ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 34: Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of all Ge
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 34: Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of all Germanic languages. The exact dates of its split with Proto-Indo-European (PIE) raises some issues with the nature of language change, but it probably began developing in the 2nd-1st millennium BCE and was spoken around 500 BCE. Proto-Germanic is not a language we have any direct evidence of. The closest is the attestation of Romans, which would have been around the time it began splintering into the various Germanic branches and some ancient loan words in Finnish and other nearby language groups. The defining feature of the Germanic languages is a sound shift known as Grimm’s law, named for Jacob Grimm who formalized it, the same Jacob Grimm who compiled fairy tales with his brother. Here’s the simplified version of it: in PIE there was a three way distinction in stop consonants. There were voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/), voiced stop (/b/, /d/, /g/), and aspirated voiced stops (/bʰ/, /dʰ/, /gʰ/). Grimms law shifts all of these in turn; first the voiceless stops become fricatives instead (/p/ > /f/, /t/ > /θ/, /g/ > /x/ [note: /θ/ is like English “th” and /x/ is like German “ch”]). The voiced stops then are pulled by this vaccum and become voiceless themselves, and the aspirate voiced ones tumble after becoming voiced, losing the aspiration. Compare, for example, Latin “ped” to English “foot” or “dent” to “tooth” Proto-Germanic did not undergo umlaut, another unique feature common in Germanic languages that causes front vowels to round, and is generally responsible for the large vowel inventories of those languages (compare English’s 15 or so vowels to Spanish’s 6). It also had nasal vowels, largely absent from modern Germanic languages. -- source link