The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm, also Gebrüder Grimm) were the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. They were German academics and most famous for their collections of folktales and fairy tales, and for their work in linguistics. The Grimm brothers both became linguists.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest in a family of five brothers and one sister. Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, a lawyer, was town clerk in Hanau and later justiciary in Steinau, another small Hessian town, where his father and grandfather had been ministers of the Calvinistic Reformed Church.

While Jacob remained single, in the mid-1820s, Wilhelm married Dortchen Wild, with whom he would have four children.

The tales in the first edition were collected not from peasants, as is commonly believed, but mainly from literate people whom the Grimms came to know quite well. Evidence shows that these people often obtained their tales from illiterate or anonymous informants.

A language arts course that is aligned to national standards. Students will use DBQ documents to write an argument writing piece as well as compare and contrast Brother Grimm stories to Disney stories.

Grimm’s Law is important because it demonstrates the development, from the Old Germanic languages, of more recent languages such as English, Dutch, and Low German. It also shows that changes in a language and in groups of languages come about gradually and not as a result of random word changes.

But this generalization can be misleading. This change did start in the same region as the other High German changes. But /θ/ shifted significantly later, around the 10th century, and spread significantly farther, affecting all of the West Germanic languages except English.

Verner’s law, linguistic explanation of the apparent exceptions to Grimm’s law (q.v.), which first demonstrated the significant role that accent (stress) played in linguistic change in the Germanic languages.

Verner’s law described a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ.

It consists of numerous Indo-Iranian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, and Farsi (Persian); Greek; Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian; Celtic languages such as Breton, Welsh, and Scottish and Irish Gaelic; Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian; Germanic languagessuch as German …