Grimm's Law

Latin purc- vs English "furrow" (remember "porcelain" back at the beginning?) is an example of what is called Grimm's Law, which describes a systematic change of certain consonants in the Germanic languages (including English) compared to the mainstream of Indo-European, which includes Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Gaelic, Persian (Farsi), and many others. The law is named for Jacob Grimm, half of the fairy-tale Brothers Grimm. In addition to being a collector of folklore, he was one of the first serious students of what is now called Comparative Linguistics.

Sticking to Grimm reality, I'm using mainly Latin for the examples below because the Latin/French component of English is so large, and many of these words exist side by side with Old English (i.e., Germanic) words of similar meaning. Examples from Persian or Gaelic would presumably be less obvious, but they do exist, trust me. Most of my other examples are from Greek. Please note that I'm not claiming that an English word comes from a particular Latin or Greek example, but only that, at minimum, both words derive from some primitive proto-Indo-European common ancestor, and that the English (Germanic) consonant in question changed from "standard" Indo-European while the Latin or Greek did not. In any case, a slightly simplified version of Grimm's Law states the following:

The voiceless /TH/ sound heard in thick and thin serves as a real trap for non-native speakers of English, because it is a surprisingly rare sound in the world's languages. It existed in proto-Germanic, but now is found only in English and Icelandic. The sound also exists in Semitic and as mentioned above, Greek, and that's about it. Speakers of German, Slavic, the Indo-Iranian and Romance families, and most non-ie languages tend to pronounce "thin" as "tin" or "sin" (and voiced /TH/ as in these and those as "deze" and "doze" or "zeze" and "zoze") unless they've had a lot of practice. Note that German had a /TH/ spelling, but the sound was hard-/T/, as mentioned before in the discussion of "thal", pronounced "tall", German for valley. Recently German authorities have begun a campaign to "rationalize" the language with a /T/ spelling instead (Neandertal, etc.) [04Sep08] Goth and Lithuania used to be spelled with a /T/ and are so pronounced, but I don't know if they will be victims of the spelling police. Castilian Spanish also has a /TH/ sound, because that's the way they pronounce /S/ — they all have a bad lithp.

Unvoiced /TH/ is thus a literal shibboleth, from the Bible story (Judges, chapter 12) of the Israelites picking that word (which means "stream") as a password in some battle with enemies who could not pronounce unvoiced /SH/ or /TH/ — anyone who claimed the password was "sibbolet" was immediately killed. Similarly, Italians have been known to use cicera, literally "chick-pea", to sort out Frenchmen, who do not have a hard /CH/. (The Roman author Cicero was a nickname — he had a big wart on his nose.) Allegedly, US soldiers in the Pacific theater in WW II used lollapalooza as a word impossible for the Japanese. Aladdin's "Open sesame" password from the Arabian Nights might be another one; in Arabic the pronunciation is "sheshame". There are two notoriously difficult tongue-twisters: "The sixth sheik's sixth sheep's sick," and "The Leith police dismisseth us." If you think you have trouble saying them correctly, try them on any (former) friend whose mother tongue is not English!

The rarity of the /TH/ sound is the reason why it is spelled with a digraph in English. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have a /TH/ letter — /θ/ (theta) is the Greek version — and so did Old and Middle English — /þ/, called thorn. [03Sep08] (Just as "alphabet" is Greek alpha-beta, the runic alphabet is called the futhorc, from the first six letters.) Unfortunately, the technology of printing developed on the continent among Germans, Dutch, and Italians who did not have that sound, and so the type fonts imported to start the English printing industry had to make do with the "continental" letter set. For a while, it was customary to replace a thorn with a /Y/ in printed text because the handwritten versions of the two looked somewhat the same, leading to the well-known ye for "the", as in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. (That "Ye" is pronounced "the", please note!) Eventually the printers gave up the fight and started using /TH/, the digraph which the Romans had used to express Greek theta, a sound not in the Roman alphabet either. Thorns were still common in handwriting as late as Shakespeare, however, and not only ye but also ys, yt, yn, yei were commonly used for "this", "that", "then", "they", etc. well into the 1700's. This must have been confusing for foreigners who didn't know the trick, since in abbreviations like "yrs" for "yours" (yrs truly) it really was a /Y/, and "ye" could either be the alternate form of "the" or the second person plural personal pronoun! [06Aug08] (Icelandic is a quite archaic language, and it still retains the thorn character in print.)

