Proto-Germanic (often abbreviated PGmc.), or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language. Comparative reconstruction, usually referred to just as common ancestor (proto-language A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead) of all the Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a such as modern English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of, Frisian The Frisian languages are a closely related group of Germanic languages, spoken by about 500,000 members of Frisian ethnic groups, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. The Frisian languages are the most closely related living European languages to English, although Scots is sometimes, Dutch Dutch ( Nederlands ) is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language and over 5 million people as a second language. Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other, Afrikaans Afrikaans is a South African language originating from the Dutch spoken by settlers in Africa in the seventeenth century. Despite the fact that Afrikaans developed in Africa and is unique to the region, it is classified as Low Franconian West Germanic due to the fact that it originates from Dutch. Aside from English, Afrikaans deviates the, German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers, Luxembourgish Luxembourgish , is a Moselle Franconian language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 390,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish, Danish Danish (dansk, pronounced [d̥ænˀsɡ̊] ) is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, Norwegian Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants (see Danish language), Icelandic Icelandic ( íslenska ) is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese, Faroese Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000[citation needed] Faroese in Denmark and elsewhere. It is one of four languages descended from the Old West Norse language spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Icelandic, Norwegian and the extinct Norn, which is thought to have been mutually, and Swedish Swedish ( svenska ) is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along.^[1]

The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language. Comparative reconstruction, usually referred to just as using the comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal development of a single language over time. Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct. However, a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark ; the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the same from Scandinavia Scandinavia is a region in northern Europe that includes Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Modern Norway and Sweden form the Scandinavian Peninsula. The name Scandinavia is considered to have the same etymology as Scania. Finland is sometimes considered a Scandinavian country in common English usage, and Iceland and the Faroe Islands are sometimes also dated to c. 200 are thought to represent a stage of Proto-Norse Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved from Proto-Germanic over the first centuries AD. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken ca. from the 3rd to 7th centuries ( or, according to Bernard Comrie Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. He is a professor at and director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 1985 and 1986 he spent 12 months in New Guinea in the field, Late Common Germanic immediately following the "Proto-Germanic" stage.^[2] Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed (PIE).

Words in Proto-Germanic written in this article are transcribed using the system described below under transcription.

Evolution of Proto-Germanic

The evolution of Proto-Germanic began with the separation of a common way of speech among some geographically proximate speakers of a prior language and ended with the dispersion of the proto-language speakers into distinct populations practicing their own speech habits. Between those two points many sound changes occurred.

Archaeological contributions

In one major^{[citation needed]} theory of Andrev V Bell-Fialkov, Christopher Kaplonski, Wiliam B Mayer, Dean S Rugg, Rebeca W, Wendelken about Germanic origins, Indo-European speakers arrived on the plains of southern Sweden Sweden (pronounced /ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən, Swedish: Sverige [ˈsvær.jə]), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and water borders with Denmark, Germany and and Jutland Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, forms the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German border to its south. The German state of Schleswig Holstein is part of the Cimbrian Peninsula but not part of Jutland, the center of the Urheimat Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language or "original home" of the Germanic peoples The Germanic peoples are a historical ethno-linguistic group, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages, which diversified out of Common Germanic in the course of the Pre-Roman Iron Age. The descendants of these peoples became, and in many areas contributed to, the ethnic groups of North, prior to the Nordic Bronze Age The Nordic Bronze Age is the name given by Oscar Montelius to a period and a Bronze Age culture in Scandinavian pre-history, c. 1700-500 BC, with sites that reached as far east as Estonia. Succeeding the Late Neolithic culture, its ethnic and linguistic affinities are unknown in the absence of written sources. It is followed by the Pre-Roman Iron, which began about 4500 years ago Categories: 3rd millennium BC | 25th century BC | Centuries. This is the only area where no pre-Germanic place names have been found.^[3] The region was certainly populated before then; the lack of names must indicate an Indo-European settlement so ancient and dense that the previously assigned names were completely replaced. If archaeological horizons are at all indicative of shared language (not a straightforward assumption), the Indo-European speakers are to be identified with the much more widely ranged Cord-impressed ware or Battle-axe culture The Corded Ware culture, alternatively characterized as the Battle Axe culture or Single Grave culture is an enormous European archaeological horizon that begins in the late Neolithic , flourishes through the Copper Age and finally culminates in the early Bronze Age, developing in various areas from ca. 3200 BC/2900 BC to ca. 2300 BC/1800 BC. It and possibly also with the preceding Funnel-necked beaker culture The Funnelbeaker culture, short TRB from Trichterrandbecherkultur (ca 4000 BC–2700 BC) is the principal north central European megalithic culture of late Neolithic Europe developing towards the end of the Neolithic The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE in the Middle East that is traditionally considered the last part of the Stone Age. The Neolithic followed the terminal Holocene Epipalaeolithic period, beginning with the rise of farming, which produced the " culture of Western Europe.^[4][5]

