JACOB LUDWIG KARL GRIMM, LAW OF LINGUISTICS & FOLK

Today, The Grandma has been reading some tales written by Jacob Grimm, the German linguist, philologist and folklorist, who was born on a day like today in 1785.

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785-20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.

Jacob Grimm was born 4 January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel. His father, Philipp Grimm, was a lawyer who died while Jacob was a child, and his mother Dorothea was left with a very small income. Her sister was the lady of the chamber to the Landgravine of Hesse, and she helped to support and educate the family. Jacob was sent to the public school at Kassel in 1798 with his younger brother Wilhelm.

In 1802, he went to the University of Marburg where he studied law, a profession for which he had been intended by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a severe illness, and likewise began the study of law.

Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) explores German history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the Teutonic tribes. He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to determine the relationship between the German language and those of the Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors. 

Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparisons and improved methods of investigation. Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving records of the languages, but his book's influence was profound.

Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) was the outcome of his purely philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly uncritical and unreliable.

Jacob is recognized for enunciating Grimm's law, the Germanic Sound Shift, which was first observed by the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask. Grimm's law, also known as the Rask-Grimm Rule or the First Germanic Sound Shift, was the first law in linguistics concerning a non-trivial sound change.

Grimm's monumental dictionary of the German Language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, was started in 1838 and first published in 1854.

Jacob Grimm died on 20 September 1863, in Berlin, Germany from disease, at the age of 78.

More information: University of Pittsburgh

How often when we are comfortable,
we begin to long for something new!

Jacob Grimm