What is Grimm's law?
'''Grimm's law''' is the name for sound laws in [[Proto-Indo-Germanic]] languages. In the first millennium BC some sounds in these languages changed. The law is named after the German linguist [[Jacob Grimm]] who described these changes in the early 19th century. It is known that almost all modern European languages originated in (grew out of) early [[Indo-European language]]. Proto-[[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of these modern languages. Grimm's law is sometimes called '''first Germanic sound shift'''. There also was a [[second Germanic sound shift]], which mostly affected German dialects, and happened much later. == Historical background == Jacob Grimm based his theory on Danish philologist [[Rasmus Christian Rask]]’s ''essay On the Origin of the Icelandic Language''.<ref>{{cite journal |url= https://doi.org/10.2307/408743 |title = A Century of Grimm's law, p. 174| doi=10.2307/408743 | jstor=408743 }}</ref> He examined the relationship between [[consonant]]s in Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages such as Latin or French.<ref>{{cite journal |url= https://doi.org/10.2307/408743 |title = A Century of Grimm's law, p. 176| doi=10.2307/408743 | jstor=408743 }}</ref> The results of the change in consonants are still visible in English, Dutch, and the [[Scandinavia]]n languages.<ref>{{cite book |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=9rJiC1gP_0wC&dq=grimms+law+history&pg=PR1 |title = English Words: History and Structure, p. 143-144| isbn=9780521882583 | last1=Minkova | first1=Donka | last2=Stockwell | first2=Robert | date=19 March 2009 | publisher=Cambridge University Press }}</ref> == The first Germanic sound shift == A [[chain shift]] is a series of interrelated sound changes.<ref>{{cite journal |url= https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0073 |title = Chain Shifts by Anna Łubowicz, p. 1-19 |doi = 10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0073 }}</ref> The assumption behind the chain shift is that all the phonemes of a languag