Grimm ’s Law fact or myth: Gessman (1990)

See Grimm's law fact or myth.pdf in the files section.

"Therefore, something must be wrong with the Germanic Consonant Shift.
That wrong thing cannot possibly be sought at the Germanic end
because the phonetic equation (Lat `pater'= Goth. Fadar, Lat tria=Goth
prija, Lat. Card=Goth hairt etc. etc.) that led to the conception of
Grimm's Law in the first place are unimpeachable. We have to conduct
our investigation at the Proto-Aryan (P-A) end (Gessman 1990, p. 6)."

"It can be safely assumed that these migrating tribes did not
represent large armies who overwhelmed the original inhabitants by the
sheer force of their numbers but were smallish bands who conquered
their new homes by their superiority in battle. Those original
inhabitants—undoubtedly greatly superior in numbers—saw themselves
forced to learn the respective languages (or still dialects of the
Aryan conquerors. It is difficult to see how one can doubt that these
substrata modified the newly acquired languages, and it stands to
reason to assume that influences from vastly different substrata were
one of the main causes for the conspicuous differentiation of the
Aryan languages in even their most ancient known forms (Gessman 1990,
p. 10)."

"Whichever the development may have been, we can see one thing
clearly. Grimm's Law, the `Germanic Consonant Shift," has evaporated.
The Proto-Aryan basis on which it had been predicated has vanished
(Gessman 1990, p.12)."

Gessman, A. M. (1990). Grimm's law: fact of myth. Language
Quarterly, 28:3-4, pp. 2-16.

M. Kelkar