Talk:Grimm's law

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There appears to be a discrepancy over who the older Grimm brother was. See 'Jacob Grimm' and 'Grimm's law' to see the situation

Contents 1 A Grammar of Modern Indo-European 2 Pull or Push? 3 Gw 4 gʰ or gɦ? 5 Greek transliteration 6 /x/ 7 "hvað" 8 Russian for 'foot' 9 Peg/ Baculum? 10 Simplifying the table 11 When did this occur? 12 Dating Grimm's Law 12.1 Notes 12.2 Comments 13 Comprehensability of the table - adjusting the column order. 14 Norwegian "hva" *kʷ→hw 15 "Gaelic" 16 Source(s) for Tocharian Cognates 17 Hidden cognates 18 Question. 19 CHaracter set ?

[edit] A Grammar of Modern Indo-European

The text is practically the same as the one you can find in A Grammar of Modern Indo-European (v.3.30), pages 43-45. You can check the book here. They do mention the Wikipedia as one of their resources in the bibliography at the end of the book. But I don't know what came first. --62.57.230.59 (talk) 13:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pull or Push?

The article presents the change of proto-Indo-European voiceless stops into voiceless fricatives as the event which "pushed" the whole system in that direction. Isn't there another, more popular theory according to which the loss of aspiration in voiced aspirated stops "pulled" the system? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Staseman (talk • contribs) 04:02, 20 April 2006

Can you cite a source and explain how that might have worked? Oh, and please get yourself a username if you want to take part in discussion. --Doric Loon 14:54, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

An username is not required or obliged to take part in any discussion Doric. Sander 17:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

No, but it helps. It's a courtesy. --Doric Loon 23:33, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

To return to the beginning question, it is rarely possible, after the fact, to tell whether a shift was pushed or pulled. As the shift is actually going on, it is (theoretically) possible to clock variation and frequencies, and/or note that (say) voiceless stops are getting more and more aspirated. Under most circumstances the issue has little interest (as is true of most "functional" so-called explanations of phonological change: they sound nifty in formulation, but in actual practice contribute little or nothing). Indeed, even the concept of phases adds little to the discussion. At most one might say, for instance, that the change of voiced stops to voiceless ones can't have gone to completion before the (original) voicless stops started to move. But Pre-Germanic could well have gone through a phase when some (shifted) voiceless stops still alternated with voiced ones (say, varying with register or age or whatever) while another set (the original voiceless ones) didn't alternate, with the fricativization coming along only later.

Put differently, we have some idea of what cannot have happened, but very little idea of what probably happened, beyond the fact of the three-way shift itself. Declaring that voiceless stops became fricatives first of all is to claim to know more than we do. Alsihler 22:10, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

How would a specific user name make his/her question more courteous? And how would it help understanding the question? Admonishing someone for transgressing a non-existent rule seems like needless antagonism and discourteous in itself.

[edit] Gw

Does *gʷʰ always become /w/, rather than /gw/? If so it should be removed from the table, as it doesn't exactly show Grimm's Law in action. --Ptcamn 00:04, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes and no. It only needs some clarification. The *w < *gʷh in all probability went through a *gʷ (or *γʷ) phase. An interplay between [w] and [gw] is commonplace in diachronic linguistics: PIE *gʷ > Latin /w/ as in Lat. veniō "come" < *gʷṃ-yō; on the other hand, PIE *w > Welsh /gw/, as in *wiros "man" > W gwr (not to mention all those Germanic borrowings in early Romance where *w is replaced by gw: *gwerra < war, etc.). And no, it doesn't always become *w: in *gʷhen- "strike dead" it becomes *b (Old English bana "murderer", etc.). In at least one pretty-good etymology it becomes *gw after a nasal: PIE *sengʷh- "phonate" (Greek omphḗ "voice" < *songʷhā) > PGmc. *singwanaⁿ "to sing", Gothic siggwan /singwan/.

—Frankly, the "wife" example is really, really weak. I've never seen a remotely convincing etymology for the Germanic forms: Kluge opts for *weyp- "hide, cover" (with elaborate discussion about why she might be veiled ... and neuter besides), which is also Pokorny's and Partidge's preference, though the latter mixes it up with *weyb- "vibrate"; the OED laconically says (correctly) "of obscure origin". As for the example in the article, I can find no mention of a root *gʷheybh-. And more to the point, there is an excellent etymology for the taking, viz., *gʷhor-mo- "hot, warm", PGmc *warmaz > OE wearm etc., etc. = Latin formus (not attested apart from Paulus-Festus, alas), Sanskrit gharma- "heat", etc. Alsihler 22:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

The University of Texas, Austin seems to believe it generally turned to *g in Germanic, They don't show any examples from *gwher in common English, but the Germanic words given have a modern derivation in German "gerben" (prepare leather). If *gwhen would cause Germanic *gunð, English has the modern derivation "gun", originally borrowed from Old Norse, for a type of large weapon. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 22:24, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] gʰ or gɦ?

