As read in this site’s Jacob Grimm feature, Jacob Grimm wrote his famous correspondence table on one page of the 1822 second edition of Deutsche Grammatik. But Grimm never gave the discovery a name of its own. It was Müller’s lecture that spread the name “Grimm’s Law” to the English-speaking public and made it stick.
An entire lecture devoted to it
In the 1863 Second Series, Lecture V. Müller titles this one, simply, “Grimm’s Law,” and opens:
I intend to devote to-day’s Lecture to the consideration of one phonetic law, commonly called Grimm’s Law, a law of great importance and very wide application, affecting nearly the whole consonantal structure of the Aryan languages.
Notice the phrase “commonly called.” By 1863, the law seems to have already been picking up the name “Grimm’s Law” to some degree. But it was Müller who put it front and center as the title of a popular public lecture and put it into wide circulation through publication.
Sharpened with data newer than Grimm’s own
Müller didn’t just spread the name. He used Sanskrit data that Grimm’s 1822 table didn’t have, to re-present the law in a more organized form — working up from the base that consonants are articulated at three points (guttural, dental, labial), each with three possible manners (hard, soft, and aspirated).
Where Grimm’s table lined up only three languages — Greek, Gothic, and Old High German — Müller rebuilt the law within a wider comparative frame that added Sanskrit. Sanskrit had preserved, cleanly intact, not just voiceless and voiced stops but “voiced aspirates” (sounds like gh, dh, bh) — material that hadn’t been fully put to use in Grimm’s day, and that became the raw material for polishing the law into a more systematic form. In effect, Müller expanded Grimm’s three-language table into a four-way comparison (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic), shaping it into something close to the “standard form” that would later appear in textbooks.
What it means for a name to spread
A discovery, and the name that sticks to it, are two separate events. Grimm’s table had been sitting there since 1822, but it took Müller’s lecture to carry it, under the proper name “Grimm’s Law,” to a general English readership. The history of a discipline is shaped not only by who discovers something, but by who retells and spreads it — the same point applies to Müller’s own theory of comparative mythology, covered in the next article in this feature.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Grimm’s table (1822) | Not yet given a name of its own |
| Müller’s lecture (1863) | Devotes an entire lecture to “Grimm’s Law” |
| What Müller added | A cleaner reformulation using Sanskrit data |
| The result | The name “Grimm’s Law” reaches, and sticks with, the English-speaking public |
In a nutshell — the familiar name “Grimm’s Law” isn’t the work of Grimm alone. It’s the product of a two-stage effort — the person who discovered it, and the person who retold and spread it.