Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm was born on 4 January 1785 in Hanau, Hesse-Kassel, and died on 20 September 1863 in Berlin. Remembered popularly for the fairy tale collection he compiled with his brother Wilhelm, he is significant to linguistics for his Deutsche Grammatik, a comparative grammar of the Germanic languages published in four volumes between 1819 and 1837. In the 1822 second edition of its first volume, he set out the systematic pattern of consonant correspondences between the Germanic languages and their Indo-European relatives now called Grimm's law, building on an earlier, narrower observation by the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask. Grimm's work, alongside Rask's and Franz Bopp's, established comparative philology as a rigorous method rather than a set of isolated observations.