GOING GOTH

by Steve Steinbock

Last week, with Halloween looming like a harvest moon, I threatened to go “Goth.” Now, with the Hunter’s Moon just starting to wane, I’m back and I’m keeping my promise.

Don’t expect dark makeup, leather, or spikes. When I go Goth I do it for real.

Two years back, James Lincoln Warren wrote a very concise history of the Goths, tracing the evolution of the term from the Visigoth invasion of Rome in 410 CE, to the architectural and literary movements of the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries, and ultimately ending up as an alt-rock leather spikes fetishist movement that is with us today.

I could go back in time further than James, with the migration of Scandinavian tribes two thousand years ago, settling in what is now northern Poland, before spreading to the west and to the east, forming what archeologists call Wielbark culture. I could … but I’m not that good.

Instead, I’ll go back to our good friend Jacob Grimm, the Nineteenth Century anthologist, anthropologist, and linguist. Grimm, in turn, will take us way back, to the dawn of language.

Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was born January 4, 1785 in Hanau, Germany. He and his younger brother Wilhelm were raised by their mother after their father, an attorney, died when they were young. The two brothers are best known for the collection of stories that has come to us as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” But Jacob Grimm led a varied life as a philologist and a politician.

It’s worth noting that Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the book that comes down to us as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, went through several editions with major revisions each time around. The brothers’ original goal was to capture German folktales in their purist form. They saw the encroaching industrial age as a threat to the storytelling tradition that had gone back for generations. My understanding is that they sat down with a few old men and women – some less educated than others – and took down their stories, word for word. Many of them were not the sort of stories you’d want children to hear: stories of knocked-up maidens being held captive in towers or children being eaten by all manner of wild animal, two-legged and four-legged. That book came out in 1812.

Ironically, it was the demand of the market that led Jacob and Wilhelm to rewrite their collection. It had become more popular among parents and children than scholars and historians. Shortly after it was first published, the brothers began to smooth out the original, adding a few stories, cutting a few others, and toning down some of the sex and violence. A second edition came out in 1819 with an additional volume in 1822. The third edition, published in 1837, and, with several other editions in between, a seventh edition came out in 1857. Each time, the brothers polished the storytelling, but sacrificed the purity of the stories.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share with you some of the details of the Grimms’ work with folktales. But first what I really want to do is tell you about some linguistic work of Jacob Grimm that, as an amateur philologist, leaves me really blown away.

Grimm’s Law and the Consonantal Divide

In his Deutsche Grammatik, Jacob Grimm formalized a pattern in consonant change that had been observed by Grimm’s contemporary, Rasmus Trask. They noticed that certain words in German were remotely similar to corresponding words in the Romance languages. Fisch (“fish”) for instance, corresponded to the Italian Pesce, and Vater (German for “father”) corresponded to the Italian Padre. From the similarities as well as the differences, Trask and Grimm were able to give voice – quite literally – to the theretofore hypothetical proto-language that was the source of both Germanic and Romance languages.

Trask and Grimm identified several specific consonant-change patterns that Grimm explained must have occurred among proto-Germanic tribes as they diverged from their other proto-Indo-European cousins. The P became an F, and the D became a T. K evolved into H and so forth, so that “Canine” led to “Hund,” and ultimately to the English “Hound.” From Latin-based words like “Dental” and “Cardiac” we get Germanic-based words like “Tooth” and “Heart.” The actual details of how these changes occurred are complicated.

I find this stuff amazing. But as Dick Stodghill would point out, I don’t get out often enough. I’m the same one who sat for an entire day with cramped forearms learning to do the Faro shuffle. Odd things amuse me.