Grimm's Law: A Study, or Hints Towards an Explanation of the So-Called "Lautverschiebung" to Which Are Added Some Remarks on the Primitive Indo-European K and Several Appendices

Grimm's Law is a phonetic process in the history of the Pro-Germanic language, which consisted in changing the Indo-European stop consonants. The topic of this small treatise inevitably got in the way of the author almost on the threshold of a somewhat more extensive study, in which he invited himself to enter. Among other preliminary inquiries, for the immediate purpose of the author, it was necessary to find out whether there are certain groups of I-E roots, members of each of which seem to suggest signs of close kinship with each other, with any approach to certainty can be individually traced back to a single parental form; and this research, as it progressed, eventually became inextricably linked with another arising from a very obvious fact, namely, that the varieties of form exhibited by a cell of group members within one of the great dialects correlated with Grimm's law are identical with the varieties of one member of the group that appear in all the great dialects, thus correlated. Looking through the various explanations for this fact, the author could hardly help but assume that all these varieties of forms, collected in one dialect or scattered over several, must have arisen as a result of phonetic variations in the same way and at the same time and that their distribution in all and among all the above dialects must have been associated with the relationship that existed between these dialects in primitive times. The pursuit of these and similar assumptions led the author further and further away from the line of research that had been originally charted; and being (like most people who have pondered this question) completely dissatisfied with the current hypotheses of Grimm's Law, the author finally decided to completely separate this secondary subject and see what conclusions about it could be drawn by rigidly applying linguistic principles to the facts before the author which either had already been demonstrated or seemed obvious to him.