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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gavin Richardson, post: 2658657, member: 83956&quot;]I&#039;m not sure how to explain what &quot;drives&quot; Grimm&#039;s law. I&#039;ve always taught it simply as a means of describing the sound correspondences between Indo-European and the specific Germanic subfamily of Indo-European. I don&#039;t think principle of least effort is adequate to describe the sound changes. There are three prongs of Grimm&#039;s law; the last one escapes me now. But the first two are:</p><p><br /></p><p>1. Indo-European voiceless stops become Germanic&nbsp; voiceless fricatives. Cardiac&gt;Heart</p><p>2. Indo-European voiced stops become Germanic voiceless stops. Dent&gt;Tooth</p><p>3. I think the third prong deals with voiced aspirated stops becoming voiced stops, losing their aspiration in Germanic. But again, I&#039;m working from memory over dinner.</p><p><br /></p><p>So I don&#039;t think these articulations are becoming &quot;easier&quot;; indeed, though it seems counterintuitive, I think a general linguistic principle is that voiced sounds are easier to make than voiceless ones. It&#039;s why we tend to voice consonants in little words such as &quot;of&quot; and &quot;the.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>So for me, Grimm&#039;s Law describes things. But I&#039;m not good enough a linguist to know how or why these changes developed in Germanic. But they are quite systematic. There are some notable exceptions, but these are often explained by Verner&#039;s law.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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