[16Sep08] English has a few peculiar family names with an initial lower-case /ff/ — ffolkes, ffyfe, and so on. The authorities are agreed this is from a misreading of the Old English handwritten capital /F/, which looked like a ligature of two lower-case /f/'s — . These days one occasionally sees such names written with an initial capital — notably the comic writer Jasper Ffordes — but that is illiterate.

Another Old English letter not present in the continental type fonts was the yogh — /ȝ/ — used for the semi-vowel /Y/ sound before another vowel. Think of "pure" compared to "poor". That little /Y/ in pure is the remains of a yogh. By Renaissance times it only was used in Scots and Northern English, and early printers replaced it with continental /Z/, again from the appearance. This practice led to its presence in northern names like Mackenzie, which is correctly pronounced "Mackenyie", and Dalziel, pronounced "Dalyell". Menzies should be pronounced "Menyies", but casual English pronunciation usually makes it sound more like "Mingus". The actor Denzel Washington's name is simply the northern spelling of "Daniel" and, in theory, should be so pronounced. (C.f. the many words pronounced with a short-/E/ in America and a short-/A/ in England when followed by an /R/, such as derby, clerk, etc. In some cases America has also adopted the short-/A/ — sergeant, the doublet person/parson, and the fact that darling started life as "dearling".)

Eventually, some words with a yogh were re-spelled to use /I/ or /Y/ instead (e.g., year and eye were originally ȝer and eȝe) or it was simply dropped. The a- in front of verbs (alight, awake, abide, etc.) was once ȝe-; c.f. German verbs with ge-. Americans and Irish often drop the sound itself in words where the English do not. For example, American "dew", "due", and "do" are homophones, but in England the first two are pronounced "dyoo". The proper British pronunciation of duke is "dyook", rhyming with "puke". The American version, rhyming with "kook", is distinctly low-class in Britain. (The English novelist Georgette Heyer consistently used the spellings "dook", "stoopid", etc. when reproducing the speech of working-class characters, which probably puzzles her American readers.)

Note that half the Mackenzie clan surrendered to the Sassenachs and now pronounce their own name the way it looks to the English, while the other half re-spelled it to be Mackinney to keep the proper Scots pronunciation. This is by no means uncommon — taking another example from a different letter and language, it's quite possible that Sir Mick Jagger and Chuck Yeager are distant cousins, with one branch of the family retaining the German pronunciation of Jaeger through re-spelling, and the other surrendering and going with standard English pronunciation of /J/. Many Youngs, Youngdahls, etc. used to be "Jung-". My wife's maiden name is Caylor, which is certainly a phonetic re-spelling of Koehler (Köhler) to keep people from pronouncing it "Coaler".

Perhaps my wife's ancestors should have grown up in Central Texas. A lot of the original settlers here were German, and the Austin-San Antonio area has such place names as the towns of Boerne and Gruene, Koenig Lane and Mueller Airport, all pronounced with an attempt at the original German umlauts — "burney", "green", "kaynig" and "miller", respectively. For that matter, I have relatives spelling the family name "Deardorf" instead of "Dierdorf", presumably because someone got irritated with their first syllable pronounced "dire" instead of "deer". Me, I'd never think of doing something like that, if only because it's such fun correcting telephone solicitors.

Certain people who should be world-famous are obscure because of pronunciation difficulties — c.f. Ignacy Lukasiewicz (Wook-a-shave-its), a famous mathematician who devised the so-called "Polish notation". If she received her PhD today, Dr. Maria Dolega-Sklodowska (Dowenga-SklawDAWFskah) would probably keep her maiden name for professional purposes. If so, she would be far less remembered by generations of science students, but fortunately for them, she meekly adopted the pronounceable name of her husband Pierre Curie, even though she got two Nobel Prizes and he only got one. [27Oct08] Astrophysicists honor Bohdan Paczynski, the expert on the formation of supermassive black holes, by calling the torus of hot interstellar gas spiralling into a black hole a "Polish Doughnut".

Switching from Poles to Greeks, consider the great painter who was known as El Greco because Domenikos Theotokopoulos did not fall gracefully on Spanish ears. (He was born in Crete, actually, but from Spain I guess that was close enough.) The electronic music composer Vangelis would undoubtedly be less famous if his movie scores were credited to Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou. The test for cervical cancer is called the Pap Test, short for Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou, the Greek physician who invented it.

