Grimm's law

Grimm's law describes regular changes by which Proto-Indo-European stop consonants became corresponding fricatives and stops in Proto-Germanic. It was a key early demonstration that sound change follows systematic patterns.

Proto-Indo-European phonology: The reconstructed sound system of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its stop consonants supplied the sounds that Grimm's law transformed.
Rasmus Rask: A Danish linguist who identified systematic consonant correspondences between Germanic and other Indo-European languages. His observations anticipated the sound correspondences later formulated as Grimm's law.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change over time and how they are historically related. Grimm's law is a classic account of change reconstructed from related languages.
Grassmann's law: A dissimilation rule in ancient Greek and Sanskrit that removes aspiration from one of two aspirated stops in a word. Unlike Grimm's law, it concerns dissimilation within a word rather than a branch-wide consonant shift.
Proto-Germanic: The reconstructed ancestor of the Germanic languages, spoken before their earliest written records. Grimm's law describes major consonant changes on the way to this language.
Jacob Grimm: A German philologist and folklorist who formulated a major account of Germanic consonant change. His 1822 account gave the law its familiar name.
Proto-language: A hypothetical ancestral language reconstructed by comparing related descendant languages. Proto-Indo-European consonants are inferred rather than directly attested.
Glottalic theory: A hypothesis that reconstructs Proto-Indo-European stops with ejective or glottalic features. It proposes a different original stop system behind the correspondences Grimm's law describes.
Verner's law: A sound-change rule explaining exceptions to Grimm's law through the position of Proto-Indo-European stress. It accounts for voicing patterns that Grimm's law alone cannot explain.
Deutsche Grammatik: Jacob Grimm's multivolume work on the grammar and history of Germanic languages. Its second edition presented the influential formulation of the consonant shift.

Linked from 25 pages