NA TURE 



309 



THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1877 



GRIMM'S LAW 



/':)imvCs Law : a Study. By T. Le M, Douse. (Triibner 

 and Co., 1876.) 



THIS is a very able and closely-reasoned book. Its 

 object is to explain the cause and origin of that 

 curious shifting of sounds known as Grimm's Law, in 

 virtue of which a particular sound in one member of the 

 Indo-European group of languages must answer to 

 another particular sound in another member. The dis- 

 covery of the law laid the foundation of comparative 

 philology, and raised etymology from mere haphazard 

 guesswork to the rank of a science, but the primary cause 

 and reason of the law itself are still under discussion. 

 We have still to learn why a classical aspirate must 

 answer to a Low German media and a High German 

 tenuis, or a classical tenuis to a Low German aspirate 

 and a High German media. 



Mr. Douse's book is intended to be an answer to this 

 question. After criticising and rejecting the various at- 

 tempts that have been made to solve the problem, he 

 essays a fresh solution of his own. He begins by assuming 

 that the cause of the law must be ultimately found in the 

 principle of least effort, and therefore that no explanation 

 of it can be considered satisfactory which does not derive 

 the weaker sounds from the stronger ones. He then ap- 

 peals to the curious fact of which the Cockney interchange 

 of iv and v is an example, and from which we learn that 

 where one dialect is in presence of another it compen- 

 sates for its mispronunciation of a sound in the latter by 

 inverting the places of the two sounds. The same person 

 who leaves out the aspirate where it ought to be sounded 

 will insert it where it has no reason to exist. This is a 

 simple case of " Cross Compensation." Grimm's Law, which 

 involves the interchange of three sounds instead of two, 

 is a more complicated and somewhat varying instance of 

 the same phenomenon, and is referred by Mr. Douse to 

 what he terms " Reflex Dissimilation." He believes, 

 therefore, that the phonetic characteristics of the different 

 branches of the Indo-European family were developed 

 while they were still dialects of one and the same lan- 

 guage, and that the characteristics once acquired were 

 only preserved, and perhaps intensified, after the break- 

 ing up and separation of the parent tongue. The aspirates 

 originated in the dialect which afterwards became the 

 Low German branch, while the dialect which became the 

 High German branch favoured the soft consonants or 

 media?. Mr. Douse further holds that the parent lan- 

 guage possessed at the outset only tenues or hard conso- 

 nants. The phonology of the Lithu-Slavic branch, which 

 agrees partly with that of the Indian section, partly with 

 that of the Teutonic section, is explained by supposing 

 that the dialect from which it has descended was originally 

 in contact with the dialects of the High Germans and 

 Indo-Greeks, and not with that of the Low Germans, and 

 that its tenues were changed into media; through the in- 

 fluence of the High German dialect before the latter had 

 become affected by Low German aspiration. 



This is a bare outline of Mr. Douse's theory, in con- 

 nection with which he has introduced a large number of 

 Vol. XV. — No. 380 



subsidiary remarks and suggestions of great value and 

 interest. It will be seen that the theory agrees better 

 with the view of J. Schmidt, who maintains that the 

 several members of the Aryan family of speech were 

 originally dialects at a greater or less distance from a 

 single centre, than with that of Fick, who would draw a 

 sharp distinction between the East Aryan and the West 

 or European Ar>'an groups. Indeed, in so far as Fick's 

 hypothesis implies the chronological descent of one Aryan 

 dialect from another, Mr. Douse's system is absolutely 

 incompatible with it. Mr. Douse, however, seems to me 

 to have fully shown the untenability of the chronological 

 hypothesis under any form, and to have proved once for 

 all that any satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of 

 Grimm's Law must rest upon the belief that the phonetic 

 systems of the various members of the Aryan group go 

 back to a time when they were still co-existing dialects of 

 one primitive tongue. Here as elsewhere language begins 

 with dialectical variety, at least so far as comparative 

 philology has any cognisance of it. 



I cannot accept Mr. Douse's postulate, however, that 

 all phonetic problems are to be tested by the principle of 

 laziness or least effort, and that the mere fact that a 

 hypothesis demands the change of a weaker into a 

 stronger sound is a condemnation of it. The principle of 

 laziness in philology can hardly be compared with the 

 law of gravitation in physics, and allowance should be 

 made for the contrary principle of emphasis. The 

 healthy desire to exert oneself is nearly as strong an 

 element in human action as the desire to escape trouble. 

 No doubt the principle of laziness has been a most 

 powerful agent of change in language, but it has not been 

 the sole agent of change. The problems of speech un- 

 fortunately do not admit of so simple a solution. 



This postulate leads Mr. Douse to another view, which 

 seems to me equally unfounded. Because we can reduce 

 by phonetic analysis the various consonants and vowels 

 of uttered speech to a few tenues and the single vowel a, 

 he concludes that the parent Aryan once contained no 

 other sounds than these, and that there was a period 

 when the alphabet consisted of little more than the letters 

 k, p, t, and a. This theory of course goes along with the 

 belief that the roots of our Aryan languages can be cut 

 down to a combination of the vowel with a single con- 

 sonant, a belief which appears to me the tie plus ultra of 

 the improbabilities resulting from the prevalent doctrine 

 of roots. There is a good deal to be said for the opinion 

 according to which the European a, e, and are not dif- 

 ferentiated from a primitive a, but on the contra:ry the 

 Indian a is the single sound into which the three vowels 

 have coalesced. 



I am compelled to part company again with Mr. Douse 

 on the question of the two classes of gutturals which the 

 parent Aryan is believed to have possessed. His theory 

 js that the single tenuis k split up into the two varieties of 

 pronunciation, kw {qti) in the western dialects and ky f^s) 

 in the eastern (and Lithu-Slavic) dialects, and that origi- 

 nally, therefore, there was only one guttural, or class of 

 gutturals {k, ^, kli). M. Havet here seems to me to be 

 more in the right in holding that the parent speech had 

 from the beginning two classes of gutturals, one the pure 

 k (^, kh) and the other a labialised kw {gw, khw). The 

 pure k became 's in the Indian (and Lithu-Slavic 