Which is the correct transcription?

[edit] Greek transliteration

What transliteration scheme is it that renders πούς as pūs? I would think it would be pous. 24.159.255.29 00:49, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

No, ού is in fact transliterated as ū. Greeks already pronounced the diphthong that way in the Classical period of Greek, even though they always spelled it OU. That's the accepted transliteration, and it holds in modern linguistics. RokasT 11:36, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I BEG to differ! There seems to be a confusion here between transcription (phonemic or otherwise) and transliteration. A translteration is a system for rendering each character of the original in an unambiguous way in a different signary. It doesn't have to be one-to-one (θ = th etc. is kosher), but the more straightforward and consistent the transliteration the better. Now, regarding the case in hand, we know that the sequence ou in Greek eventually became /ū/, but it is historically the outcome both of the diphthong *ow and secondary lengthening of *o. Besides, if you're going to take it on yourself to interpret Greek ou as ū, then presumably you would also render ei sometimes as ē and sometimes as ey depending on which it stood for in the original. And what about "iota subscripts"? Pretend they aren't there (which in a way is what the standard Greek orthography means)? In any case, I'm unfamiliar with any school of historical linguistics that would treat Greek transliteration in such a way, so far from it being "accepted" as a standard transliteration. Alsihler 22:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Your prayers have been heard. --RokasT (talk) 11:37, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] /x/

Anyone think there should be a note somewhere that /k/ became /x/ before advancing to /h/? I'm inclined to think so, since it has implications for Verner's law. 24.159.255.29 01:05, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Of course it must have. In fact, we don't really know when it did become /h/: it might well have been [x] in Gothic, at least in some positions. And note that e.g. *hr in word-initial position becomes kr in Scandinavian languages, which implies (but does not prove) that in a word like *hringaz "ring" it was something more than an ordinary [h]. Alsihler 22:09, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "hvað"

I'm pretty sure that Icelandic "hvað" is not an example for the *kʷ→hw shift, since it's still pronounced with a /k/ (even though it's not written that way). I'll remove this. -- Schnee (cheeks clone)

A little learning is a dangerous thing. hvað is indeed the direct descendent of PGmc *hʷat-aⁿ (< *kʷod-ōm). It's probably not the best idea in any case to cite Icelandic, since Old Norse hvat does just as well (and isn't going to stir up irrelevant arguments about pronunciations that are 2,000 years too late).

In general, I find both that the etyma are poorly chosen (why trot out a contested and implausible set to demonstrate the reflexes of *gʷh when there are far clearer ones lying around?) and that the presentation the cognate forms as cited is questionable in detail. As hinted above, the Greek transliteration is unacceptable; forms of different meaning are sometimes glossed and sometimes not (Skt pāda is presented as meaning "foot", by implication; it does get that meaning, late, but earlier it meant "quarter", that is, "leg", of an animal), there are many small fluffs of detail (Latin "vivus" should have ī, and so on and on). I suppose someone (sigh, meaning me) should take the stuff in hand. I don't know how hard to be on the creator of the table, though the business about a root *gʷhíbh- (presumably a typo for gʷhībh-; and his or her discussion of it) has gone far to alienate my sympathies; whether or not the connection between the Germanic and Tocharian forms is valid, the other supposed cognates are both wrong (they reflect PIE *gʷenH₂- "woman") and are cited in a botched transliteration. Two of a trade never agree, and so on, and that goes double for historical linguists, but some things are out of place in what is supposed to be a rehearsal of basic principles. I'm working on a substantial revision. Alsihler 22:25, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Russian for 'foot'

Yesterday I commented in the Grimm's Law article that 'pod' is not the Russian for 'foot'. My comment had disappeared by this afternoon, without explanation. If Russian 'pod' is indeed considered cognate with English 'foot', Latin 'pes' etc., because of its meanings 'hearth', 'floor' and 'under', should not one of these meanings be stated in the article (perhaps in brackets immediately after the word) as justification? Levka 16:44, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Please read the summary of the revert: "Undid revision 108885647 by Levka (talk) This is talk page material, not article material" You do not make comments directly to article pages (unless they're commented out with: <!-- comment here -->. This is because articles are not the place for a discussion such as this. This talk page is the proper place for such discussion.

