Comparative Linguistics

Linguists were looking at different languages and trying to identify how the pronunciation of certain words and sounds had changed over time. Much of this early work concerned sound changes from early versions of a language through later versions. But it was jacob grimm, the fairy tale collector, who built upon their earlier work and is the most famous researcher to day. Grimm's work began by comparing thousands of words in the germanic languages with words in other languages. He didn't just identify words that resembled each other; he looked for systematic patterns to explain the differences.