Los hermanos Grimm vivieron durante el siglo XIX,
y resulta que fueron profesores.
Esto no es lo único que los hace especiales.
De hecho, ellos vivieron juntos la mayor parte de sus vidas.
Jacob nació en 1785, y fue un hombre bastante activo, aunque permaneció soltero toda su vida,
además fue el que se encargó de compilar los cuentos.
Wilhelm nació un año después, era enfermizo, pero se casó.
Él fue quien se encargó de reescribir los cuentos. Teoricamente, lo que hicieron
los hermanos Grimm fue ir a las granjas cercanas a su hogar
in Germany and talk to people. In theory, illiterate people, to find the stories
that had somehow passed through the sieve of history. That is. If an illiterate
grandmother were telling a story to her grandchildren that she had learned from
her illiterate grandmother which she in turn had learned from her illiterate
grandmother. These stories must go back to the very beginnings of culture. Now, it's
true that there were people who were trying to collect fairy tales before the
Grimm brothers did. They did them with specific reasons. Shal Pavo collected them
in order to have entertainments to read at court, and his versions of things like
Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are, in fact, highly, highly literate. However.
The Grimm brothers had something else in mind. Remember, Germany was not a country.
As we know it today. Until after the Franco-Prussian war, 1870, 71'. Germany
was the name of. A collection of different. City states. Principalities,
Deutsche's and so on. Where people mostly. Spoke German. England, France... These
were already well developed modern nations by the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Germans wanted to emulate them. Greece, Rome... With the great countries
of the classic era. Germany wanted to take its place along side them as well. The
Grimm Brothers sought to collect stories that would demonstrate the purity and
antiquity of the German Folk. These stories were meant, to bind the German
speaking peoples together, and to show th at they spoke for the oldest roots of
humanity. So their books were, Children and Household Tales, published in three
volumes in 1812, 1814, and 1822. Instantly they became enormously popular all over
Europe. In 1823, George Crook shank published an illustrated edition of all of
the tales that had come out. There were translations by one person, then another.
I've asked you to read the Lucy Crane translation, if you find that convenient,
from 1886. We now, that is the wide public, associate the Grimm brothers with
these fairy tales, but that, in fact, is not their only scholarly contribution.
Phonology. Is the study of the development of language sounds. And the Grimm
Brothers, particularly Jacob, were instrumental in coming up with the very
first law of phonological change. Now, let me see if I can make this. Palpable. If
you say the word, voices, voices and hold your voice box, when you see, say the s
sound in voice Your voice box doesn't move, but when you say the z sound at the
end of voices, zzzzzzs, you can feel the vibration in your voice box. Speech sounds
that use your voice box, zzzzz, are called voiced. Speech sounds that do not use your
voice box are called voiceless. The Grimm Brothers noticed something that anyone who
speak a large number of European languages would note that there are connections that
seem to be regular changes between some languages and others. What they realize
was that. If you go far enough back, say to Latin, you will find words that are
Voiceless, stops. That is. They are produced by stopping the air. And then
releasing it. Like i f you. Look at the development of romance languages. That is,
the languages that are based on Latin. The language of Rome. Those languages retain.
That very same sound. In words that have the consonant in the same place. So,
pater" I n Latin R emains, padre I n Spanish. But if you move to the Germanic
languages. German, English, Frisian, Deutsche. Those initial, voiceless stops
become voiceless frigatives. That is, sounds that are made by friction. Peter
becomes Pierre in French, Padre in Spanish, but Father in English, and Vater
in German. There are only three voiceless stops. Ptk. Peter becomes father. Today's.