Proto-Germanic then evolved from the Indo-European spoken in the Urheimat region. The succession of archaeological horizons suggests that before their language differentiated into the individual Germanic branches the Proto-Germanic speakers lived in southern Scandinavia and along the coast from the Netherlands in the west to the Vistula in the east around 750 BC).^[6]

Evidence in other languages

In some non-Germanic languages spoken in areas adjacent to Germanic speaking areas, there are loanwords believed to have been borrowed from Proto-Germanic. Some of these words are (with the reconstructed form in P-N): rõngas (Estonian) / rengas (Finnish) < *hrengaz (ring), kuningas (Finnish) < *kuningaz Germanic monarchy, also called barbarian monarchy, was a monarchical system of government which was predominant among the Germanic tribes of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is often contrasted with feudal monarchy and national monarchy, the later medieval systems which developed out of it (king),^[2] ruhtinas (Finnish) < *druhtinaz *Druhtinaz is a Common Germanic term meaning "lord", properly designating a military leader or warlord. After Christianisation, the term began to be used for God (meaning the Lord) both in English and in the Scandinavian languages (lord), silt (Estonian) < *skild (tag, token), märk/ama (Estonian) < *mērke (to spot, to catch sight of), riik (Estonian) < *rik (state, land, commonwealth), väärt (Estonian) < *vaērd (worth), kapp (Estonian) / "kaappi" (Finnish) < *skap (chest of drawers; shelf)^{[citation needed]}

Linguistic definitions

By definition, Proto-Germanic is the stage of the language constituting the most recent common ancestor of the attested Germanic languages, dated to the latter half of the first millennium BC. The post-PIE The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed dialects spoken throughout the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly 2500–500 BC, even though they may have no attested descendants other than the Germanic languages, are referred to as "Germanic Parent Language Germanic Parent Language is a term used in historical linguistics to describe the chain of reconstructed languages in the Germanic group referred to as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc), Early Proto-Germanic (EPGmc), and Late Proto-Germanic (LPGmc). It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. As an identifiable neologism,", "pre-Proto-Germanic" or more commonly "pre-Germanic."^[7] By 250 BC, Proto-Germanic had branched into five groups of Germanic (two each in West and North, and one in East).^[6]

In historical linguistics Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity, Proto-Germanic is a node in the tree model In historical linguistics, the Tree Model is a model of language change in which daughter languages are genetically descended from a proto-language through a regular process of gradual change and is due in its most strict formulation to the Neogrammarians. The model relies on earlier conceptions of William Jones and Franz Bopp by adding the; that is, if the descent of languages can be compared to a biological family tree, Proto-Germanic appears as a point, or node, from which all the daughter languages branch, and is itself at the end of a branch leading from another node, Proto-Indo-European The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed.^[8] One of the problems with the node^[6] is that it implies the existence of a fixed language in which all the laws defining it apply simultaneously. Proto-Germanic, however, must be regarded as a diachronic sequence of sound changes, each law or group of laws only becoming operant after previous changes.^[9]

To the evolutionary history of a language family, a genetic "tree model" is considered appropriate only if communities do not remain in effective contact as their languages diverge. Early IE was computed to have featured limited contact between distinct lineages, while only the Germanic subfamily exhibited a less treelike behaviour as it acquired some characteristics from neighbours early in its evolution rather than from its direct ancestors. The internal diversification of especially West Germanic is cited to have been radically non-treelike.^[10]

W. P. Lehmann Winfred P. Lehmann was a historical linguist who served as the director of the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin from 1961 until his death considered that Jacob Grimm Jakob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author (with his brother) of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and more popularly, as one of the Brothers Grimm, as the editor of Grimm's Fairy Tales's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's Law Grimm's law named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic (PGmc, the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and Verner's Law Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h , when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g (and *gʷ),^[11] which pertained mainly to consonants and were considered for a good many decades to have generated Proto-Germanic, were pre-Proto-Germanic, and that the "upper boundary" was the fixing of the accent, or stress, on the root syllable of a word, typically the first.^[12] Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch accent comprising "an alternation of high and low tones"^[13] as well as stress of position determined by a set of rules based on the lengths of the word's syllables.

