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constitution as too liberal), the brothers Grimm settled in Berlin where they began their last and greatest project, the Deutsches Wörterbuch —a gigantic German dictionary documenting the history, etymology, and use of every word contained in three centuries of literature from Luther to Goethe. Certain scholarly projects are, like medieval cathedrals, too vast for completion in the lifetimes of their architects. Wilhelm never got past D ; Jacob lived to see the letter F .
    Speaking in Calcutta, during the infancy of the British raj in 1786, the philologist William Jones first noted impressive similarities between Sanskrit and the classical languages of Greece and Rome (an Indian king, or raja, matches rex , his Latin counterpart). Jones’s observation led to the recognition of a great Indo-European family of languages, now spread from the British Isles and Scandinavia to India, but clearly rooted in a single, ancient origin. Jones may have marked the basic similarity, but the brothers Grimm were among the first to codify regularities of change that underpin the diversification of the rootstock into its major subgroups (Romance languages, Germanic tongues, and so on). Grimm’s law, you see, does not state that all frogs shall turn into princes by the story’s end, but specifies the characteristic changes in consonants between Proto-Indo-European (as retained in Latin) and the Germanic languages. Thus, for example, Latin p ’s become f ’s in Germanic cognates (voiceless stops become voiceless fricatives in the jargon). The Latin pl num becomes “full” ( voll , pronounced “foll” in German); piscis becomes “fish” ( Fisch in German); and p s becomes “foot” ( Fuss in German). (Since English is an amalgam of a Germanic stock with Latin-based imports from the Norman conquest, our language has added Latin cognates to Anglo-Saxon roots altered according to Grimm’s law —plenty, piscine , and podiatry . We can even get both for the price of one in plentiful .)
    I first learned about Grimm’s law in a college course more than twenty-five years ago. Somehow, the idea that the compilers of Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin also gave the world a great scholarly principle in linguistics struck me as one of the sweetest little facts I ever learned—a statement, symbolic at least, about interdisciplinary study and the proper contact of high and vernacular culture. I have wanted to disgorge this tidbit for years and am delighted that this essay finally provided an opportunity.
    A great dream of unification underlay the observations of Jones and the codification of systematic changes by Jacob Grimm. Nearly all the languages of Europe (with such fascinating exceptions as Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish) could be joined to a pathway that spread through Persia all the way to India via Sanskrit and its derivatives. An origin in the middle, somewhere in the Near East, seemed indicated, and such “fossil” Indo-European tongues as Hittite support this interpretation. Whether the languages were spread, as convention dictates, by conquering nomadic tribes on horseback or, as Colin Renfrew argues in his recent book ( Archaeology and Language , 1987), more gently and passively by the advantages of agriculture, evidence points to a single source with a complex history of proliferation in many directions.
    Might we extend the vision of unity even further? Could we link Indo-European with the Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic) languages of the so-called Afro-Asiatic stock; the Altaic languages of Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan; the Dravidian tongues of southern India; even to the native Amerindian languages of the New World? Could the linkages extend even further to the languages of southeastern Asia (Chinese, Thai, Malay, Tagalog), the Pacific Islands, Australia, and New Guinea, even (dare one dream) to the most different tongues of southern Africa, including the Khoisan family with its complex clicks and implosions?
    Most scholars balk at