Linguistics and the Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm are best-known for their collection of traditional folk fairytales, which includes Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, and Sleeping Beauty. But Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were also serious scientists who made major contributions to the linguistic study of the history of languages.

The Brothers Grimm

In 1783, an English judge named Sir William Jones was appointed by the Crown to be a Supreme Court Justice in Bengal, part of the British colony of India. In arguments before the Court, the Indian lawyers often made citations to Hindu law, which was written in Sanskrit. And so, to fully consider and evaluate these arguments, Judge Jones decided that he had to learn the Sanskrit language for himself.

Jones was already something of a polyglot with an interest in linguistics. He had learned native Welsh along with English while he was a child. As a young man, he learned ancient Persian, translated many medieval works into English, and had written a scholarly grammar book on the language. Later, he also learned Latin, classical Greek, and ancient Gothic German.

After a few years of study in Sanskrit, he began to notice something peculiar: many of the basic words in Sanskrit were similar in form to the same words in all of the other languages that he was familiar with. This was contrary to all accepted ideas of the time: the Europeans and Hindu Indians were thought to be completely separate cultures, with little or no contact for thousands of years. Yet, it appeared to Jones, different languages found as far away from each other in space and time as Celtic Welsh, Gothic German, classical Greek and modern English, seemed to share a similar vocabulary.

After some thought, Jones could only reach one conclusion, which he passed on by letter to the Asiatic Society in 1786: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” In other words, there had once been a single ancient language, now no longer spoken and today unknown, from which all of these later languages had developed and separated over time.

This hypothetical “mother tongue” came to be referred to as “Proto-Indo-European”, or “PIE”, and the idea that modern languages were the product of a long process of change and differentiation from a once-common source became one of the organizing principles of the science of linguistics. Today, there are at least twelve recognized language branches which have been demonstrated to have their roots in PIE, which includes the Celtic branch with modern Welsh and Gaelic; the Indo-Iranian branch with modern Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, Sindhi, Punjabi and Kurdish; the Baltic/Slavic branch with Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Bulgarian; the Italic branch with Latin and all its European descendents such as French and Spanish; the Germanic branch with German, Swedish, Dutch, Frisian, and English (though historically English received a large mixture of Old French through the Norman invasion in 1066); and even some now-extinct languages like Hittite, Anatolian, and Phrygian. And similar “mother tongues” have been found for modern language families in the Americas, Africa and East Asia. There is even some indication that all of these super-families have a single common root as well, perhaps in the very ancient “click” languages of southern Africa.

In Germany, meanwhile, after Jones’s observation, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who had been trained as lawyers but who both worked as librarians, became particularly interested in the development of modern German from Proto-Indo-European. Around 1806, they began to systematically study the problem by comparing the phonetic roots of German words. To do this, they needed to compile a comprehensive list of German words spanning as far back in time as they could, and they decided that the best source for this were the traditional folklores and stories told by the rural peasants around their home town of Kassell, which had been passed down orally for generations. So in 1806 the brothers began systematically collecting and writing down as many “fairytales” as they could find.

At first, the Grimm Brothers regarded these collections as simply a source material for their linguistic studies, but by 1812 they recognized the cultural and historical value of these stories, and decided to preserve them by publishing the entire collection. Originally there was just one volume of stories: this quickly grew to two volumes, eventually reaching over 200 stories. The Brothers Grimm Fairytales remain in print today, making them one of the best-selling works ever published. (But the stories one finds today are not the same as the originals—the tales have, in a process that probably would have fascinated the two linguists, been altered, censored, and modified numerous times to reflect all of the different cultures around the world that they have found themselves in contact with.)

The Grimms’ linguistic study also led them to publish the first comprehensive dictionary of the German language, in 1854.

But their most important contribution to the science of linguistics came in a book written by Jacob Grimm in 1822, titled German Grammar. Previously, several scholars, including Friedrich von Schlegel and Rasmus Christian Rask, had noted that whenever Latin and German shared the same word, the letters seemed to differ in a consistent way: the Latin letter “p” tended to be replaced in German by an “f”. Rask also noticed that this same substitution tended to happen in other languages like Sanskrit and Greek, and that certain other consonants also tended to be replaced over time with another in a remarkably consistent way—among others, “d” tends to get replaced by “t”, and “g” is replaced by “k” or “h”.

In 1822, Jacob Grimm spelled out what is now known as “Grimm’s Law” which explained how and why this shift happened. In the technical language of linguistics, Grimm’s Law is stated as: “Over time, in particular language branches, Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives, Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops, and Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives.” In simpler terms, this means that consonants tended to change over time according to the position of the tongue and the breathing pattern used to pronounce them, and certain consonants tended to change into other consonants in a stable and predictable pattern (usually one which allowed words to be pronounced more quickly with less movement of the tongue).

For example, the words for “foot” are very similar in all the descendents of PIE: classical Greek “podos”, Latin “pedis”, Sanskrit “pada”, Russian “pod”, and Lithuanian “peda”. But in some branches, in accordance with Grimm’s Law, the “p” changes to “f”, and the “d” changes to “t”, and we get Gothic “fotus”, Icelandic “fotur”, German “foos”, Swedish “fot”, and English “foot”.

But the regular changes which occur under Grimm’s law have a more useful effect: the process can also be reversed by modern linguists to extract the sounds of the original Proto-Indo-European word. In other words, once we know the rules under which the sounds of various consonants change over time, we can compare the modern words, undo those changes, and arrive at a reconstructed approximation of the actual PIE word, now long-extinct, from which it was ultimately derived. Using this method, today’s linguists have extracted almost 2,000 different pieces of ancient Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, mostly centering around such basic things as “parts of the body”, “numbers”, and “family relationships”. (The reconstructed PIE word for “foot”, for instance, is “peds”, while the ancient word for “dog” is “un” and the PIE word for “honey” is “medu”.)

Of course in practice the process is much more complicated, and it encounters difficulties along the way caused by the adoption of parts of one language structure and vocabulary by neighboring people, through trade or conquest or alliance. But even by 1868 enough of the original PIE language had been extracted to allow an enterprising linguist to compose a short story, titled “Owis Ekwoses Kwe” (“The Sheep and the Horses”) written entirely in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. Remarkably, we now know a great deal about a language that existed thousands of years ago, was never written down, and is spoken today by nobody at all.

And all this is based on the work of the men who brought us “Cinderella”.