The fixation of the stress led to sound changes in unstressed syllables. For Lehmann, the "lower boundary" was the dropping of final -a or -e in unstressed syllables; for example, post-PIE *woyd-á > Gothic wait, "knows" (the > and < signs in linguistics indicate a genetic descent). Antonsen agreed with Lehmann about the upper boundary^[14] but later found runic The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark ; the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the same evidence that the -a was not dropped: ékwakraz ... wraita, "I wakraz ... wrote (this)." He says: "We must therefore search for a new lower boundary for Proto-Germanic."^[15]

His own scheme divides Proto-Germanic into an early and a late. The early includes the stress fixation and resulting "spontaneous vowel-shifts" while to define the late he lists ten complex rules governing changes of both vowels and consonants.^[16]

Other Indo-European loans

Loans into Proto-Germanic from other Indo-European languages can be relatively dated by their conformance to Germanic sound changes. As the dates of neither the borrowings nor the sound changes are known with any precision, the utility of the loans for absolute, or calendar, chronology has been nil.

Most loans from Celtic The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in central Gaul. During the 1st appear to have been made before the First Grimm Shift.^[17] An example of a Celtic loan is *rīk "wealthy" from Celtic *rīgos "king", with g > k.^[18] It was not borrowed from Latin (rex) because Celtic alone has -ī-. Another is *walhaz "foreigner; Celt" from the Celtic tribal name Volcae, with c > h. Other likely Celtic loans include *ambahtaz 'servant', *brunjōn 'mailshirt', *gīslaz 'hostage', *īsarna 'iron', *lēkijaz 'doctor', *lauðan 'lead', *Rīnaz 'Rhine', and *tūnaz, tūnan 'fortified enclosure'.^[19][20] These loans would likely have been borrowed during the Celtic hegemony of the Hallstatt Culture The Hallstatt culture was the predominant Central European culture from the 8th to 6th centuries BC , developing out of the Urnfield culture of the 12th century BC (Late Bronze Age) and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture, although the period spanned several centuries.

From East Iranian The Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages emerging in Middle Iranian times . The Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian, but this is uncertain. The largest living Eastern Iranian language is Pashto with some 40 million speakers, a major language of Afghanistan and western Pakistan. As opposed to have come *hanapiz 'hemp' (cf. Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically kanab), *humalaz, humalōn 'hops' (cf. Ossete Ossetian , also sometimes called Ossete, is an East Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains xumællæg), *keppōn, skēpan 'sheep' (cf. Pers čapiš 'yearling kid'), *kurtilaz 'tunic' (cf. Ossete k^wəræt 'shirt'), *kutan 'cottage' (cf. Pers kad 'house'), *paidō 'cloak',^[21] *pathaz 'path' (cf. Avestan pantā, g. pathō), and *wurstwa 'work' (cf. Av vərəštuua).^[22][23] These words were surely transmitted by either the Scythians or later groups such as the Sarmatians from the Ukraine plain where Germanic peoples and Iranians had protracted interaction. Unsure is *marhaz 'horse', which was either borrowed directly from Scytho-Sarmatian or through Celtic mediation.

Non-Indo-European elements

The term substrate with reference to Proto-Germanic refers to lexical and phonological items that do not appear to be explained by Indo-European etymological principles. The substrate theory postulates that these elements came from a prior population that remained among the Indo-Europeans and was sufficiently influential to transmit some elements of its own language. The theory of a non-Indo-European substrate was first proposed by Sigmund Feist, who estimated that about 1/3 of the Proto-Germanic lexical items came from the substrate.^[24]

Phonology

Consonants

The table below^[6] lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic classified by reconstructed pronunciation. The slashes around the phonemes are omitted for clarity. Two phonemes in the same box connected by "or" represent allophones, which are explained below. For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms follow the links on the headings.^[25]

Grimm's law

Grimm's law as applied to pre-proto-Germanic is a chain shift of the original Indo-European stop consonants:

p, t, and k did not change after a fricative (such as s) or other stops; for example, where Latin (with the original t) has stella "star" and octo "eight", Middle Dutch has ster and acht (with unshifted t).^[28] This original t merged with the shifted t from the voiced consonant; that is, most of the instances of /t/ came from either the original /t/ or the shifted /t/.

