At Heather’s impetus, I, too, will emerge from the depths of winter-holiday-season office decampment to wish for and wonder about a book. 

The tie between folklore and linguistics may seem flimsy to those not buried in a world of fricatives and syntax, vowel shifts and universal grammar. (I often worry over the difficulty of linguistics for lay readers and why the study hasn’t yet been very popularized.) But the Grimm brothers saw a very close tie, and I’ve been told (albeit by a biased linguistics professor) that they began their accumulation of fairy tales for language study purposes. Give me a good biography to prove it!

The Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes got a good review from LJ at first publication in 1988 and after being updated in 2002, but its focus on the literariness of the tales is clear. 

I would love to see a linguistic biography of the brothers. Jacob is responsible for Grimm’s Law, which can be used to trace English words to their Indo-European predecessors, to find the links between English words and their German, Latin, and even Hindi counterparts, and to recreate ancient, extinct parent languages.

Now, if someone could find a way to explain this fascinating history in an accessible way (maybe via the Grimms’s lives and studies, nudge, nudge), I would be one very happy reader.

And please, by all means, any of you secret linguistics enthusiasts out there, let me know of any easy-to-read linguistics books that exist!  (I’ll check out my shelf of college linguistics textbooks, but something tells me I won’t come up with too much to recommend in the layperson’s linguistics category.)