Talk about how sounds change. This is a transcript from the video series The Story of Human Language. Watch it now, on Wondrium. Then you have some of these other cases, which are a little bit more difficult. So we get back to semantic change. Technically you can see how a field can be although you would never have thought of it filled—it can be filled with plants and things.
If you flee, you flow with your feet out of something. We may never know what this Proto-Indo-European language was called; presumably, its speakers called it something like Lagana or Pedinkum or Hahooha or something—they had a name for their language. Proto-Indo-European became many subfamilies. There is Germanic. So Germanic was one of a litter of languages born of Proto-Indo-European. Short answer, roughly BC to AD. But this is just a rough estimate and we don't know for sure.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. To quote Ringe , the best authority I know on the subject: Proto-Germanic [ Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.
Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Active languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive pronouns, so that a form corresponding to we could either include or exclude reference to the hearer as well as the speaker, that is, 'I and you' or 'I and others, but not you'. Prokosch pointed out that many languages make this distinction, such as "most Australian languages, nearly all of the Austronesian and most of the Dravidian group He provided a description, but not an explanation.
In Active languages, stative verbs take the place of adjectives. Contentive typology in this way provides explanations for features of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic that had been noted, as by Prokosch, but not explained.
More such features will be observed in the treatment of the syntactic and semantic systems in chapters 5 and 6. Quite independently of these features in the semantic system of Government Languages, characteristic features have been identified that distinguish the syntactic systems of languages.
These are based on the position of the verb with regard to the object. As VO languages, English and the major European languages have the verb placed before the object.
Many other languages, such as Japanese and Turkish, place the verb finally: they are OV languages. Subsets of these types are based on the placement of subjects, yielding six syntactic types. Syntactic and morphological elements are arranged in accordance with the two basic types.
As a general principle, modifiers are placed outside the central structure, whether OV or VO, so that adjectives, genitive modifiers and relative clauses typically stand before nouns in OV languages, but after them in VO languages.
Similarly, verbal modifiers, like markers of tense, mood and person, stand before verbs in VO languages, vs. Further, adpositions, like verbs, are placed before nouns as prepositions in VO languages but after them as postpositions in OV languages. Few languages are consistent.
For example, adjectives stand before nouns in modern English, and older forms of English included more such inconsistencies. Observation of the various patterns provides clues on the history of a language. French, for example, places adjectives after nouns, and is accordingly more consistently VO than English. In examining the syntactic development of language, I some time ago proposed that when a language is adopted by many non-native speakers, it tends to become SVO.
The shift of the Germanic languages from the OV structure of Proto-Indo-European to the VO structure of the modern dialects provides us with data on their social context through the past five millennia or so, as does that of Greek and Latin. We know from historical sources, such as Livy's History of Rome , that Latin was adopted by many speakers of other languages, such as Etruscan; its shift to VO structure may be credited to such adoptions. The shift in the Germanic languages is similarly explained.
The principles of phonological structure have long been determined. Elements are grouped by phonetic value and distribution. In current historical grammars, the phonological elements proposed are usually phonemes. Brugmann on the other hand proposed some phonetic elements for Proto-Indo-European; for example, on the assumption that some occurrences of Proto-Indo-European s were voiced, he included z as well as s in his system Two subsets of phonemes are proposed for a language: the consonants and vowels are referred to as segmental; pitch and stress are referred to as supra-segmental.
While modern English, German and so on have a stress system, the accentual system of early Proto-Germanic was based on pitch, as is that of the Chinese languages today.
Two systems are subsumed by syntactic structure: the morphological system and the system of sentences. The morphological system deals with the inflection and derivation of words. In traditional grammars the inflectional sub-system enjoys by far the most extensive presentation, and so-called exceptions are treated in detail. In this grammar, only the major inflections are presented chapter 3 ; occasional forms that may be variations of individual items are assumed to be treated in dictionaries, including etymological dictionaries.
