Grims' Fairy Tales

By Jacob Grimm

2023

First Published

4.13

Average Rating

382

Number of Pages

11H39M

Audio Length

The Brothers Grimm traveled widely throughout Germany and other countries, performing field research for their linguistic work, which involved trying to find patterns in how the vowels and consonants which made up specific words changed over time. To determine these patterns, they needed to hear many different examples of authentic speech by various speakers of different ages and in different regions. They eventually discovered that one of the easiest ways to convince older local residents to give them lengthy examples of their natural speech was to ask the residents to tell their favorite stories to the brothers. As the Grimms Brothers recorded the style of speech of the speaker for their research (which eventually led to the formulation of Grimm's Law), they also recorded the various stories that they were told, and eventually published them in 1817.

Avg Rating

4.13

Number of Ratings

207

5 STARS

42%

4 STARS

35%

3 STARS

19%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Jacob Grimm

Author · 131 books

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.