Addressing your real question, the words "Knight" and "Knecht" are both cognates of each other, yet mean fairly different things in both languages. We're not attempting to establish the similarity of meanings, but rather simply presenting a list of words that are cognates to those words. If you feel that the Russian entries are confusing, and misleading, and you know that the current meaning of the word, is different from the cognate that you're comparing it to, you can put it in parentheses: "Russian: pod (hearth, floor, under), ..." in order to remove that misleading nature. It is however not considered acceptable to attempt to discuss an issue directly on the article page. --Puellanivis 00:24, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, Puellanivis, for your patience with a newcomer to Wikipedia. Please accept my apologies for breaching the established etiquette – I should have studied it more carefully before leaping in!

I do of course realise that cognates will often have acquired quite divergent meanings over the centuries, which is precisely why I think it would be helpful occasionally to give meanings in parentheses, particularly when the majority of the words cited still share a basic meaning (e.g. "foot").

Finally, I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say in your reply above "...you can put it in parentheses...". Are you actually inviting me now to make this insertion in your article? If so, I will gladly do it.

Best wishes, Levka 15:41, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's not "my" article, it's our article. I am by no means an expert on Grimm's Law, so if you know something that I don't, it would be great to see you add it to the article.  :) --Puellanivis 16:22, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Peg/ Baculum?

According to Chambers' Dictionary of Etymology "peg" is borrowed from Middle Dutch "pegge" and is of uncertain origin after that. Deman7001 17:48, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

If no one else disapproves, I would like to change the words in the table. Perhaps this could be changed to English warp, virbas(it's either Sanskrit or Lithuanian I can't remember). I'm still looking for a most ideal example. I checked the German page and it has Pegel listed as cognate with baculum, but I don't think peg is cognate with Pegel or that Pegel is cognate with baculum either. I checked an German online Etymological dictionary and Pegel doesn't appear. Also, one would expect that if peg and Pegel were cognates that Pegel would have shifted to Fegel or Pfegel.Deman7001 02:32, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

No problem with your change if you like it better: warp is most closely related to German werfen (throw), and is cognate with Latin verber, whence English reverberate. You have to be careful with a /p/ in final position, because it can be a Germanic /b/ which has been subject to terminal devoicing; so initial or medial position are safer, but in this case it does seem to be a Germanic /p/ resulting from Grimm's law. But peg was also fine. Yes, it is borrowed from Dutch, but that is also a Germanic language and therefore does not affect its relevance. According to Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch, German Pegel IS cognate with peg. As you know, the High German consonant shift moved p > pf in initial position, so any High German word beginning with a non-affricated /p/ must be a loan word. In fact, Pegel is taken from Low German, which is very close to Dutch, so that tallies nicely. The trouble is, good examples of a Germanic /p/ are hard to find. The symmetry of Grimm's law demands that there must have been an original IE unaspirated /b/ which became /p/ in Germanic, but it seems to have been a very rare phoneme in PIE, and Calvert Watkin's dictionary, which I happen to have beside me, only knows seven IE roots beginning with it - all of which have some question mark or peculiarity attached to them. Some scholars have questioned whether IE had the phoneme at all. On balance, I think it probably did. But we will always be struggling to demonstrate it with examples as clear as the father/pater or thou/tu pairs. --Doric Loon 08:13, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Simplifying the table

Apparently people don't know what "The most illustrative examples are used here." means, adding things that are shifted by separate sound changes and so don't illustrate Grimm's law very well. I suggest we include only English on the Germanic side (English is conveniently conservative with respect to Grimm's law), and maybe Greek and/or Sanskrit on the unshifted side. Thoughts? --Ptcamn 08:25, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

And why on earth is φρατήρ commented out? --Ptcamn 08:28, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

The point is to only include "illustrative examples", "φ" would be pronounced as a voiceless labiodental fricative or an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive. To include cognates with other sound shifts than Germanic muddles things, and complicates the point. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 11:28, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] When did this occur?

