Overview
Grimm's law
Quick Reference
A proposition about various shifts that occurred in the pronunciation of plosive consonants between the Proto-Indo-European language and the various Indo-European languages, including English, that are descended from it, based on a set of nine correspondences observed between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek on the one hand and the Germanic languages such as English on the other, including the change from [p] to [f] as in Latin pater becoming English father and the change from [t] to [θ] as in Latin tres becoming English three. The other correspondences are [k] to [x] (the final phoneme in the Scots loch), [b] to [p], [d] to [t], [g] to [k], [bh] (aspirated, that is, accompanied by a brief [h]-sound) to [b], [dh] to [d], and [gh] to [g]. See also Grassmann's law (linguistics). [Named after the German philologist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863) who formulated it in 1822]
From: Grimm's law in A Dictionary of Psychology »