The derivational elements are presented similarly chapter 4. The system of sentences deals with the structure of the sentence and its elements. These are presented chapter 5 in accordance with the principles discussed in section 1. The earliest data in the dialects indicate that Proto-Germanic was an OV language; sentences as well as the morphological systems include residues of Indo-European Active structure. The treatment of such elements is critical for understanding the relation of Germanic to the other Indo-European languages, and for understanding its relation to Proto-Indo-European.
The semantic structure of a language is least often viewed as a system. Groups of elements are recognized, such as kinship terms, but for the most part the vocabulary is divided into general groups such as terms for nature, for foods, for the household, and so on; in this way vocabulary reflects the culture and the social structure of the speakers, supplementing the information obtained from texts, from archeological findings, and to some extent from genealogical findings.
The relationship of the Germanic language group to other language groups can only be determined by evidence in the languages. Yet, unlike Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian, which have the augment as a common innovation as well as extensive verbal inflection, these four western groups lack any common phonological or morphological innovations. They share common vocabulary items, more for instance between Germanic and Italic than between Germanic and Celtic. Some of these may be attributed to a relatively late date, such as the name of a grain, either wheat or spelt, Lat.
Similarly, the Germanic words in common with Celtic indicate contacts between the two groups, but not major innovations; among them is a word for wagon, OIr. Other examples are given by Porzig , some of which will be examined in the last section of this grammar.
In view of the absence of common innovations shared among other dialects, such as the augment, I assume that Germanic broke off independently — early — from Proto-Indo-European. Its archaic structure has been pointed out variously, as for instance in my article on the conservatism of Germanic phonology Lehmann, and in subsequent publications.
The development of Latin provides the model for understanding the expansion of the other Indo-European dialects. In its early form, it was the language of a small group of speakers in northern Italy in the eighth century B.
Among other language groups at the time, that of the speakers of Etruscan was probably the largest. In the course of the following centuries, Latin was adopted by those groups, including also speakers of Celtic languages in the north, of Venetic, of Oscan and Umbrian, and even of Greek in the south, so that at the beginning of our era Latin was the most prominent language in the Italian peninsula.
The bases for its expansion can only be imagined, but among them was military competence, as may be assumed from the account of the historian Livy. Other Classical historians, among them Herodotus, have provided material on various groups of speakers elsewhere, such as those north of the Black Sea; but for none of their languages do we have information comparable to Livy's for Latin.
The earliest description of the Germanic group of speakers was provided by Julius Caesar for the middle of the last century B. It may be concluded, then, that the Germanic group of speakers developed somewhat independently of the other Indo-European dialect groups.
For a long time, the group may have been relatively small; but whatever the size, it was coherent at the time of the Germanic consonant shift for, unlike the later High German consonant shift, the earlier shift was carried through consistently among all speakers of Proto-Germanic, as was also the adoption of the dental preterite for weak verbs.
Such consistently adopted changes can only have been introduced and generally carried out in a group that was in close intercommunication. As separate groups, they introduced innovations leading to the dialects that later became independent languages. General Inquiries: In compounds, stress is placed on the first part of the compound. Nouns and adjectives with adverbial prefixes are considered compounds, but verbs are not, just as in the modern Germanic languages. Proto-Germanic was not a static language, it underwent many changes throughout its history.
To clearly represent the language however, and to avoid confusing forms that only differ in time, it would be a good idea to pick a particular stage and stick with it. Here are the most important changes generally accepted to have occurred by late Proto-Germanic, in a somewhat chronological order. See also w:Proto-Germanic and w:Phonological history of English. Some Proto-Germanic words are only reconstructable for a certain branch of the language. Proto-West Germanic and Proto-Norse are treated as their own language, with the codes gmw-pro and gmq-pro respectively.
Words that are only reconstructable in one of these branches should not automatically receive a Proto-Germanic page. On the other hand, Proto-Northwest Germanic, the common ancestor of the two, is treated as a dialectal form of Proto-Germanic itself.
It does not differ significantly enough in form to warrant treating it as its own language.
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