Hi, when in pre-history did this sound-change occur? --Kjoonlee 23:53, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I am currently studying the 'Grimm's Law' at the university and in my textbook 'Klaus Weimann, Einführung ins Altenglische (Introduction into Old English), Heidelberg Wiesbaden, 1995' there is also /bh, dh, gh/ to /v, ?, j/. ? = the voiced form of th (Sorry, can't find the correct symbol, but I hope everybody understands what I mean). My point is therefore that the author was totally ignored this part of the Grimm's Law —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.171.237.35 (talk) 11:35, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dating Grimm's Law

I am currently working on several Germanic-related articles. My research has led me to compose a short passage relating to the dating of Grimm's law. It appears below with notes:

There is growing consensus among researchers that the First Sound Shift took place around 500 BCE.^[1] One argument used to substantiate this date observes that the Greek word for hemp (kánnabis) appears to have been borrowed into that and other Indo-European languages sometime around the 5th century BCE from a hitherto unidentified but purportedly non-Indo-European source in the form *kanab-. Based on the cognates of the word in attested Germanic daughter languages (Old English hænep, Old High German hanaf, Old Icelandic hampr) it is assumed that the Proto-Germanic form of the word was *hanapaz. According to this reconstruction, it would appear that the word entered the Proto-Germanic vocabulary prior to the First Sound Shift. Assuming that hemp became known in both regions at or around the same time, the First Sound Shift can thus be considered to have taken place no earlier than the 5th century BCE.^[2]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Comments

If someone would like to include this information here, I can post the full citations for the references. There is also an original argument offered by van Coetsem (1994) which involves extra-linguistic evidence (Celtic in particular), but I have not been able to locate an occurence of its being cited in other work. With that being said, I view van Coetsem's argument to be the stronger of the two. If interested, please contact me on my userpage. Aryaman (☼) 17:30, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comprehensability of the table - adjusting the column order.

Two suggestions for the tables:

1. Generally, we are trained to think in terms of time moving forward and represented as moving from left to right in diagrams or other representations on a page. The older becomes the newer, the earlier pronunciation changes into the more recent pronunciation.

With this in mind, I think the table would be more understandable, more intuitive, if the column order was changed. The columns would then also reflect the order in which the symbolic examples are given and the order in which the process actually took place.

Additionally, internal consistency within the table is easier to understand.

Note that column 1 states: *p→f But then the language examples reverse that order, citing the shifted examples before (to the left of) the non-shifted original state. So the example order conflicts with the rule's order.

To resolve both these issues, I think the column of older non-shifted forms should appear to the left of the column of the newer shifted forms.

2. Not as critical, but perhaps more logical in terms of process, would be to put the symbolic rule in the middle column. So, one would read a row like this:

Col 1 | Col 2 | Col 3

"the old state" | "underwent this change" | "to the new state."

Hlaufman (talk) 16:58, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Norwegian "hva" *kʷ→hw

Some dialectal Norwegian still uses *kʷ "kva" in speech instead of hw "hva". Don't know if it's relevant. /per —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.136.0.201 (talk) 10:45, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Gaelic"

What exactly is meant by "gaelic" in the Non-Germanic (unshifted) cognates column? It is not Irish\Gaelic, but the examples given are extremely close to it. Is it the common root of all the Goidelic languages? Bogger (talk) 15:55, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

These are the Scottish Gaelic forms. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:45, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Source(s) for Tocharian Cognates

Might I ask for sources for the Tocharian cognates of wife? I'll happily add this information to the entry once I come upon a good hard source. Dr. C.S. Lewis-Barrie, Ph.D. (talk) 18:23, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it's from Calvert Watkins' appendix of Indo-European Roots to the American Heritage Dictionary. Apparently, there are no other known cognates, and both the phonetic and semantic shifts seem to be unusual, so it seems wildly disputed. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 14:28, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Hidden cognates

I re-hid the less illustrative cognates once again. I know they are correct, but it would be confusing for a layman to see a bunch of examples shifted in (for a layman) haphazard ways. This shouldn't be a list to show all known cognates to words, but the most illustrative examples for explaining Grimm's law, in particular. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 15:30, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Question.

Why does it say that *b→p and then show English: warp; Swedish: värpa; Dutch: werpen; Icelandic, Faroese: varpa and shows the Latin version as verber. Should it not be v→w or something? 98.27.163.188 (talk) 01:14, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Aaahh, the v/w distinction isn't primarily phonetic, as much as ortographic. Apparently both Latin and Proto-Germanic is believed to have had one single v-sound /w/ (as in wait). The distinction here is between warp and verber, but the problem is that *b was such a rare phoneme in PIE, that it's difficult to find good examples. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 14:25, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] CHaracter set ?

Many of the characters in the table are appearing as filler symbols rather like a very fat lower-case "L". Is there some "proper" character set we are supposed to have loaded for these pages to display correctly? And how do we make certain our browser uses it in this instance?

Install Unicode, I think that should fix it. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 09:15, 1 May 2008 (UTC)