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Grimm's law

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Grimm's law

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sound shift in the Germanic languages in which PIE voiceless stops become fricatives, PIE voiced stops become voiceless and PIE voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives

Wikidata facts

Instance of
phonetic rule
Named after
Jacob Grimm
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Sources (1)

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Encyclopedic overview

A diagram of Grimm's law and Verner's law

Grimm's law, also known as the First Germanic Consonant Shift or First Germanic Sound Shift, is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the first millennium BCE, first discovered by Rasmus Rask but systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Grimm's law” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.