Linguistic XperiMint

Here's something by one of our distinguished members of ANALOG. It was presented during ARTSaha! this summer.

"Jacob Grimm, one of the co-authors of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is also well-known for discovering Grimm's law - a linguistic theory explaining how consonant sounds relate between different languages with Indo-European roots. Thus, the Latin word Pisces becomes fish in English; Latin p corresponds to English f. Similarly the Latin word flor, in addition to giving us the word flower, corresponds to the English word blossom, Latin f relating to English b. Obviously this does not work for all words, but is helpful in deducing a word origin.

Based on a simplified adaptation of this law, I have produced a version of the story of Rumpelstiltskin from Grimm's fairy tales. By swapping consonants from English to their corresponding letters in Latin according to Grimm's law, a new language is created that seems vaguely like English. In this version, the queen must guess the name of Rumbelsdildsgin and not Rumpelstiltskin." - Garrison

Rumbelsdildsgin by Geoffrey Garrison 2004