A similar shift on the consonant inventory of Proto-Germanic later generated High German. McMahon says: "Grimm's and Verner's Laws ... together form the First Germanic Consonant Shift. A second, and chronologically later Second Germanic Consonant Shift ... affected only Proto-Germanic voiceless stops ... and split Germanic into two sets of dialects, Low German in the north ... and High German further south ...."^[29]

Verner's law

Verner's Law addresses a category of exceptions to Grimm's Law, in which a voiced fricative appears where Grimm's Law predicts a voiceless fricative. For example, PIE *bhrátēr > PGmc. *brōþēr "brother" but PIE *mātér > PGmc. *mōðēr "mother." The law states that unvoiced fricatives: /s/, /f/, /θ/, /x/ are voiced when preceded by an unaccented syllable, but the accent system is the PIE one in Pre-Proto-Germanic. Verner's Law therefore follows Grimm's Law in time and precedes the Proto-Germanic stress accent. The voicing of some /s/ according to Verner's Law produced /z/, a new phoneme.^[6]

The allophones

Sometimes the shift produced consonants that were pronounced differently (allophones) depending on the context of the original. With regard to original /k/ or /kʷ/ Trask says: "The resulting */x/ or */xʷ/ were reduced to /h/ and /hʷ/ in word-initial position."^[30]

The double letters in the phonemes of the table represent consonants that have been lengthened or prolonged under some circumstances, appearing in some daughter languages as geminated graphemes. The phenomenon is therefore termed gemination. Kraehenmann says:^[31] "Then, Proto-Germanic already had long consonants ... but they contrasted with short ones only word-medially. Moreover, they were not very frequent and occurred only intervocally almost exclusively after short vowels."

The phonemes /b/, /d/, /g/ and /gʷ/ says Ringe "were stops in some environments and fricatives in others. The pattern of allophony is not clear in every detail."^[32] The fricatives merged with the fricatives of Verner's Law (see above). Whether they were all fricatives at first or both stops and fricatives remains unknown. Some known rules:

• Stops appeared after homorganic nasal consonants (had the same place of articulation); for example, n produced a following [d].
• Gemination produced [b], [d], [g].
• Word-initial /b/ and /d/ were or became [b] and [d].
• /d/ was [d] after l or z.

Vowels

• Proto-Germanic had four short vowels (i, u, e, a), four or five long vowels (ī, ū, ē, ō and perhaps ǣ), and at least one "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel (ô). The exact phonetic quality of the vowels is uncertain.
• PIE a and o merge into Proto-Germanic a, PIE ā and ō merge into Proto-Germanic ō. At the time of the merge, the vowels probably were [ɒ] and [ɒː] before their timbres differentiated into maybe [ɑ] and [ɔː]^{[citation needed]}.
• ǣ and ē are also transcribed as ē¹ and ē²; ē² is uncertain as a phoneme, and only reconstructed from a small number of words; it is posited by the comparative method because whereas all provable instances of inherited (PIE) *ē (PGmc. *ē¹) are distributed in Gothic as ē and the other Germanic languages as *ā, all the Germanic languages agree on some occasions of ē (e.g., Got./OE/ON hēr "here" < PGmc. *hē²r). Krahe treats ē² (secondary ē) as identical with ī. It probably continues PIE ei or ēi, and it may have been in the process of transition from a diphthong to a long simple vowel in the Proto-Germanic period. Gothic makes no orthographic and therefore presumably no phonetic distinction between ē¹ and ē². The existence of two Proto-Germanic [eː]-like phonemes is supported by the existence of two e-like Elder Futhark runes, Ehwaz and Eihwaz.
• Proto-Germanic had at least one "overlong" vowel ô (possibly also ê).^[33] This occurred in the last syllable of a word, and possibly elsewhere as well. ô is distinguished from ō by the fact that reflexes of the former show up as long vowels while reflexes of the latter are short vowels. There has been a great deal of debate over both the nature of this sound in Proto-Germanic and its origin. Older theories claimed that ô and ō were both long but were distinguished in that ô had a circumflex accent while ō had an acute accent, and asserted that this distinction was inherited from PIE. Newer theories claim that ô was greater in length than ō, and originated mostly through the contraction of directly adjacent vowels, e.g. plural *wulfôz "wolves" < pre-Germanic *wl̥po-es.
• Vowels in unstressed syllables were gradually reduced over time, beginning at the very end of the Proto-Germanic period and continuing into the history of the various dialects. This is reflected to the least extent in Proto-Norse, with steadily greater reduction in Gothic, Old High German, Old English, Modern German and Modern English.
• Vowels could also be nasalized or non-nasal. Whether and to what extent this distinction was phonemic is a matter of debate. Phonemic nasal vowels definitely occurred in Proto-Norse and Old Norse down to at least 1125 AD (the earliest possible time for the creation of the First Grammatical Treatise, which documents nasal vowels), and surface (possibly phonemic) nasal/non-nasal contrasts occurred in the West Germanic languages down through Proto-Anglo-Frisian of 400 AD or so. There are apparent examples indicating that phonemic nasality must have occurred at some stage of Proto-Germanic, e.g. the three-way distinction of final -u/-ũ/-un in *fehu "livestock" vs. *nahtũ "night (acc.)" vs. tehun "ten". However, since final -ũ comes from earlier -un while final -un comes from earlier -und, it could be claimed that Proto-Germanic actually had an underlying phonemic contrast -u/-un/-und and that the development of phonemic nasality occurred only after Proto-Norse split off.

