Deutsche Grammatik

In 1816, the brilliant young Danish scholar Rasmus Rask not only accepted the relationship of Germanic, Hellenic, Italic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian, but went further and found the missing connection. Rask had seen something no one else had noticed: between some Germanic streams of language and the others a regular sound-shift had occurred transforming the sounds of B, D, and G into those of P, T, and K. It meant an absolute identification could be established between England and ancient Germania. Rask wasn’t prominent enough to promote this theory very far, but the man who stole it from him was—Jacob Grimm of fairy-tale fame. In the second edition of Deutsche Grammatik (1822), Grimm claimed the sound shift discovery which to this day is called "Grimm’s Law." Salons on both sides of the Atlantic buzzed with the exciting news.