This feature has moved from an overview through the content of the law itself, a close reading of the original text, the resolution of its exception, and the spread of its legacy. To close, let’s grade that 1822 table from the vantage point of two centuries of linguistics since.
“What corresponds to what” — barely shaken
Voiceless stops in Greek and Latin becoming voiceless fricatives in Germanic, voiced stops becoming voiceless stops, voiced aspirates becoming voiced sounds — this correspondence itself has not been shaken by two hundred years of scrutiny since. Nearly the entire basic vocabulary of the Germanic languages can be explained through it, and Verner’s Law, covered in the previous article, showed that even the remaining exceptions had a proper reason behind them. Grimm’s Law remains one of the first sound laws taught in any linguistics textbook precisely because this foundation has proven so solid.
“Why it happened” — actually still contested
There is a point easy to overlook, though. Grimm himself said almost nothing about why this shift happened. What he presented was strictly a correspondence table — a record of “it changed this way,” not an explanation of “here is why it changed this way.” That gap has, remarkably, never been fully closed. In the latter half of the twentieth century, some linguists raised an even more fundamental question: was the traditional reconstruction itself mistaken? This is the so-called “glottalic theory.” On this view, the sounds traditionally reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European “voiced stops” may actually have been glottalized (sounds produced with a catch in the throat), and reconstructing them that way lets both Grimm’s shift and Verner’s exception be explained as a more natural phonetic process. This theory remains a minority position today — but it’s worth remembering that while the answer to “what corresponds to what” has been settled for a long time, the answer to “why it changed” has still not converged on one view.
An answer, sent back to Jones
This feature exists to keep a promise made in an article in the William Jones feature — that “Grimm is due a full feature of his own elsewhere on this site.” Jones’s 1786 intuition — a resemblance “which could not possibly have been produced by accident” — passed through Bopp’s comparative tables and Rask’s discovery of regularity before Grimm forged it into a testable system. And that system was, in turn, reforged by Verner, extended to other language families by Grassmann, and eventually became the very ground from which Saussure could step off into an entirely different question — looking at language as a system rather than a history. From one judge’s paragraph, to one philologist’s table, and on to the generation after that — this is how the discipline of linguistics has grown, handed forward piece by piece.
Summary
| Point | Current assessment |
|---|---|
| The consonant correspondences themselves | Settled. Hold with almost no exception across Germanic basic vocabulary |
| The cases once called “exceptions” | Shown by Verner’s Law to be regular phenomena after all |
| Why the change happened (a causal account) | Still contested; the glottalic theory and other positions compete |
| Contribution to the discipline | The methodological starting point for treating sound change as a testable rule |
In a nutshell — the table Grimm presented in 1822 got “what changed” almost perfectly right, and has survived two centuries of testing. But the deeper question of “why it changed” remains genuinely open. Stating plainly what is certain and what is not — there is no conclusion more fitting for this feature to close on, and none closer to Grimm’s own stated method.