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To see how the sound change commonly referred to as "Grimm's Law" transformed the sounds of certain Indo-European consonants into their Germanic descendents, click on the word boxes below.¹

 The consonants p t k, belonging to the class of sounds known as voiceless stops, underwent a series of changes that resulted in f x (voiceless fricatives) in Germanic:

 

 

This created a gap in the phonological system previously occupied by the voiceless stops, a gap that the IE voiced stops moved to occupy. Thus b d g become p t k in Germanic:

The IE consonants bh dh gh, belonging to the class of sounds known as aspirated stops, underwent a series of changes that resulted in b d g (voiced stops) in Germanic:

These sounds had been the first to "shift," but they had shifted to an intermediate class of sounds, voiced fricatives: . After the IE voiced stops had become voiceless stops, these voiced fricatives moved to occupy that vacated category, becoming voiced stops.

¹Forms, meanings, and derivations are from Calvert Watkins, ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985). [back]