Grimm’s Law( 101)

 

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Grimm’s Law( 101)

Grimm's law was the first discovery of a systematic sound change, and it led to the creation of historical phonology as a separate discipline of historical linguistics. The correspondence between Latin p and Germanic f was first noted by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806. In 1818, Rasmus Rask extended the correspondences to other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, and to the full range of consonants involved. In 1822, Jacob Grimm put forth the rule in his book Deutsche Grammatik and extended it to include standard German. He noticed that there were many words which had different consonants from what his law predicted, and these exceptions defied linguists for several decades, until they eventually received explanation from Danish linguist Karl Verner in the form of Verner's law.

Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:

1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).

This chain shift (in the order 3,2,1) can be abstractly represented as:

• bʰ → b → p → f
• dʰ → d → t → θ
• gʰ → g → k → x
• gʷʰ → gʷ → kʷ → xʷ

Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value. Note that within Proto-Germanic, the sounds denoted by ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ and ⟨gw⟩ were stops in some environments and fricatives in others, so bʰ → b should be understood here as bʰ → b/β, and likewise for the others. The voiceless fricatives are customarily spelled ⟨f⟩, ⟨þ⟩, ⟨h⟩ and ⟨hw⟩ in the context of Germanic.

The exact details of the shift are unknown, and it may have progressed in a variety of ways before arriving at the final situation. The three stages listed above show the progression of a "pull chain", in which each change leaves a "gap" in the phonological system that "pulls" other phonemes into it to fill the gap. But it is also conceivable that the shift happened as a “push chain”, where the changes happened in reverse order, with each change "pushing" the next forward to avoid merging the phonemes.

The steps could also have occurred somewhat differently. Another possible sequence of events could have been:

1. Voiceless stops are allophonically aspirated under most conditions.
2. Voiced stops become unaspirated voiceless stops.
3. All aspirated stops become fricatives.

This sequence would lead to the same end result. This variety of Grimm's law is often suggested in the context of the glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European, which is followed by a minority of linguists. This theoretical framework assumes that "voiced stops" in PIE were actually voiceless to begin with, so that the second phase did not actually exist as such, or was not actually devoicing but a loss of some other articulatory feature such as glottalization or ejectiveness. This alternative sequence also accounts for the phonetics of Verner's law (see below), which are easier to explain within the glottalic theory framework when Grimm's law is formulated in this manner. Additionally, a change from aspirated stops to fricatives is known to have happened in the transition between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Italic, so represents a plausible potential change from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.

 

By Manoj Sir