Intestinal Gas And The First Sound Shift

Somewhere around 1500 BC, people were running around Europe and parts of Asia speaking a language known to linguists as Indo-European. A group of folks, discovered by the Grimm Brothers, yes, those of fairy tale fame, shifted various sounds in their language about that time and began speaking something different from their neighbors. These people, clad in furs and steel helmets with horns and wings, were called "The Germanen," and this change in speaking became known as "the first sound shift." Why they made these shifts, no one knows. Perhaps the climate gave them perpetual head colds, perhaps a powerful warlord had a speech impediment. To keep one's position near the salt and one's head on one's shoulders, the socially mobile imitated his speech.
At any rate, the Grimm Brothers, when not soliciting gory stories from old ladies in the small villages around Marburg University, where they were studying, noticed some trends in different languages, one of which was the "p" sound. Apparently the Germanic people found the "P" sound to be not to their liking and changed it to the sound of "F". Thus the word "Pater" in Latin became "Fater" in the Germanic languages. And so the Germanic people went off to settle around Northern and Western Europe, there their languages morphed out into Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, German and, yes indeed, English.
Which brings us to intestinal gas . Take the simple, every day word "fart." While being vulgar and obscene to some, the very vernacular of flatulence is a striking example of the seismic linguistic change which led to our modern English. That simple word, in the Germanic tongues begins with "F," fis (I like that one, sounds like you get it from drinking too many carbonated beverages)is what the Swedes detect, while good Norwegian lytefisk causes a fjert. Sauerkraut gives the Germans Furzen, while we and the Dutch simply fart. Those people who kept the "P" like the Slavic and Romance languages view it differently. The Spanish do a pedo while their Italian cousins let fly a peto The French will waft a dainty pet, while the Czechs blast a prd and anything else that comes with it.
The point is, the next time you detect gas, and are disgusted by the vulgarity of it all, remember, what you are witnessing is the first sound shift in action.