Transcription

The following conventions are used for transcribing Proto-Germanic forms:

• Voiced velar obstruents appear as b, d, g; this does not imply any particular analysis of the underlying phonemes as stops /b/, /d/, /g/ or fricatives /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/.
• Unvoiced velar fricatives appear as f, þ, h (perhaps /f/, /θ/, /x/).
• Labiovelars appear as kw, hw, gw; this does not imply any particular analysis as single sounds (e.g. /kʷ/, /xʷ/, /gʷ/) or clusters (e.g. /kw/, /xw/, /gw/).
• Long vowels appear as e.g. ō /oː/.
• Nasal vowels appear as e.g. oN /õ/.
• Overlong vowels appear as e.g. ô /oːː/.
• Nasal overlong vowels appear as e.g. ôN /õːː/.
• The "yod" sound appears as j /j/. Note that the normal convention for representing this sound in Proto-Indo-European is y; the use of j does not imply any actual change in the pronunciation of the sound.
• Diphthongs appear as ai, au, eu, iu. However, when immediately followed by the corresponding semivowel, they appear as ajj, aww, eww, iww. This convention is based on the usage in Don Ringe's recent book From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.

Morphology

Historical linguistics can tell us much about Proto-Germanic. However, it should be kept in mind that these postulations are tentative and multiple reconstructions (with varying degrees of difference) exist. All reconstructed forms are marked with an asterisk (*).

Simplification of the inflectional system

It is often asserted that Germanic languages have a highly reduced system of inflections as compared with Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. Although this is true to some extent, it is probably due more to the late time of attestation of Germanic than to any inherent "simplicity" of the Germanic languages. As an example, there are less than 500 years between the Gothic Gospels of 360 AD and the Old High Germanic Tatian of 830 AD, yet Old High Germanic, despite being the most archaic of West Germanic languages, is missing a large number of archaic features present in Gothic, including dual and passive markings on verbs, reduplication in Class VII strong verb past tenses, the vocative case, and second-position (Wackernagel's Law) clitics. Many more archaic features may have been lost between the Proto-Germanic of 200 BC or so and the attested Gothic language. Furthermore, Proto-Romance and Middle Indic of the fourth century AD—contemporaneous with Gothic—were significantly simpler than Latin and Sanskrit, respectively, and overall probably no more archaic than Gothic. In addition, some parts of the inflectional systems of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were innovations that were not present in Proto-Indo-European.

General morphological features

Proto-Germanic had six cases, three genders, three numbers, three moods (indicative, subjunctive < PIE optative, imperative), two voices (active, passive < PIE middle). This is quite similar to the state of Latin, Greek, and Middle Indo-Aryan of c. 200 AD.

Nouns and adjectives were declined in (at least) six cases: vocative, nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, genitive. Sparse remnants of the earlier locative and ablative cases are visible in a few pronominal and adverbial forms. Pronouns were declined similarly, although without a separate vocative form. The instrumental and vocative can be reconstructed only in the singular; the instrumental survives only in the West Germanic languages, and the vocative only in Gothic.

Verbs and pronouns had three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. Although the pronominal dual survived into all the oldest languages, the verbal dual survived only into Gothic, and the (presumed) nominal and adjectival dual forms were lost before the oldest records. As in the Italic languages, it may have been lost before Proto-Germanic became a different branch at all.

Nouns

The system of nominal declensions was largely inherited from PIE. Primary nominal declensions were the stems in /a/, /ō/, /n/, /i/, and /u/. The first three were particularly important and served as the basis of adjectival declension; there was a tendency for nouns of all other classes to be drawn into them. The first two had variants in /ja/ and /wa/, and /jō/ and /wō/, respectively; originally, these were declined exactly like other nouns of the respective class, but later sound changes tended to distinguish these variants as their own subclasses. The /n/ nouns had various subclasses, including /ōn/ (masculine and feminine), /an/ (neuter), and /īn/ (feminine, mostly abstract nouns). There was also a smaller class of root nouns (ending in various consonants), nouns of relationship (ending in /er/), and neuter nouns in /z/ (this class was greatly expanded in German). Present participles, and a few nouns, ended in /nd/. The neuter nouns of all classes differed from the masculines and feminines in their nominative and accusative endings, which were alike.

