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Grimm's Law: Jacob Grimm
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Grimm's law (... known as the [First] Germanic Sound Shift) was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered; its formulation was a turning-point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of rigorous methodology in historical linguistic research. The "law" was discovered about 1820 by Jacob Grimm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives (see: Consonant) and the stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration). As formulated nowadays, Grimm's Law describes the development of inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family). It consists of three parts (the presentation below is simplified for the sake of clarity):
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In their reconstruction of the ancestral Indo-European language, the early linguists relied heavily on Grimm's law of Lautverschiebung (" sound shift"), which postulated that sets of consonants displace one another over time in predictable and regular fashion. The law was posed in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, who is more widely famed for the anthology of fairy tales he wrote with his brother, Wilhelm. Grimm's law explained, among other things, why in the Germanic languages certain hard consonants had persisted despite their universal tendency to yield to soft ones. The set of softer "voiced" consonants "b," "d," "g" (followed by momentary vibration of the vocal cords), posited in the protolanguage, had apparently given way to the corresponding hard set "p," "t," "k." According to Grimm's law, this had come about by "devoicing" those consonants ("p," for example, is unaccompanied by vocal vibration). Thus, the Sanskrit char is seen as an archaic form of the English "draw," which is itself more archaic than the German tragen (all of which mean "to pull").
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The Grimm's made major contributions in many fields, notably in the studies of heroic myth and the ancient religion and law. They worked very close, even after Wilhelm married in 1825. Jacob remained unmarried. Wilhelm died in Berlin on December 16, 1859 and Jacob four years later on September 20, 1863. He had just finished writing the dictionary definition for Frucht.
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"Jacob Grimm, one of the co-authors of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is ... well-known for discovering Grimm's law - a linguistic theory explaining how consonant sounds relate between different languages with Indo-European roots. Thus, the Latin word Pisces becomes fish in English; Latin p corresponds to English f. Similarly the Latin word flor, in addition to giving us the word flower, corresponds to the English word blossom, Latin f relating to English b. Obviously this does not work for all words, but is helpful in deducing a word origin.
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Jacob Grimm