Becomes trois in French. Tres in Spanish. But three in English. And Cornu as in
Cornucopia becomes horn in English. But remains ' cu' as in cuerno in Spanish. In
other words. You can find an absolutely regular shift in the phonology as you go
from some other language and they split into Germanic languages and Latinate
languages. This means it's possible to trace back to some hypothetical earlier
language and know how it was pronounced. This is the first phonological law. Now,
why were they concerned with this? Well, if you trace back to a common origin for
say, German and French, and it turns out you go back for a common origin between
say, Sanskrit and Hindi, you can keep right on going all the way back until you
get to a single earlier language, spoken between the fifth and the seventh millenia
before this era, called Indo-European. And that language is the oldest one to which
we, who might speak English or French, have access. What the Grimm brothers were
trying to do, in studying linguistics. Will show the direct line back from German
to something that even pre-dated Greek and Latin. So that the Greeks and the Latins,
those classic countries, had no real advantage in antiquity over the German.
You know, when you study The, the meanings of words. One of the things that one often
does is study etymology. Etymology most people define as the study of the history
of words, and that's a very useful thing to do because our words have in them
meanings that we might not really recognize but somehow they're still in
there. The, the, the fancy word for England is Albion, and it's called Albion.
Because when the Romans first got to the British Isles, and they came toward what
we now call the White Cliffs of Dover, the land seemed miraculous, because it was all
white. And alba is white in Latin. So that word Albion doesn't mean oh, a crummy way
of look ing at England, it means a wonderful way of looking at England and
you understand that better if you understand the etymology of the world
Albion, so you might think. Ology means the study of, etymon might mean history or
words. But it doesn't. Theology means study of, but the Greek work means truth.
Somehow. There is an intuitive belief that most people share, that if you understand
how something began, you understand what it really, really, is. The truth of the
words are in understanding their history. The truth of the culture is in
understanding the history of its language. The truth of human culture is in finding
those ever further back stories. That. The Grimm brothers saw it. In fact, they lied.
We know that. They sent their graduate students out to collect stories and they
gave them to Yacob and Yacob put together the stories that seemed like they might go
together. And then he gave that draft to Wilhem and Wilhem rewrote it so that
rewrote the story so that they would look appealing he had in mind and lots of
collections of folk tales and fairy tales that they'd already seen. Nominally. These
were tales from antiquity. In fact, the largest single source was a middle-class
housewife who lived a couple blocks down from them in Germany. And we know this
because we have access to their library. And hers. Why did this matter so much? As
I say, it was a nationalist project. In the year nine of our era. A Germanic
warrior named Arminius led a group of Germanic people to attack three full Roman
legions in the Tutebourg forest, near modern-day Ostneburg. It was a 3-day
encounter, but in one day. The Germans under Arminius wiped out all three
legions. At that time, and for most of the centuries thereafter, Rome had about 28
legions. In other words, ten%, more than ten percent of the military might of Rome
was destroyed on one day in Teutoburg Forest in nine of this era. The Romans
never again tried to attack what they called Germania. And to this day. A line
that goes east of the Rhine and north of the Danube separat es two cultures in
Europe. If you like you can call it the, the oil and butter line. On the west of
the line, the south of the line people cook with oil. On the right on the west
east I should say, and the north they cook with butter. Or you can call it the beer
and wine line. Alright, they have beer north and east of the Danube and the
Rhine. They have wine in the other areas. Those cultural realities stick with us to
this day. In the year 98, Tacitus published a, a booklet which talked about
these Germanic people. He referred to them as tall, strong, uncorruptible, mighty
warriors. Probably what he was trying to do was use the fear of attacking north of
the Danube as a way to get his fellow citizens, the Romans of his day, to be
less lazy and more militaristic, because he was trying to drum up their own
political vigor. But in fact, the story of Germania, Tassidus description of what the
Germans were like, although he probably had never met one, and certainly has never
gone to Germany, or to the area of all of those states that he collectively called
Germania. The existence of this booklet became a myth for German speaking people.
And in the year 1455, a copy of that book was found. And almost immediately, German
speaking people used this as a justification for trying to become
stronger and unify and make themselves into this great nation. As part of that
effort many people participated and so did the Grimm brothers. They didn't collect
their fairy tales, their, because they were trying to please children. They
collected them, because they were trying to show the might, antiquity, power and
uncorruptibility of the German people. Those are the stories you've just been