Adjectives

Adjectives agree with the noun they qualify in case, number, and gender. Adjectives evolved into strong and weak declensions, originally with indefinite and definite meaning, respectively. As a result of its definite meaning, the weak form came to be used in the daughter languages in conjunction with demonstratives and definite articles. The terms "strong" and "weak" are based on the later development of these declensions in languages such as German and Old English, where the strong declensions have more distinct endings. In the proto-language, as in Gothic, such terms have no relevance. The strong declension was based on a combination of the nominal /a/ and /ō/ stems with the PIE pronominal endings; the weak declension was based on the nominal /n/ declension.

Determiners

Proto-Germanic had a demonstrative which could serve as both a demonstrative adjective and a demonstrative pronoun. In daughter languages, it evolved into the definite article and various other demonstratives.

Verbs

Proto-Germanic had only two tenses (past and present), compared to the six or seven in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Some of this difference is due to deflexion, featured by a loss of tenses present in Proto-Indo-European, for example the perfect tense. However, many of the tenses of the other languages (future, future perfect, probably pluperfect, perhaps imperfect) appear to be separate innovations in each of these languages, and were not present in Proto-Indo-European.^{[citation needed]}

The main area where the Germanic inflectional system is noticeably reduced is the tense system of the verbs, with only two tenses, present and past. However:

• Later Germanic languages (for instance Modern English) have a more elaborated tense system, derived through periphrastic constructions.
• PIE may have had as few as three "tenses" (present, aorist, perfect), which had primarily aspectual value, with secondary tensal values. The future tense was probably rendered using the optative and/or desiderative verbs. Other tenses were derived in the history of the individual languages through various means (originally periphrastic constructions, such as the augment /e-/ of Greek and Sanskrit and the /-b-/ forms of Latin, derived from the PIE verb /bʱuː/ one form of verb "be"; reinterpretation of subjunctive and desiderative formations as the future; analogical formations).

Verbs in Proto-Germanic were divided into two main groups, called "strong" and "weak", according to the way the past tense is formed. Strong verbs use ablaut (i.e. a different vowel in the stem) and/or reduplication (derived primarily from the Proto-Indo-European perfect tense), while weak verbs use a dental suffix (now generally held to be a reflex of the reduplicated imperfect of PIE *dheH₁- originally "put", in Germanic "do"). Strong verbs were divided into seven main classes while weak verbs were divided into five main classes (although no attested language has more than four classes of weak verbs). Strong verbs generally have no suffix in the present tense, although some have a -j- suffix that is a direct continuation of the PIE -y- suffix, and a few have an -n- suffix or infix that continues the -n- infix of PIE. Almost all weak verbs have a present-tense suffix, which varies from class to class. An additional small, but very important, group of verbs formed their present tense from the PIE perfect tense (and their past tense like weak verbs); for this reason, they are known as preterite-present verbs. All three of the previously mentioned groups of verbs—strong, weak and preterite-present—are derived from PIE thematic verbs; an additional very small group derives from PIE athematic verbs, and one verb *wiljanaN "to want" forms its present indicative from the PIE optative mood.

Proto-Germanic verbs have three moods—indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The subjunctive mood derives from the PIE optative mood. Indicative and subjunctive moods are fully conjugated throughout the present and past, while the imperative mood existed only in the present tense and lacked first-person forms. Proto-Germanic verbs have two voices, active and passive, the latter deriving from the PIE mediopassive voice. The Proto-Germanic passive existed only in the present tense (an inherited feature, as the PIE perfect had no mediopassive). On the evidence of Gothic—the only Germanic language with a reflex of the Proto-Germanic passive—the passive voice had a significantly reduced inflectional system, with a single form used for all persons of the dual and plural. Note that, although Old Norse has an inflected mediopassive, it is not inherited from Proto-Germanic, but is an innovation formed by attaching the reflexive pronoun to the active voice.

Although most Proto-Germanic strong verbs are formed directly from a verbal root, weak verbs are generally derived from an existing noun, verb or adjective (so-called denominal, deverbal and deadjectival verbs). For example, a significant subclass of Class I weak verbs are (deverbal) causative verbs. These are formed in a way that reflects a direct inheritance from the PIE causative class of verbs. PIE causatives were formed by adding an accented affix -éy- to the o-grade of a non-derived verb. In Proto-Germanic, causatives are formed by adding a suffix -j/ij- (the reflex of PIE -ey-) to the past-tense ablaut (mostly with the reflex of PIE o-grade) of a strong verb (the reflex of PIE non-derived verbs), with Verner's Law voicing applied (the reflex of the PIE accent on the -ey- suffix). Examples:

