{"id": "card_n_232eb0029ad3", "kind": "note", "title": "Grimm's Law — sound change without exceptions, and the exception that deepened it", "body": "Grimm (1822): the PIE voiceless stops became Germanic fricatives, systematically — *p -> f\n(pater->father, ped->foot, piscis->fish), *t -> th (tres->three), *k -> h (cornu->horn,\ncanis->hound, centum->hundred). The REGULARITY is the whole point: sound laws admit no\nexceptions (the Neogrammarian principle), which is exactly why the method PREDICTS rather than\nguesses. And the assay's own ethos appears here a century early: Grimm's law had stubborn\napparent exceptions, and Verner (1875) chased them to a DEEPER rule — they depended on where\nPIE stress fell, and Verner's Law explained every one. An anomaly pursued honestly revealed a\nmore fundamental law — the moat's discipline, in 19th-century philology. Empirical, discovered,\npredictive.", "source": {"label": "Concordance assay — 2026-07-09", "url": "https://narrowhighway.com/s/9c66f521565216319b7ab6cf3bca9314c18dfe3e9982b88459f714c61237c10f", "ref": "language", "authority_tier": "engine_derived"}, "shelf": "science", "box": "language", "bands": ["grimm's law", "verner's law", "sound change", "germanic", "consonant shift", "neogrammarian", "cognates"], "connections": [], "author": "engine", "created_at": "2026-07-10T02:06:03.344343+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-10T02:06:03.344343+00:00", "visibility": "public", "lifecycle_stage": "public", "volatility": "permanent", "surface": "secular", "metrics": {"paperclips_count": 0, "helpful_count": 0, "not_helpful_count": 0, "cite_count": 0, "walks_through_count": 0, "flagged_count": 0}, "source_hash": "447eeaa91a6e003168103564dc249bea68e7e5a1e2f36f3ba18619d9438ffc80"}