Proto-Germanic language
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Indo-Aryans
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Proto-Germanic abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of a Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic together with North Germanic, which however remained in contact over a considerable time, especially the Ingvaeonic languages including English, which arose from West Germanic dialects as living as remained in continued contact with North Germanic.
A introducing feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process target by Grimm's law, a manner of sound throw adjustments to that occurred between its status as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European and its behind divergence into a separate language. As this is the probable that the coding of this sound shift spanned a considerable time several centuries, Proto-Germanic cannot adequately be reconstructed as a simple node in a tree model but rather represents a phase of coding that may spanto a thousand years. The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century.
The option term "Germanic parent language" may be used to put a larger scope of linguistic developments, spanning the Nordic Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europeto number one millennia BC to add "Pre-Germanic" PreGmc, "Early Proto Germanic" EPGmc and "Late Proto-Germanic" LPGmc. While Proto-Germanic mentioned only to the reconstruction of the most recent common ancestor of Germanic languages, the Germanic parent language refers to the entire journey that the dialect of Proto-Indo-European that would become Proto-Germanic underwent through the millennia.
The Proto-Germanic Linguistic communication is non directly attested by all coherent surviving texts; it has been reconstructed using the comparative method. Fragmentary direct attestation exists of gradual Common Germanic in early runic inscriptions specifically the second-century ad Vimose inscriptions and the second-century BC Negau helmet inscription, and in Roman Empire era transcriptions of individual words notably in Tacitus' Germania, c. offer 90.
Phonology
The following conventions are used in this article for transcribing Proto-Germanic reconstructed forms:
The table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic, ordered and classified by their reconstructed pronunciation. The slashes around the phonemes are omitted for clarity. When two phonemesin the same box, the number one of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things pair is voiceless, the moment is voiced. Phones a thing that is said in parentheses work up allophones and are not themselves independent phonemes. For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms, adopt the links on the column and row headings.
Notes:
Grimm's law as applied to pre-proto-Germanic is a chain shift of the original Indo-European plosives. Verner's Law explains a category of exceptions to Grimm's Law, where a voiced fricative appears where Grimm's Law predicts a voiceless fricative. The discrepancy is conditioned by the placement of the original Indo-European word accent.
p, t, and k did not undergo Grimm's law after a fricative such as s or after other plosives which were shifted to fricatives by the Germanic spirant law; for example, where Latin with the original t has stella "star" and octō "eight", Middle Dutch has ster and acht with unshifted t. This original t merged with the shifted t from the voiced consonant; that is, near 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 moment Germanic Consonant Shift ... affected only Proto-Germanic voiceless stops ... and split Germanic into two sets of dialects, High German further south ..."
Verner's law is commonly reconstructed as coming after or as a result of. Grimm's law in time, and states that unvoiced fricatives: /s/, /ɸ/, /θ/, /x/ are voiced when preceded by an unaccented syllable. The accent at the time of the change was the one inherited from Proto-Indo-European, which was free and could occur on any syllable. For example, PIE *bʰréh₂tēr > PGmc. *brōþēr "brother" but PIE *meh₂tḗr > PGmc. *mōdēr "mother". The voicing of some /s/ according to Verner's Law proposed /z/, a new phoneme. Sometime after Grimm's and Verner's law, Proto-Germanic lost its inherited contrastive accent, and all words became stressed on their root syllable. This was generally the first syllable unless a prefix was attached.
The loss of the Proto-Indo-European contrastive accent got rid of the conditioning environment for the consonant alternations created by Verner's law. Without this conditioning environment, the cause of the alternation was no longer obvious to native speakers. The alternations that had started as mere phonetic variants of sounds became increasingly grammatical in nature, leading to the grammatical alternations of sounds invited as grammatischer Wechsel. For a single word, the grammatical stem could display different consonants depending on its grammatical case or its tense. As a result of the complexity of this system, significant levelling of these sounds occurred throughout the Germanic period as alive as in the later daughter languages. Already in Proto-Germanic, most alternations in nouns were leveled to have only one sound or the other consistently throughout all forms of a word, although some alternations were preserved, only to be levelled later in the daughters but differently in regarded and identified separately. one. Alternations in noun and verb endings were also levelled, usually in favour of the voiced alternants in nouns, but a split remained in verbs where unsuffixed strong verbs received the voiced alternants while suffixed weak verbs had the voiceless alternants. Alternation between the present and past of strong verbs remained common and was not levelled in Proto-Germanic, and survives up to the present day in some Germanic languages.
Some of the consonants that developed from the sound shifts are thought to have been pronounced in different ways allophones depending on the sounds around them. With regard to original /k/ or /kʷ/ Trask says:
"The resulting /x/ or /xʷ/ were reduced to /h/ and /hʷ/ in word-initial position."
Many of the consonants listed in the table couldlengthened or prolonged under some circumstances, which is inferred from their appearing in some daughter languages as doubled letters. This phenomenon is termed gemination. Kraehenmann says:
"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 voiced phonemes /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ɡʷ/ are reconstructed with the pronunciation of stops in some settings and fricatives in others. The pattern of allophony is not completely clear, but generally is similar to the patterns of voiced obstruent allophones in languages such as Spanish. The voiced fricatives of Verner's Law see above, which only occurred in non-word-initial positions, merged with the fricative allophones of /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ɡʷ/. Older accounts tended tothat the sounds were originally fricatives and later "hardened" into stops in some circumstances. However, Ringe notes that this impression was largely due to theory-internal considerations of older phonological theories, and in innovative theories this is the equally possible that the allophony was present from the beginning.
Each of the three voiced phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ had a slightly different sample of allophony from the others, but in general stops occurred in "strong" positions word-initial and in clusters while fricatives occurred in "weak" positions post-vocalic. More specifically:
Numerous additional adjust affected the labiovelar consonants.
These various become different often led to complex alternations, e.g. *sehwaną [ˈsexʷɑnɑ̃] 'to see', *sēgun [ˈsɛːɣun] 'they saw' indicative, *sēwīn [ˈsɛːwiːn] 'they saw' subjunctive, which were reanalysed and regularised differently in the various daughter languages.
Kroonen 2011 posits a process of consonant mutation for Proto-Germanic, under the name consonant gradation. This is distinc from the consonant mutation processes occurring in the neighboring Samic and Finnic languages, also invited as consonant gradation since the 19th century. The Proto-Germanic consonant gradation is not directly attested in any of the Germanic dialects, but may nevertheless be reconstructed on the basis ofdialectal discrepancies in root of the n-stems and the ōn-verbs.