• *bītanaN (I) "to bite" → *baitijanaN "to bridle, yoke, restrain", i.e. "to make bite down"
• *rīsanaN (I) "to rise" → *raizijanaN "to raise", i.e. "to cause to rise"
• *beuganaN (II) "to bend" → *baugijanaN "to bend (transitive)"
• *brinnanaN (III) "to burn" → *brannijanaN "to burn (transitive)"
• *frawerþanaN (III) "to perish" → *frawardijanaN "to destroy", i.e. "to cause to perish"
• *nesanaN (V) "to survive" → *nazjanaN "to save", i.e. "to cause to survive"
• *ligjanaN (V) "to lie down" → *lagjanaN "to lay", i.e. "to cause to lie down"
• *faranaN (VI) "to travel, go" → *fōrijanaN "to lead, bring", i.e. "to cause to go"
• *faranaN (VI) "to travel, go" → *farjanaN "to carry across", i.e. "to cause to travel" (an archaic instance of the o-grade ablaut used despite the differing past-tense ablaut)
• *grētanaN (VII) "to weep" → *grōtijanaN "to cause to weep"
• *lais (I, preterite-present) "(s)he knows" → *laizijanaN "to teach", i.e. "to cause to know"

As in other Indo-European languages, a verb in Proto-Germanic could have a preverb attached to it, modifying its meaning (cf. e.g. *fra-werþanaN "to perish", derived from *werþanaN "to become"). In Proto-Germanic, the preverb was still a clitic that could be separated from the verb (as also in Gothic, as shown by the behavior of second-position clitics, e.g. diz-uh-þan-sat "and then he seized", with clitics uh "and" and þan "then" interpolated into dis-sat "he seized") rather than a bound morpheme that is permanently attached to the verb (as in all other Germanic languages). At least in Gothic, preverbs could also be stacked one on top of the other (similar to Sanskrit, different from Latin), e.g. ga-ga-waírþjan "to reconcile".

An example verb: *nemanaN "to take" (class IV strong verb).

Schleicher's PIE fable rendered into Proto-Germanic

August Schleicher wrote a fable in the PIE language he had just reconstructed, which though it has been updated a few times by others still bears his name. Below is a rendering of this fable into Proto-Germanic:^[34]

Awiz ehwaz-uh: awiz, hwesja wulno ne ist, spehet ehwanz, ainan krun wagan wegantun, ainan-uh mekon boran, ainan-uh gumonun ahu berontun. Awiz nu ehwamaz weuhet: hert agnutai meke witantei, ehwans akantun weran. Ehwaz weuhant: hludi, awi! kert aknutai uns wituntmaz: mannaz, foþiz, wulnon awjan hwurneuti sebi warman wistran. Awjan-uh wulno ne isti. þat hehluwaz awiz akran bukeþ.

