Grimm Brothers
German philologist and folklorist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm in 1822 formulated Grimm's Law, the basis for much of modern comparative linguistics. With his brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786-1859), he collected Germanic folk tales and published them as
Grimm's Fairy Tales
(1812-1815).
Indo-European stop consonants, represented in Germanic, underwent the regular changes that Grimm's Law describes; this law essentially states that Indo-European p shifted to Germanic f, t shifted to th, and k shifted to h. Indo-European b shifted to Germanic p, d shifted to t, and g shifted to k. Indo-European bh shifted to Germanic b, dh shifted to d, and gh shifted to g.
This jurist and mythologist also authored the monumental
German Dictionary
and his
Deutsche Mythologie
.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
“He dug and ploughed over his piece of land, and then sowed some turnip seed. Soon the seed began to show itself above ground, and there grew on turnip immensely large and thick, which seemed as if it would never have done growing, but was a princess among turnips; and as there had never before been seen such a turnip, so also there has never been such another since.”