[BLANK_AUDIO]
The Grimm Brothers, who lived in the 18th
and 19th Century, were as it happens professors.
That's not the only thing that made them weird.
In fact, they lived together almost their entire lives.
Jacob was born in 1785, and he was a
rather active fellow stayed a bachelor his whole life,
and was the chief compiler of their tales. Wilhelm was born a year later,
was sickly, but he married, and he was the chief re-writer of their tales.
Their tales. Well, in theory, what the Grimm brothers
did was go around to the farms in the areas near where they lived in Germany,
and talked 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.
Charles Perrault 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, duchies, and so on, where people mostly spoke German.
England, France, these were already well developed modern
nations by the beginning of the 19th century.
Germans wanted to emulate them. Greece,
Rome were 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 that
they spoke for the oldest roots of humanity.
So, their books were Kinder- und Hausmarchen, Children and Household
Tales, published in three volumes in 1812, 1814 and 1822.
Instantly, they
became enormously popular all over Europe.
In 1823, George Cruikshank published an illustrated edition
of all of the tales that had come out.
There were translations by one person and 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 in fact that is not their only scholarly contribution.
Phrenology 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, you can feel the vibration in your voice box.
Speech sounds that use your voice box, ZZZ, are called voiced.
Speech sounds that do not use your voice box are called voiceless.
The Grimm brothers noticed something that anyone who speaks 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 realized 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 p, p.
If you look at the development of Romance languages, that
is, 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, in Latin, remains padre in Spanish.
But if you move to the Germanic languages, German, English, Frisian, Dutch,
those initial voiceless stops become
voiceless fricatives. That is, sounds that are made by friction.
So, pater becomes Père in French, Padre in Spanish.
But father in English, and Vater in German.
There are only 3 voiceless stops, P, T, K. P T K.
Pater becomes father, tres becomes
trois in French, tres in Spanish,
but three in English. And cornu,
as in cornucopia, becomes horn in English,
but remains k, 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
seventh millennia 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 predated
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 looking at England.
It means a wonderful way of looking at England, and you
understand that better if you understand the etymology of the word 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 word etymon means truth.
Somehow,
[COUGH]
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 sought. In fact,
[COUGH]
they lied.
We know that they sent their graduate students out to collect stories.
And they gave them to Jacob, and Jacob put
together the stories that seemed like they might go together.
And then he gave the draft to Wilhelm, and Wilhelm rewrote
it so that, rewrote the stories so that they would look appealing.
He had in mind Charles Perrault, and lots of other collections of folk
tales, or fairy tales, that they'd already seen.
Nominally, these were tales from antiquity.
In fact, the largest single source was a middle class house
wife, who lived a couple of 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 Teutoburg Forest near modern day Osnabruck.
It was a three day encounter, but in one day, the Germans
under Arminius wiped out all three legions.
At that time, and for most of the
centuries there after, Rome had about 28 legions.
In other words 10%, more than 10% 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 separates two cultures in Europe.
If you like, you can call it the, the oil and butter line.
On the west of the line and the south of the line, people cook with oil.
On the right, on the we-, east I should say, and the north they cook with butter.
Or you can call it the beer and wine line, all right.
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, uncorruptable, 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, Tacitus description of
what the Germans were like, although he probably had never
met one and certainly had never gone to Germany or
the area of all 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 Kinder-Und
Hausmarchen, because they were trying to please children.
They collected them because they were trying to show the might, antiquity,
power, and un-corruptibility of the German people.
Those are the stories you've just been reading.