See also

• Pre-Germanic
• Holtzmann's Law
• Suebi

Notes

1. ^ Another, less common name used in English-language literature by a few noteworthy scholars is (Primitive) Germanic Parent Language. For example, see Bloomfield, Leonard (1984). Language. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 298–299.
2. ^ ^{a b} Comrie, Bernard (editor) (1987). The World's Major Languages. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 69–70. ISBN 0-19-506511-5.
3. ^ Bell-Fialkoll (Editor), Andrew (2000). The Role of Migration in the History of the Eurasian Steppe: Sedentary Civilization v. "Barbarian" and Nomad. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 117. ISBN 0312212070. Note that the term "pre-Germanic" is equivocal, meaning, as here, either prior to the Indo-European ancestors or Indo-European but prior to Proto-Germanic.
4. ^ Kinder, Hermann; Werner Hilgemann; Ernest A. Menze (Translator); Harald and Ruth Bukor (Maps) (1988). The Penguin atlas of world history. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Volume 1 page 109. ISBN 0-14-051054-0.
5. ^ Kinder book
6. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Languages of the World: Germanic languages". The New Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago, IL, United States: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1993. ISBN 0-85229-571-5. This long-standing, well-known article on the languages can be found in almost any edition of Britannica.
7. ^ Pre-Proto-Germanic is relatively recent, but it still does not solve the problem of distinguishing pre-PIE from PIE but pre-Germanic populations.
8. ^ The links in this sentence suffice to explain the basic concept but more information can be found in numerous books including Lass, Roger (1997). Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3.6 "Sound Laws". ISBN 0521459249.
9. ^ This article covers some of the major changes but for more of a presentation see Kleinman, Scott. "Germanic Sound Changes" (pdf). English 400: History of the English Language: Grammar Tutorial and Resources. California State University, Northridge. http://www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW2/engl400/gmcsoundchanges.pdf. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
10. ^ [1] Perfect Phylogenetic Networks: A New Methodology for Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Natural Languages - Luay Nakhleh,Don Ringe & Tandy Warnow, 2005, Language- Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Volume 81, Number 2, June 2005
11. ^ Described in this and the linked articles but see Kleinman.
12. ^ Lehmann, W. P. (January - March, 1961). "A Definition of Proto-Germanic: A Study in the Chronological Delimitation of Languages". Language 37 (1): 67–74. doi:10.2307/411250.
13. ^ Bennett, William H. (May 1970). "The Stress Patterns of Gothic". PMLA 85 (3): 463–472. doi:10.2307/1261448. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-8129%28197005%2985%3A3%3C463%3ATSPOG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage. Retrieved 2007-11-06. First page and abstract no charge.
14. ^ Antonsen, Elmer H. (January - March, 1965). "On Defining Stages in Prehistoric German". Language 41 (1): 19–36. doi:10.2307/411849.
15. ^ Antonsen, Elmer H. (2002). Runes and Germanic Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 26–30. ISBN 3110174626. http://books.google.com/books?id=gvSi3JVNRFQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false. This presentation also summarizes Lehmann's view.
16. ^ Antonsen (2000) page 28 table 9.
17. ^ Ringe, Donald (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford University Press. pp. 296. ISBN 019928413X. ; Lane, George S. The Germano-Celtic Vocabulary, Language (1933), 244-264.
18. ^ Watkins, Calvert (2000). "Appendix I: Indo-European Roots: reg-". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE427.html.
19. ^ D.H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149-164.
20. ^ Donald A. Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (Oxford: Oxford, 2006), 296.
21. ^ This word gave: Old English pād, Old Saxon pēda, Old High German pfeit, Bavarian Pfoad, Gothic páida 'coat'.
22. ^ Ibid, 297.
23. ^ Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003).
24. ^ Feist was proposing the idea as early as 1913 but his classical paper on the subject is Feist, Sigmund (1932). "The Origin of the Germanic Languages and the Europeanization of North Europe". Language 8: 245–254. doi:10.2307/408831. A brief biography and presentation of his ideas can be found in Mees, Bernard (2003), "Stratum and Shadow: The Indo-European West: Sigmund Feist", in Andersen, Henning, Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in Stratigraphy, John Benjamin Publishing Company, pp. 19–21, ISBN 1588113795
25. ^ While the classification varies somewhat the consonants do not; for example, coronals are sometimes listed as dentals and alveolars while velars and labiovelars are sometimes combined under dorsals.
26. ^ The grapheme þ is often used instead of the IPA symbol θ.
27. ^ The phonemes /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ can be the stop consonants [b], [d] and [ɡ] or the fricatives [β], [ð] and [ɣ], all of which characters are symbols in the IPA. The fricatives may also be written as graphemes with the bar used to produce ƀ, đ and ǥ. The characters in this and other similar tables typically do not use one system consistently throughout.
28. ^ Van Kerckvoorde, Colette M. (1993). An Introduction to Middle Dutch. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 123. ISBN 3110135353.
29. ^ McMahon, April M.S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. pp. 227. ISBN 0521446651.
30. ^ Trask, Robert Lawrence (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 122. ISBN 1579582184.
31. ^ Kraehenmann, Astrid (2003). Quantity and Prosodic Asymmetries is Alemannic: Synchronic and Diachronic. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 58. ISBN 3110176807.
32. ^ Ringe, page 100.
33. ^ Ringe, Donald (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019928413X. .
34. ^ Casas, Carlos Quiles; Fernando López-Menchero Díez (July 2007). "A Grammar of Modern Indo-European". Asociación Cultural Dnghu. http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean/indo-european.htm#_edn1. The ASCII text used on the web site has been replaced by the Proto-Germanic characters presented in this article.

References

• Bennett, William Holmes (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
• Campbell, A. (1959). Old English Grammar. London: Oxford University Press.
• Krahe, Hans and Meid, Wolfgang. Germanische Sprachwissenschaft, 2 vols., de Gruyter, Berlin (1969).
• Plotkin, Vulf (2008). The Evolution of Germanic Phonological Systems: Proto-Germanic, Gothic, West Germanic, and Scandinavian. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen.
• Ramat, Anna Giacalone and Paolo Ramat (Eds.) (1998). The Indo-European Languages. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06449-X.
• Ringe, Don (2008). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 0199552290.
• Voyles, Joseph B. (1992). Early Germanic Grammar. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-728270-X.
• Guus, Kroonen (Expected October 2010). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, 11. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 978 90 04 18340 7. http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=24855.

External links

• W.P. Lehmann & J. Slocum (eds.) A Grammar of Proto-Germanic (Online version)
• Proto-Germanic nominal and pronominal paradigms
• A dictionary of Proto-Germanic (in German)
• Orel, V. (2003) A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, London: Brill
• Charles Prescott. "Germanic and the Ruki Dialects"

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