenting the changes as a connected system rather than a list turned an observation into something that could be violated, and therefore into something that could be tested. Grimm himself did not hold that sound change was exceptionless — that doctrine came half a century later, after Verner had shown that the most conspicuous exceptions to Grimm's own law were regular after all.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.