As the previous chapter showed, Rask established the method of “regular correspondence,” but hadn’t yet ventured into why that regularity exists. This chapter follows how that regularity became a “table,” then a “law,” and became bound up with the metaphor of an “organism.”
A table, 584 pages long — Grimm
In 1822, in the second edition of Volume I of Deutsche Grammatik, Jacob Grimm compiled the consonant correspondences between the Germanic branch and Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit into one enormous table.
Die ganze für Geschichte der Sprache und Strenge der Etymologie folgenreiche zweifache Lautverschiebung stellt sich tabellarisch so dar…
(The entire double sound-shift, so consequential for the history of language and the rigor of etymology, presents itself in tabular form as follows… Article 085)
What Rask showed was the general property that correspondences among languages are “regular.” What Grimm did was turn that regularity into a concrete table you could take in at a glance — p→f, t→þ, k→h, and so on. This table would later be named “Grimm’s Law” and popularized by Max Müller (Article 091) — Grimm himself never called this regularity a “law.”
An exception discovered — Verner
This table had, at first, exceptions no one could explain. Words like father and brother, whose consonants should have shifted the same way under the same conditions, sometimes shift in only one of the two. This exception was solved, after Grimm’s death, by the Danish linguist Karl Verner, who brought in a second condition — the position of stress (Article 086). Even an exception has a regular reason — this idea would later be raised again, in a far more thoroughgoing form, by Brugmann’s generation (Chapter 4).
The metaphor of an organism — Bopp
At almost the same time Grimm’s table appeared, Franz Bopp was pursuing a larger ambition. Not just individual sound correspondences, but entire grammatical systems, compared across languages. In 1833, in the preface to his magnum opus, Comparative Grammar, Bopp writes:
Ich beabsichtige in diesem Buche eine vergleichende… Beschreibung des Organismus der auf dem Titel genannten Sprachen…
(I intend, in this book, a comparative… description of the organism of the languages named in the title… Article 113)
“Organism” (Organismus) — this single word is the most important turning point in this chapter. For Bopp, it was still a metaphor — a tool for explaining how grammatical endings wear down and fossilize, like the organs of a living thing (his analysis of Sanskrit’s first-person ending -mi as a “worn-down” trace of the pronoun ma — Article 114). Bopp himself carefully draws a line against venturing into the mystery of the roots themselves — “why the root I means ‘to go’ and not ‘to stand,’ such questions we do not address” (Article 113).
Still a metaphor, but the seed was planted
Seen against the overview’s axis, this chapter hasn’t fully tipped toward the “natural law” side yet. Grimm’s table was, strictly, a list of observed regularity, not a theoretical claim about why it happens. Bopp’s “organism” was, likewise, still a metaphor aiding analysis, not the claim that “language is literally alive.”
But the seed was already planted. The form of a “correspondence table” would come to be called, later, a “law” — a word with the ring of natural science. The metaphor of an “organism” would be grown, by later generations, into a literal claim — the work of Müller and Schleicher, covered in the next chapter.
Summary
| Figure (work, year) | What they did | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Grimm (1822) | Compiled consonant correspondences into one table — later called a “law” | Regularity made visible |
| Verner (1875) | Found the condition of stress behind the exceptions to Grimm’s table | Even exceptions have a reason |
| Bopp (1833) | Compared entire grammatical systems, using “language is an organism” as a supporting metaphor | The metaphor is born |
In a nutshell — Grimm turned regularity into a table; Bopp brought in the metaphor of an organism. Neither yet called language a literal natural object. But in these eleven years, the ground was already laid for the next generation to cross that line.