1504: Greater Impact Grimm's Law (g.l.5) Jan 24, 2019

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Over the last few days this blog has talked about the linguistic aspects of Grimm's Law, and while these may seem minor, at the time even to a non-linguistic community this was earth-shattering. While the notion of the Indo-European language family was posited as early as 1786, some of the most conclusive evidence came with Grimm's Law. This suggested that there was once a common language, culture, and genealogy to most of the peoples across Europe, and some of the Middle East and India, which, in an age of legalized racism and colonialism did not sit well with many people. However, as discussed in the post about the term 'aryan', this idea was quickly adopted by both sides of any extreme view on the issue.
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