[20Feb08] While on the subject of human anatomy, a whole lot more women know about the G Spot than know about the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenburg who first described it. Similarly, everybody knows about the ubiquitous E. coli bacterium, but nobody remembers the 19th century German bacteriologist and pediatrician Theodor Escherich who discovered it. (Despite the headlines, unless you have a few billion E. coli in your gut, you die. The bug is the body's source of several essential vitamins.)

NASA calls their X-ray orbital telescope the Chandra observatory, named for the Indian-American astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (In an interesting combination of heredity and environment, Chandrasekhar literally was raised from birth to be a Nobel Prize winner. He was a nephew of the Nobel-winning physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Chandra's mother was fiercely determined that her child would out-do his brilliant uncle.)

I wonder if these men and women were compensated by getting less unwanted telephone calls — I certainly can visualize a poor solicitor seeing such a name come up on his or her computer monitor and quickly clicking to the next entry. Names don't even have to be long — I know someone named Chudej, which has the property (for non-Czechs, at least) that if you see it, you can't pronounce it, and if you hear it, you can't find it in the telephone book. The pronunciation is "Hoo-jay", more or less. That reminds me of the joke that the pterodactyl is obviously an Irish animal, either "Peter O'Dactill" or "Terry Dactill" depending on whether the user has read the word or heard it pronounced.

Similarly, I'm sure the Welsh keep place names like Rhosllanerchrugog, Gwyddelwern, Llanymawdowy, and the grand champions, Gorsafawddachaidraigodan­heddogleddolonpen­rhynareurdraeth­ceredigion and LLanfair­pwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn­drobwllllantysiliogogogoch, just to irritate and embarrass the English. That last is even too much for the Welsh, who, I have heard, usually say "Llanfair PG". (As an aside, Welsh is certainly the only language which can have four consecutive /L/'s. The reason for all those -llan- syllables in place names is that it means "church" in Welsh.) I'm told that some Welshmen won't admit they are fluent in English until the tourist reassures them they are from the USA, Australia, or Canada rather than from England. All things considered, this is certainly an easier feat than an anglophone trying to extract English from a perfectly-bilingual resident of Montreal.

Long words in themselves are not particularly difficult if the reader knows the language. English speakers touring Germany soon become accustomed to signs like hauptbahnhofparkplatzeinfahrt and automatically break the monster into its components: haupt (high), bahn ([rail]road), hof (hall), park (same as English), platz (plaza, place), ein (in), and fahrt (fare, travel). Thus we have the "high-railroad-hall-park-place-in-travel", the main railroad station parking lot entrance. (Many other languages get just as bemused by the English habit of long noun phrases like that one — a "college Division One June 2006 baseball World Series home plate umpire chest protector strap" has fifteen consecutive nouns, but gramatically fourteen of them act as modifiers to "strap".)

[24Jan08] There is at least one grammatical construction where English goes so far as to treat an entire phrase as a single word, namely when adding a possessive. Consider the phrase "the Secretary of State's limousine". The position of that /'s/ only makes sense if "secretary-of-state" is regarded as one word. This doesn't happen with the only other remaining English noun inflection, the plural. Two of the breed are "Secretaries of State", not "Secretary of States".

Most other Indo-European consonants, — /L/, /M/, /N/, /R/, and /S/ in particular — were not affected by Grimm's Law. Observe that all these are the "extended" consonants — those that can be drawn out for a long time. (Mmmmmm…, ssssss…, etc.) Grimm's Law seems to have only affected the "plosive" sounds that cannot be prolonged.

The early philologists found quite a few exceptions to Grimm's Law — Germanic words where a consonant did not change as expected. Eventually it was realized that there was a secondary principle, now called Verner's Law, that applied when the consonant in question was in certain positions relative to the stressed syllable of a word. This had been masked because the stress of a proto-Germanic word was not necessarily on the same syllable as that of its modern descendants, and is one of the reasons that most of my examples so far have been at the beginning of words, where Grimm's Law always applies no matter where the accent falls. A few examples showing where Vernor over-ruled Grimm are Latin septem to English seven (instead of "sethem"), Latin centum to English hundred (instead of "hunthred"), and the variations between lose/lorn, raise/rear, dead/death, etc. The -kyr- in valkyrie, from the same root as choose, is another Vernor's Law substitution. This is complicated by the fact that since most Germanic languages were heavily inflected, Verner's Law might cause different forms of the same word to be spelled differently — the added endings changed the syllable count and the stress.

No one knows why proto-Germanic changed in this way from the parent Indo-European, although other languages have undergone similar but less drastic systematic shifts, a few of which are discussed in the next sections.