Grimm

Grimm, JAKOB LUDWIG KARL, the founder of scientific German philology, and one of the noblest of ancient or modern scholars, was born January 4, 1785, at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. He studied law at Marburg, and learnt scientific method from Savigny, at whose invitation he spent the greater part of the year 1805 in study at Paris. On his return he was appointed to a clerkship in the war-office, and in 1808, private librarian to Jerome Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, who also made him auditor to the council of state. His brother Wilhelm had also by this time settled at Cassel. The first fruit of his studies was the treatise Ueber den Altdeutschen Meistersang (1811), which was followed in 1812 by the first volume of the famous Kinder- und Hausmärchen, collected by the two brothers—a work which has carried their name over the civilised world in the happiest and most enduring kind of immortality, and has formed a foundation for the new science of comparative Folklore (q.v.). Nor has a contribution to storiology since been made equal in importance to the earliest. The second volume followed in 1814; the third, containing the notes, in 1822. In 1813 Grimm was secretary to the ambassador of the Elector of Hesse, whom he attended at Paris, and at the Congress of Vienna. In 1815 he was sent to Paris to claim the books carried off by the French. His brother Wilhelm had already received a post in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jakob became second librarian under Völkel, on whose death in 1828, the two brothers being disappointed of the first and second places in the library, removed to Göttingen, where Jakob became professor and librarian, and Wilhelm under-librarian. Here for seven years he studied the language, ancient laws, history, and literature of Germany, but never made an effective lecturer. He was one of the famous seven professors who protested in 1837 against the abolition of the constitution by the king of Hanover, for which act he was dismissed, together with his brother, and obliged to retire to Cassel. In 1840 they were both invited to Berlin, where they received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Here Jakob continued his studies with the most single-minded devotion, producing a series of works still unsurpassed for their stupendous erudition. Working up to the last with a devotion undivided by wife or children, he died 20th September 1863.

His Deutsche Grammatik (1819; 2d ed. entirely recast, Gött. 1822-40) is perhaps the greatest philological work of the age, and may be said to have laid the foundation of the historical investigation of language. It traces the German language historically through all its dialects. His Deutsche Rechts-Alterthümer (1828; 2d ed. 1854) and Deutsche Mythologie (1835; 3d ed. 1854; 4th ed. by Meyer, 1875-78; Eng. trans. by J. S. Stallybrass, 4 vols. 1879-88) are works of exhaustive erudition upon the society of the middle ages in central Europe, and the religious traditions and superstitions of the Teutonic races from the earliest times. Only less important is his Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache (1848; 3d ed. 1868), and his Reinhart Fuchs (1834). In company with his brother Wilhelm he published many editions of old German classics, Deutsche Sagen (1816-18; 2d ed. 1865-66); and projected and commenced the great and still unfinished Deutsches Wörterbuch (vol. i. 1854; three-fourths finished by 1897, with the collaboration of Heyne, Hildebrand, Lexer, and Weigand). The first volume of Grimm's Kleinere Schriften (8 vols. 1867-86) contains an autobiography which reveals a character entirely free from jealousy or envy, full of warm human sympathy, and combining in an almost unexampled degree a noble simplicity of life with lofty elevation of purpose. Many collections of his letters have been printed. See the studies by Scherer (2d ed. 1884), Berndt (1884), and those devoted to the two brothers by A. Duncker (1884) and Schönbach (1885).

GRIMM'S LAW is the name given to the rule which regulates the Lautverschiebung, or permutation of certain primitive consonants, which takes place in the Teutonic languages. The law, as finally formulated by Jakob Grimm, is that if the same roots or words exist in Sanskrit, Greek, and generally in Latin, Celtic, Lettic, and Slavonic, and also in Gothic, English, Dutch, and other Low German dialects on the one hand, and in Old High German on the other, the following correspondences are to be expected: (1) Gothic has a soft mute, and High German a hard mute, in place of the corresponding aspirate in Sanskrit and Greek; (2) Gothic has a hard mute, and High German an aspirate, in place of the corresponding soft mute in Sanskrit and Greek; (3) Gothic has an aspirate, and High German a soft mute, in place of the corresponding hard mute in Sanskrit and Greek. Thus, a primitive th becomes d in Low German, and t in High German, as in the words thugatēr, daughter, tochter. A primitive d becomes t in Low German, and z in High German, as in duo, two, zwei; or dens, tooth, zahn; or decem, ten, zehn. A primitive t becomes th in Low German, and d in High German, as in tres, three, drei; or tu, thon, du; or tenuis, thin, dünn. Similar changes affect the labials and gutturals, as in pecus, fec, vieh; pater, father, vater; fagus, beech, puocha; and in oculus, eghe ('eye'), auge; quis, who, wer; or khortos, garden, korto. The normal changes are set forth in the following table:

The credit of the discovery of the Lautverschiebung is not wholly due to Jakob Grimm. Thre and Rask had discovered, as early as 1818, the law of the transmutation of consonants in Greek and Gothic, while Grimm, in the second edition of his Deutsche Grammatik, which appeared in 1822, added the corresponding changes in Old High German, and formulated the Law as it now stands.

Grimm's Law may be interfered with by the action of other laws, especially by the position of the accent, as formulated in Verner's Law (q.v.). Thus frāter is accented on the first syllable and patēr on the second, consequently, though we have brother and father in English, we find bruder and vater in High German. The accent in patēr has interfered with the regular action of the Lautverschiebung, and prevented the normal change of t to d from taking place.

Thus Grimm's Law may be defined as the statement of certain phonetic facts which happen invariably unless they are interfered with by other facts. The great use of Grimm's Law, in addition to the identification of words in different languages, is in the detection of loan words. Any etymology which violates Grimm's Law, as qualified by other phonetic laws, must be rejected unless it can be explained as a loan word.

The causes which brought about the changes formulated in Grimm's Law are obscure. They are probably due to the settlement of Low German conquerors in central and southern Germany.

See Douse's Grimm's Law: a Study of Lautverschiebung (1876); Max Müller's Lectures on the Study of Language, 2d series, lecture v. (1864); Morris' Historical Outlines of English Accidence, chap. ii. (1872).