 It's been over two months since my last video, but I've caught up on my schoolwork, dealt with my finals, and finally graduated high school. Now, I'm looking forward to heading off to college, but before that, I'm excited to be spending most of this summer doing what I love most, making videos for you guys. And what better way to kick off the summer than by covering one of the most important ideas in the history of linguistics, Grim's Law. If you watch my channel, odds are you're pretty into linguistics, so there's a good chance you've already heard of Grim's Law. All languages in the world go through sound changes, where gradually over time some sounds in that language change into others. And although linguists love listing and classifying and sorting all these different sound changes, Grim's Law is not only by far the most famous sound change ever described, but it's one of only a few with its own name. It describes one of the ways Proto-Germanic changed as it evolved from Proto-Indo-European, and at least in my mind, Grim's Law isn't just a sound change, it is THE sound change, a reputation which springs from the fact that Grim's Law is quite possibly the first major sound change ever described by modern linguistics. Grim's Law was discovered in the early 1800s, and linguistics at the time was a really, really new thing. I mean, yeah, there were ancient traditions of linguistics that went back a long way. Aristotle had spent no small amount of time describing ancient Greek phonology, and in India people had been studying linguistics for thousands of years, largely out of interest in preserving Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism. The modern scientific tradition of western linguistics, however, might be said to have begun in 1786 with Sir William Jones, and a speech he gave to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta. This was during the colonial era in India, and Sir William Jones was an Englishman who had been appointed to be a judge in Bengal. While he was in India, he became obsessed with Indian culture, and, being a well-educated Englishman who knew a fair amount of ancient Greek and Latin, started to notice similarities between these languages and the ancient Sanskrit that the Indians had preserved. So, in his 1786 speech, he proposed that the three languages were descended from a common ancestor, which we know today as Proto-Indo-European. Now, this wasn't the first time someone had noticed similarities between languages and proposed a common ancestor. Back when Latin and ancient Greek were still spoken, the Romans noticed that the two languages were pretty similar, and some thought Latin was descended from ancient Greek. Later, during the Middle Ages, the idea that every language in the world was originally descended from Hebrew was the norm. This comes from the idea that Hebrew was the original language, spoken by Adam and Noah, and that other languages only appeared when God caused them to diverge in the whole Tower of Babel story. However, it was Sir William Jones that started the trend in Europe of systematically comparing the vocabularies of different languages to try to figure out if they were related or not, and it was only a few decades later that Grimm's law was discovered. Now, because there are written records of ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit from way earlier than other languages, these languages had changed the least since they had branched off from their common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. So it was mostly from these three languages that linguists originally figured out what sounds Proto-Indo-European had to begin with. What linguists reconstructed was that PIE had 15 stop consonants. P-T-K-K-Q-B-D-G-G-Q-B-D-G-G-G-Q. If you can't tell the difference between the last two rows, don't worry. I'm not that good at distinguishing them, and we don't really have good equivalents in English. Just know that the third row is supposed to have a little puff of air after each sound. They also had some nasal consonants, some liquids, some semi-valls, probably just one fricative, probably some laryngeals, and of course it had a whole bunch of vowels, but they're not as interesting, so I'm not going to talk about them. Point is, all of these 15 stop consonants started merging with each other after all of the different branches of Proto-Indo-European started spilling off from each other. But in each branch, it happened in a slightly different way. In Sanskrit, they started pronouncing K-G-G-G without the W after them, merging them with the normal K-G-G. At the same time, the sounds with Y after them started being pronounced as a funky S sound, or as a J-J sound, or what I only know how to describe as a really, really weird H-H sound. Meanwhile, in ancient Greek, K-G-G merged with the normal K-G-G, while K-G-G merged with some other consonant depending on what vowel came after them. Also, the whole bottom row of breathy sounds with puffs of air changed from B-D-G to P-T-G. Again, the difference from the first row is only that they're more Finally, Latin merged its Y-ish sounds with its normal ones like Greek, but kept the W-ish ones. It also got rid of its bottom row by not making it breathy anymore, merging it with the second row. Now, as you can see, there is a lot of changing around of sounds, but for the most part, the sounds in the different languages tend to match up with each other, or at least to something really similar. Now, when you compare Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit words to Germanic words, you'll find a whole lot of cognates. You have Sanskrit Nama, Greek Onama, Latin Nomen, and English Name. Sanskrit Mom, Greek Emma, Latin May, and English Me. And Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Old English all had moose as their word for mouse. But at the same time, you have a lot of situations where the oldest three languages would have similar words for something, while the Germanic languages would have something completely different. Sanskrit Pitar, Greek Pater, Latin Pater, English Father. Sanskrit Traia, Greek Trace, Latin English Three. Sanskrit Pari, Greek Peri, Latin Per, English Far. For a couple of decades, as the idea of Proto-Indo-European started to catch on, no one could explain these words, and it stayed that way until Grimm's law was discovered by Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. Rask noticed that the Proto-Indo-European B, D, G, and G corresponded to the very much not breathy Proto-Germanic B, D, G, and G, while the Pi, B, D, G, and G corresponded to the Proto-Germanic P, T, K, and Q. And finally, that the Pi, P, T, K, and Q corresponded to a completely new set of sounds, F, F, H, and H. Later, the H and H sounds would become H and H in English. So, basically, the third row became the second row, the second row became the first row, and the first row became a completely new row. Also, the Kia sounds merged with the normal K sounds like in Latin and Greek. Now, I can already hear you screaming, but if Rasmus Rask discovered it, why is it called Grimm's law? Short answer, I'm not sure. Longer answer, the credit for discovering it often goes to a guy named Jacob Grimm. You probably know him as one of the two Grimm brothers, the guys who wrote Grimm's fairy tales, but he was also one of the earliest linguists of the modern era. By publishing his book, Deutsch Grammatik, he basically founded German linguistics. In this book, he talks about the sound shift, and this is often cited as the discovery of Grimm's law, even though Rasm came first. This sounds unfair, but from what I can tell, it isn't completely unjustified, because from what I gather, Rasm basically just made a big table of what consonants corresponded to what in modern languages, while Grimm was like, these groups of sounds turned into these groups of sounds in proto-Germanic. I wish I could present that with more certainty, but most of the sources I found were really vague about who said what, and I'd go read the originals, if it wasn't for the fact that they can only ever seem to find them in the original German. If any of you know German and feel like rummaging through these things, let me know if my assessment is accurate. Either way, there's actually a fair number of people, including myself, who think that Grimm's law should actually be called Rask's rule, although granted, I only believe this because alliteration is awesome. Now all of this is interesting academically, of course, at least I hope you think so if you've watched this much of the video, but I also think it's interesting because it's actually helped me a little bit with learning Spanish. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the US, so I think a lot of you will probably find this interesting. Notice how English has question words that start with wh, who, what, when, where, and why, while Spanish has qu or cu question words, quien, que, cuando, and cuántos. That's because in proto-Germanic, originally they started with cu sounds, but because of Grimm's law, they changed to wh, and later to wh. Grimm's law also explains house versus casa, lips versus lobbyos, foot versus pie, four versus por, cat versus gato. This sound change may have happened thousands of years ago, but you can still see its effects in the two most common languages in the US spoken today. Now the video's about to end, so this is usually the part where I mention my next video. Problem is, I actually have no idea what my next video's gonna be about. I have about a dozen different competing ideas, and the list is only growing, so catch me in a week or two for a video that will probably have something to do with the listings.