| Old English | Middle English | Renaissance English | Grimm's Law | ||
| Grimm’s Law
Fortunately,
since modern English includes many words borrowed from Indo-European languages
which are not Germanic, the effects of Grimm’s law can frequently
be seen in pairs of modern English words which have different histories,
but which can be traced back to the same Proto-Indo-European ancestor.
Thus, an "English" word like ‘foot’ (and by "English"
I mean a ModE word which comes from OE) is related to a "Latin"
word like ‘pedal’ (where the ‘-al’ is a familiar
Latinate suffix) through Grimm’s law. (In the following discussion
of Grimm’s law, all changes in vowels will simply be ignored. Many
vowel changes occurred within the Germanic languages and within English;
the Great Vowel Shift--discussed below--is only one of the more recent
and extensive of these changes.) Specifically,
Grimm’s law affected the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) stops according
to the following scheme: |
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Germanic
f,  , x p, t, k b, d, g |
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| This is, of course, of relatively little use to us in this class, since there are no surviving PIE texts and no borrowings into English directly from PIE (which had pretty much ceased to be a language at all by the time Grimm’s law was finished happening, or even earlier). But we can note that other consonant shifts applied in other Indo-European languages like Latin and Greek: | ||
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Latin
p, t, c b, d, g f (or b), f (or b, or d), h |
Greek
p, t, k b, d, g f, ,
x |
| We
can, of course, combine these two tables into one, showing the correspondences
between Germanic languages and Latin and Greek: |
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Latin
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Greek p, t, k b, d, g f, ,
x |
These, then, are the "Grimm’s law correspondences" between these three descendants of Proto-Indo-European. Looking only at Modern English words, however, will allow us to come to pretty much the same conclusion as this anyway, as I hope to show below.
2. "Discovering" Grimm’s law.
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ped-al
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Of course, many other words could be listed here, though these will give us a good start. Looking only at spelling, we might note the following correspondences. |
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[Note that I have left out certain correspondences here, such as d-t in hundred and centennial. Likewise: note the r-r and n-n (and m-n) correspondences which are both quite regular here and important, but not part of Grimm’s law.] Unfortunately,
spelling is only part of the story here, because in these words, similar
spellings sometimes represent different pronunciations: ‘c’
stands for both [k] and [s]; ‘th’ stands for both voiced and
voiceless interdental fricatives; ‘gh’ is entirely unpronounced,
as is one example of ‘k’. Nevertheless, a quick look at a
dictionary which includes etymological information will show that all
of the left hand words come from OE, while all of the words in the right
hand column descend from Latin or Greek roots. We might take this data,
then and put it, too, into the form of a chart: |
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Latin Root
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Greek Root
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Of course, I’ve stacked the deck here: you might note that the form of this chart allows us to easily compare it to the "Grimm’s law correspondences" chart above. Indeed, if we hypothesize that the inconsistencies in our pronunciations of some of these letters are fairly recent, then we can conclude that at an earlier stage of English, all of the ‘g’s (and ‘gh’) were pronounced similarly; the ‘c’s and ‘k’s and ‘th’s likewise.
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As a final comment on Grimm's Law and the influence it has on Contemporary English, consider the following diagram, which indicated the major strands of influence from the Latin and Greek language families. Many pairs (and possibly even triplets) of words in Contemporary English can be traced back to the same Indo-European roots through differing lines of descent, and this fact can explain the Grimm's Law pairs discussed here.
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