Earlier I was talking about the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this belief, which was in turn the catalyst for the existence of the discipline of historical linguistics, was the product of the work of two men, the first of whom was a German named Jakob Grimm (one of the Brothers Grimm who compiled the German folktales) in 1820.

Grimm, like others, recognized that the Germanic languages (among which are German, Dutch, Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, and English) share a common ancestor with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, based on a large number of vocabulary words whose phonetic similarities are too similar to be coincidental. Grimm’s important insight was that, in almost every word that appears to be related among Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, words that had the consonants p, t, or k in the non-Germanic languages showed up in Germanic with the consonants f, þ (the “th” in think) or χ (as in German Bach) instead. He also noted that Gk/Lat/Skt b, d, g generally corresponded with Gmc p, t, k. The Gk, Lat, and Skt consonants that we now know come from Indo-European *bh, *dh, *gh he saw as corresponding with Gmc b, d, g (simplified here from a close phonetic variant). All three correspondences make up what we now call Grimm’s Law: in other words, he saw a method to the madness and was able to accurately predict the sorts of sounds that made Germanic the odd man out where Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit agreed with one another. Here’s an example.

Skt. pitar, Lat. pater, and Gk. pater obviously correlate in some way with English father and German Vater (the “v” is pronounced like an f): so we have relationship between Gk/Lat/Skt p and the phonetically similar Gmc f, which was originally pronounced with both lips together. Likewise, Skt bhratar, which comes from Indo-European bh, shows up in Germanic in the English word brother; bh vs. b.

Grimm’s Law explains one way in which Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (most of all) better reflected the original Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pronunciation of the stops p, t, k, b, d, g, bh, dh, and gh. One of the defining markers of the Germanic subgroup was this sound change that turned all those original consonants above into f, þ, χ, p, t, k, b, d, and g respectively. In tabular format:

First series: PIE p, *t, *k > Gmc f, þ, χ Second series: PIE b, d, *g > Gmc p, t, k Third series: PIE bh, *dh, *gh > Gmc b, d, g

This sound law accounts for many, many consonant differences between Gmc and Indo-European, but not all. The voiceless stops p, t, and k occasionally did not show up as f, þ, and χ as expected from the first series, but as b, d, and g (the output of the third series)! It was not until 1875 that the Dane Karl Verner explained that all those exceptions to Grimm’s Law had their very own systematic explanation. The times when the PIE consonants did not undergo the expected sound change were cases in which 1) the consonant was not at the beginning of the word or 2) the vowel in the syllable immediately preceding the consonant carried the accent. This is now called Verner’s Law.

With the discovery that even the “exception” to the otherwise very regular (consistent) Grimm’s Law was itself regular, these early linguists were handed exciting evidence that sound change is carried out very regularly and systematically throughout the language, and hence can be reverse-engineered, “reconstructed” with a significant level of certainty that what is reconstructed will be accurate. Thus was the science of the comparative method born, and so the discipline of historical linguistics.

Is sound change truly exceptionless? Perhaps not, but no one ever really claimed it was: there are many cases in which the sound change for a few isolated words seems to have been reworked or replaced by other forms to make things seem uniform (the process called “analogy”). These exceptions are usually explainable on their own terms, and do not invalidate the sound change that took place on a broad scale for the vast majority of words; for instance, a particular word can be adopted from another language or dialect in which the sound change was absent or not as thorough-going. Nonetheless, instead of “exceptionlessness”, we now speak about the regularity of sound change that allows us to create sound laws that occasionally admit an exception here or there.

• In case anyone came down here to look for what the asterisks stood for, let me explain that unattested (reconstructed) sounds and words are marked by a preceding asterisk. Any word, root, or affix cited as being a PIE form should have an asterisk, since no one ever wrote anything down in PIE.

My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per se, but from analysis and comparison of the languages in which those historical records were composed. Philology (”love of words”) is an old term used to describe those who read literature for appreciation of the language. Naturally, most philologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were multilingual and well-read. It was this familiarity with multiple languages that led some to recognize similarities between the languages they were reading in, and as curiosity was given room, many of these philologists set out to figure out exactly the relationships between them. In so doing, they became intimately familiar with the language itself, not as it exists in practice, but in shared tendencies and similarities that must be chalked up to the innate nature of human language. Thus began the modern science of linguistics.

Because of ground-breaking work done in the 19th century, scholars discovered that sound change in language is a remarkably thoroughgoing, exceedingly systematic, and almost exceptionless process. These linguists realized that if they could determine what sound changes occurred in a given language, they would be able to reverse engineer the process and uncover an earlier state of the language. That principle of reconstruction is what historical linguistics is all about.

Systematic sound changes and changes in other aspects of language (such as in syntax, semantics, or morphology) are referred to as “laws”. For instance, a sound law that happened fairly recently in the transition from Middle to Modern English (c. 15th century) is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which was a drastic change in all the long vowels of Middle English and was responsible for the major differences between the way we pronounce and write our vowels and the way Spanish or other European languages do.

What historical linguists do is reconstruct language based on known laws using a combination of the comparative method and internal reconstruction.

Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.

Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.