Grimm's Law/ Verner's Law/Great Vowel Shift

 Characteristics of Indo-European Languages

Though we have no direct, first hand knowledge about Indo-European, some general characteristics can be attributed to it, based on the traces of this parent language, embedded in the various daughter languages, descended from it. Thus, it is believed that it had a limited vocabulary, but the language structure was in no way simple but rather complicated. Simplicity and directness of expression are the index of development and ancient languages are often more complex and complicated than their descendants of the present day.

Characteristics of Germanic Languages

Of the eight language groups which descended from the Indo-European family, the most important for the students of English is Proto/Primitive Germanic (also known as Teutonic), since English has descended from this branch. The eight language groups,  developed their own peculiar features, retaining the common features they shared with the languages of the IE family. The following are some of the special features developed by the Germanic group of languages, which help us to group them together.

  1. Germanic languages inherited the inflectional system of the Indo-European, though they were not as highly inflected as the parent language.
  2. Proto-Germanic had only five cases, while Indo-European had eight. The five cases are nominative, accusative, dative, possessive, and instrumental.
  3. In Proto-Germanic, there was no one-to-one correspondence between the grammatical gender and the natural gender and each noun had to be described in terms of masculine, feminine and neuter gender.
  4. In PG, verbs had only two tense forms, the past and the present.
  5. While PIE was pitch based, PG languages were stress based.
Grimm's Law


The Germanic branch, as it diverged from its parent language and developed, underwent a number of changes in pronunciation. The first important change is what is known as the Primitive Germanic Consonant Shift or the First Sound Shift or Grimm's Law. It refers to the changes which the Indo-Germanic plosive consonants underwent during the Primitive Germanic period ie., before the Germanic parent language became differentiated into separate Germanic languages. At the beginning of the 19th century, a few eminent German philologists like Rask and Jakob Grimm observed that while the Italic group kept the IE consonant system, the Germanic group changed it in a regular and systematic manner which becomes evident if a number of Latin of Sanskrit (representing IE) words are placed alongside their equivalents in English (Germanic). These changes were first formulated by Jakob Grimm in his Deutsche Grammatik (1822) and this law came to be known after him as Grimm's Law.

  1.  p > f
Latin            Sanskrit            Old English            Modern English           

pater               pita                     faeder                       father      

     2.  t > ð (dh)

Latin            Sanskrit            Old English            Modern English  

frater            bhrata                 bro(?)or                  brother

     3.  k > h

Latin            Old English            Modern English

cordem         heorte                         heart

Another change was the voiced plosives b, d, g became p, k respectively.

     1.  b > p

Old Bulgarian     slabu (slack) OE sl(?)pan   (to sleep)

Latin                    labium                    OE lippa   (lip)       

     2.  d > t

Latin            Old English            Modern English

decum            tien                          ten

     3.  g > k

Latin            Old English            Modern English

ager                  aecer                        acre

In addition to these, the aspirated bh, dh, gh became unaspirated b, d, g.

     1.  bh > b

Sanskrit     bhrata    > OE bro(?)or     (brother)

     2. dh > d

 Sanskrit            Modern English

madhya                  middle

     3.  gh > g

 Sanskrit     (g) hamsa      goose

These changes can be represented as follows:

Aspirated            Unaspirated     Voiceless     Voiceless

Voied stops         Voiced stops     stops           fricatives

bh     >     b     >     p     >     f

dh     >     d     >     t     >     ð(dh)

gh     >     g     >     k     >     h

Grimm's Law is important for the comparative study of languages, for deriving the etymology of words, and to differentiate the Germanic branch from the other branches of the Indo-European.

Verner's Law



After Grimm had formulated the law regarding the change of certain IE consonants, it was noticed that this law did not account for all the changes in question. For eg. 'centum' in Latin and 'hundred' in English, /k/ becomes /h/ according to Grimm's law but /t/ doesn't become /ð/. but /d/. these exceptions of Grimm's  law were later explained by a Danish philologist Karl Verner in 1875, and this law is known as Verner's law. According to Verner, accent played an important role in these changes. Verner's law states that the voiceless fricatives/f, ð, h/ medially and /s/ finally and medially became voiced to /b,d,g/ and /z/ respectively, when the principal accent did not rest upon the immediately preceding syllable. Thus, the /t/ in 'centum, instead of becoming /ð/ became the voiced /d/ beacuse he preceding syllable was unaccented.

ð > d, s> r, h> g

Great Vowel Shift



It is the series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language, beginning in South England in 1350's. Middle English vowels changed their pronunciation. English spelling became standardized only in 15th and 16th C. These changes were introduced by Otto Jespersen a Danish Linguist and he coined the term Great Vowel Shift. The change in pronunciation of the long vowels from Middle English to Modern English is known as Great Vowel Shift.

eg: bite /i:/ - /ai/

meet /e:/ - /3:/

mate /a:/ - /ei/

boot /o:/ -  /u:/

boat /ɔ:/ - /ou/


Prepared by:

Dr. Susan Mathew

Dept. English

     




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