Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm (Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm) was born 4 January 1785,[2] in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel. His
father, Philipp Grimm, was a lawyer who died while Jacob was a child, and his mother Dorothea was
left with a very small income. Jacob Grimm also known as Ludwig Karl. He was famous person in the
history of philology. He wrote a lot of fairytales, what we read, when we was in our childhood with
his brother – Wilhelm Karl Grimm. But today we are talking about another side of his personality.
Also he was a clever and well-educated scientist of philology and linguistic.

I think, that his education history started from his studying in University of Marburg where he
studied law, a profession for which he had been intended by his father. But as far as we can see now,
his soul was following another way. The way of studying language. In that time, he met Von Savigny
– German jurist and historian. Jacob Grimm became inspired by the lectures of Friedrich Carl von
Savigny, a noted expert of Roman law; Wilhelm Grimm, in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik
(German Grammar), credits Savigny with giving the brothers an awareness of science. Savigny's
lectures also awakened in Jacob a love for historical and antiquarian investigation, which underlies
all his work. It was in Savigny's library that Grimm first saw Bodmer's edition of the Middle High
German minnesingers and other early texts, which gave him a desire to study their language. And, in
the beginning of 1805, he was invited by Savigny to Paris, to help him in his literary work. There
Grimm strengthened his taste for the literature of the Middle Ages. Towards the close of the year,
he returned to Kassel, where his mother and brother had settled after Wilhelm finished his studies.
Then he started study in depth language “laws” and language theory.

Thanks to this now we can read and study his linguistic works. There is:

History of the German Language

Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) explores German
history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the
Teutonic tribes. He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to
determine the relationship between the German language and those of the Getae, Thracians,
Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors.
Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparison and improved
methods of investigation. Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving
records of the languages, but his book's influence was profound.

German Grammar
Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) was the outcome of his purely
philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting
an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly
uncritical and unreliable.

Grimm's law
Despite the name, it’s a philology book. Jacob is recognized for enunciating Grimm's law, the
Germanic Sound Shift, which was first observed by the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask.
Grimm's law, also known as the "Rask-Grimm Rule" or the First Germanic Sound Shift, was the first
law in linguistics concerning a non-trivial sound change.
German Dictionary
Grimm's monumental dictionary of the German Language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, was started
in 1838 and first published in 1854. The Brothers anticipated it would take 10 years and encompass
some six to seven volumes. However, it was undertaken on so large a scale as to make it impossible
for them to complete it. The dictionary, as far as it was worked on by Grimm himself, has been
described as a collection of disconnected antiquarian essays of high value.[3] It was finally finished
by subsequent scholars in 1961 and supplemented in 1971. At 33 volumes at some 330,000
headwords, it remains a standard work of reference to the present day.

2. Jacob Grimm was responsible for his family at a young age

By the time Jacob Grimm was 23 years old, both his mother and father were dead. Since he was the
oldest child in the family, it fell to him to take care of his five other siblings. Wilhelm was the second
oldest sibling.

4. Jacob Grimm had many different government offices

Before Jacob dove into linguistics, he filled many different government positions. In 1806, he served
as the secretary to the office of War in Kassel. He was the private librarian to King Jerome of
Westphalia, a small kingdom. He returned to his hometown after the defeat of Napoleon and
traveled to France a few times in order to recover paintings and old, valuable books that France
stole. He also served in the Congress of Vienna. These government positions were Grimm’s bridge
between law and linguistics, an interesting fact about Jacob Grimm.

5. He was more a realist than a Romantic

Jacob Grimm and his brother very much went against the grain of the times. During their lives,
Romanticism was popular, which meant romanticizing things, and indulging in grand fantasy. Jacob
Grimm lived together with his brother for a while, and they worked steadily and lived simply,
without spending a lot of money. They could be described more as Realists. They were greatly
influenced by the social and political changes of their day, and the difficulties that came with those
changes. The brothers Grimm became fascinated with looking into the past to figure out why things
were how they were by looking at writings from many different countries.