Taylor Ragland Spanish Blog Post 1

Something I find interesting when studying linguistics are the changes in word pronunciation over time. My favorite example of this phenomenon is Grimm’s law, which is a systematic formulation which correlates between Germanic and other Indo-European languages. (Encyclopedia Britannica) Grimm’s law serves as a method of decoding the pronunciation of words based on the languages. For example, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, Grimm’s law shows us that the originally voiced “bh”, “dh”, “gh” had become the English “b”, “d”, “g”. In this example the previously voiced “h” sound began to be left off or otherwise unvoiced in areas where English developed. The consistency of these types of formulas within Grimm’s law supports the idea that both vowel and consonant sound shifts are a normal phenomenon in language and not a random mispronunciation of a handful of words.

I first encountered Grimm’s law while studying Medieval Literature at the University of Wyoming. During that time, I learned that the Grimm was able to gather the information needed to develop his method (which would later be known as Grimm’s law) by traveling across Europe and asking the people in villages about fairy tales. The fairy tales did not change very much based on where he was in Europe which is how he was able to learn how the different groups of people pronounced the same words differently. For example, if you go up to anyone on the streets and ask someone to finish your sentence, “Little Red Riding Hood and…” certainly everyone would answer “The Big Bad Wolf”. The same was true for Grimm, the words were always the same, the other difference was the pronunciation.

Learning that small piece of history during my study of Medieval Literature, helped me to better understand how there is not a necessary correlation between language and the written word. It seems strange that so many different pronunciations of the same consonants could be in use in the same time period, but we still see small examples of this phenomenon today. While not as extreme as many examples in Grimm’s law we can get an idea of where a person in the United States is from based upon how they use the word creek or crick to describe a creek.

Sources Referenced:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Grimms-law

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