The “rule” and “resolved exception” covered in the previous two articles were already, on their own, a substantial discovery. But what Grimm’s Law left to the linguistics that followed reaches further still. This article looks at what the discovery gave to comparative linguistics as a whole.
Someone had actually noticed it before Grimm
It may come as a surprise, but the very first person to notice the correspondence between Latin p and Germanic f was neither Grimm nor Rasmus Rask, covered in the previous article in this feature. The German thinker Friedrich von Schlegel had already pointed it out in 1806. Rask extended it, in 1818, to other consonants and other languages (Sanskrit, Greek); Grimm, in 1822, gathered it into one systematic table. A discovery is rarely one genius’s single flash of insight — it usually takes shape gradually, passing through several hands. The same was true of William Jones’s 1786 discourse, read elsewhere in this feature.
What turned a hunch into a discipline
The real value of Grimm’s Law lies less in finding the individual correspondences than in demonstrating, in a testable form, the idea that sound change is systematic, not accidental. Before this, there had already been attempts to line up words from related languages and point out that they “look similar” — William Jones’s 1786 discourse, discussed elsewhere in this feature, is the classic example. But after Grimm’s Law, linguists were no longer satisfied with “similar” — they were expected to show, in a table, exactly which regular sound correspondence produced that similarity. The methodological foundation of historical linguistics as a discipline was built on that shift.
The method spread well beyond Germanic. In the 1870s, the German linguist Hermann Grassmann demonstrated a separate regular correspondence involving the aspirated consonants of Greek and Sanskrit (Grassmann’s Law) — one more case of Grimm’s method, “go looking for a systematic sound correspondence,” bearing fruit in an entirely different language group. Individual sound laws accumulated this way gradually turned the Indo-European family tree from a vague intuition of relatedness into a concrete structure, backed by an actual set of rules.
An unexpected road to Saussure
This methodological legacy also, in a somewhat ironic way, pushed the next generation of scholars in a different direction entirely. As comparative linguistics turned into a race to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European ever more precisely, a young Swiss scholar named Ferdinand de Saussure published, in 1878, a groundbreaking paper on the vowel system of the proto-language — a piece of work that sharpened comparative linguistics’ own tools to their limit. But Saussure then moved on to a completely different question: not “how far can we reconstruct a language’s history,” but “what makes a language system at one point in time work in the first place?” That turn would later be compiled as the Course in General Linguistics (1916) — read about it, and what that turn actually involved, in this site’s Saussure feature. The arc runs like this: pushing the historical-comparative method Grimm opened up to its very limit is what revealed a question that method could not answer.
The shadow side — conflating people and language
This legacy has a shadow as well as a light. The linguistic discovery of an “Indo-European” family got tangled, in nineteenth-century Europe, with the baseless racial narrative of an “Aryan race.” How that conflation spread is covered, as already noted in this feature’s sister feature, in the Max Müller feature elsewhere on this site. It would be unfair to read that conflation back into Grimm’s own work — but it is only honest to record that the method he opened up was, later, put to that misuse.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| A predecessor | Friedrich von Schlegel (1806, first to note the p/f correspondence) |
| The methodological core | Turning sound change from “coincidental similarity” into “testable, regular correspondence” |
| Where it spread | Grassmann’s Law (Greek/Sanskrit aspirates) and other language families and branches |
| An unexpected consequence | Pushing comparative linguistics to its limit is what let Saussure pose the separate question of “language as a system” |
| The shadow side | The false conflation of “Indo-European family” with “Aryan race” (covered in a separate article) |
In a nutshell — the real legacy of Grimm’s Law was never the table itself. It was the conviction that sound change has a reason, and the practice of going to find it. That conviction reaches, by an unexpected road, all the way to Saussure’s work — the work that set language aside from its history and looked at it as a system instead.