Consonants

Speaking about Germanic consonants, we should first of all speak of the First Consonant Shift, or Grimm's law. That is a system of regular correspondences between Indo-European and Germanic languages which was presented by the German linguist Jacob Grimm in 1822.

One of the things that became obvious in the 19^th century was the recognition that some words from Germanic languages including English had certain sets of sounds, and these sounds correspond to words of similar meaning in the non-Germanic Indo-European languages. A word from one language and a word from another language both seemed to descend from a common root. Such related words are called cognates. Cognate words are words of shared origin and shared meaning, or shared semantic history.

E.g. English fish - Latin pisces

English tooth - Latin dentis (when you have a toothache you go to the dentist)

English hundred- Latin centum[kentum]

One of the things that you start to notice here is that certain sounds in English corresponds to certain sounds in Latin /p – f, d – t, k - h/.

This is the illustration of the set of sound relationships known as Grimm’s law. It was discovered by the Grimm brothers (Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm) who were great historians of language and folklorists, the same Grimm brothers who gave us the fairy tales, they were interested in both literary history and the linguistic history of the Germanic peoples; they developed the first major dictionary on historical principles – Grimm’s Dictionary – on which the Oxford English dictionary is modeled. They also developed the historical study of language in the early 19* century.

What is Grimm’s law? Grimm’s law is the relationships among sets of consonants in the Germanic languages and non-Germanic Indo-European languages. This is the core of Grimm’s law. This set of relationships helps us understand the way in which words from different modern European languages are related.

English fish - Latin pisces; foot – pedal; father - pater

English tooth - Latin dentis; English tree – Russian дерево

English hundred- Latin centum English heap - Russian кипа

In other words, these correspondences illustrate that the “f” sound in a Germanic language corresponds to a “p” sound in a non-Germanic Indo-European language. Or that non-Germanic “d” corresponds to Germanic “t”.

All these correspondences can be grouped in the following way:

Non-Germanic	Germanic	Examples	Type of Speech Sound
p	f	пять – five pisces – fish pedal– foot pater - father	voiceless plosive – voiceless fricative
t	th	три - three	- « - « - « -
k	h	кардио – heart кипа – heap centum - hundred	- « - « - « -
b	p	яблоко - apple	Voiced plosives – voiceless plosives
d	t	два – two dentis – tooth дерево – tree decade - ten	- « - « - « -
g	k	глина – clay genuflect - knee	- « - « - « -
bh	b	bhrator - brother	Voiced aspirated plosives – voiced non-aspirated plosives
dh	d	dhe - do	- « - « - « -
gh	g	ghu - good	- « - « - « -

The table shows a scheme of Grimm's law with the examples from Germanic and other Indo-European languages.

However, there are some cases where Grimm's law seems not to apply. These cases were explained by a Dutch linguist Karl Verner, and the seeming exceptions from Grimm's law have come to be known as Verner's law.

According to Verner’s law all the Proto-Germanic voiceless fricatives [f, θ, h] which arose under Grimm’s law, and also [s] inherited from I-E, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed. In the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless. The voicing occurred in early PG at the time when the stress was not yet fixed on the root-morpheme. The process of voicing is a step in a succession of consonant changes in prehistoric reconstructed forms. Let’s consider the changes of the second consonant in the word “father”:

PIE Early PG Late PG OE

pa`ter > fa`θar > fa`ðar > > `faðar > >> `fadar