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Proto-Germanic language

Proto-Germanic language

Encyclopedia
Proto-Germanic or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed
Linguistic reconstruction
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...

 proto-language
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.Often the proto-language is not known directly...

 of all the Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

, such as modern English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Frisian, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, Afrikaans, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Luxembourgish
Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...

, Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

, Norwegian
Norwegian language
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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

, Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

, Faroese
Faroese language
Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 Faroese people in Denmark and elsewhere...

, and Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

.

The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed
Linguistic reconstruction
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...

 using the comparative method
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 with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...

. However, a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

 dated to c. 200 are thought to represent a stage of Proto-Norse
Proto-Norse language
Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic over the first centuries AD...

 or, according to Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology and linguistic universals, and on Caucasian languages....

, late Common Germanic immediately following the "Proto-Germanic" stage. Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 (PIE).

Words in Proto-Germanic written in this article are transcribed
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

 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.

Sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic


The following changes are known or presumed to have occurred in the history of Proto-Germanic up to the point that it began to break up into distinct dialects. The changes are roughly in chronological order, with changes that operate on the outcome of earlier ones appearing later in the list.

Pre-Proto-Germanic


This stage began with the separation of the Germanic people, perhaps while still forming part of the Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum. It contained many innovations that were shared with other Indo-European branches to various degrees, probably through areal contacts, and mutual intelligibility with other dialects would have remained for some time.
  • Depalatalisation of PIE palatal stops, merging them with the plain stops (Germanic is therefore a centum language
    Centum-Satem isogloss
    The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...

    ):
    • /ḱ/ > /k/ - "hundred" > >
    • /ǵ/ > /g/ - "work" > >
    • /ǵʰ/ > /gʰ/ - "stranger" > > "guest"
  • Epenthesis
    Epenthesis
    In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....

     of /u/ before the syllabic sonorants:
    • /m̥/ > /um/ - "hundred" > >
    • /n̥/ > /un/ - "inside" > > "among"
    • /l̥/ > /ul/ - "wolf" > >
    • /r̥/ > /ur/ - "worm" > >
  • An epenthetic /s/ was inserted already in PIE after dental consonants when followed by a suffix beginning with a dental. This sequence now becomes: /TsT/ > /ts/ > /ss/ - "known" > > > "certain"
    • A single example exists where /tt/ was word-internal, in which case it remained (even after Grimm's law
      Grimm's law
      Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

       below)- "dad" > *attô
  • Geminate consonants are shortened after a consonant or a long vowel - "act of calling" > > > "command"
  • Word-final long vowels are lengthened to "overlong" vowels - "seeds" > >
  • Loss of laryngeal
    Laryngeal
    Laryngeal may mean*pertaining to the larynx*in Indo-European linguistics, a consonant postulated in the laryngeal theory*in phonetics, an alternate term for glottal sounds....

    s, phonemicising the allophone
    Allophone
    In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

    s of /e/:
    • Word-initial laryngeals are lost before a consonant - "tooth, acc." > >
    • Laryngeals are lost before vowels:
      • /h₁V/ > /V/ - "is" > >
      • /h₂e/ > /a/, /h₂V/ > /V/ otherwise - "in front" > (with shift of accent) > "in addition"
      • /h₃e/ > /o/, /h₃V/ > /V/ otherwise - "eagle" > >
    • Laryngeals are lost after vowels, but lengthen the preceding vowel: /VH/ > /Vː/ - "seeds" > >
      • Two vowels that come to stand in hiatus
        Hiatus (linguistics)
        In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....

         because of this change contract into an overlong vowel - "dative plural" > > ; "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > >
      • In word-final position, the resulting long vowels remain distinct from (shorter than) the overlong vowels that were formed from PIE word-final long vowels - "thematic 1st sg." >
    • Laryngeals remain between consonants.
  • Cowgill's law
    Cowgill's law
    Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.-Cowgill's law in Greek:...

    : /h₃/ (and possibly /h₂/) is strengthened to /g/ between a sonorant and /w/ - "us two" > > >
  • Vocalisation of remaining laryngeals: /H/ > /ə/ - "father" > > ; "sand" > >
  • Velars are labialised by following /w/: "horse" > > >
  • Labiovelars are delabialised next to /u/ (or /un/) and before /t/ - ~ "killing" > > > "battle"
    • This rule continued to operate into the Proto-Germanic period.

Early Proto-Germanic


This stage began its evolution as a form of centum PIE that had lost its laryngeals and had five long and six short vowels, as well as one or two overlong vowels. The consonant system was still that of PIE minus palatovelars and laryngeals, but the loss of syllabic resonants already made the language markedly different from PIE proper. Mutual intelligibility might have still existed, but strained, and this period marked the definitive break of Germanic from the other Indo-European languages and the beginning of Germanic proper, containing most of the sound changes that are now held to define this branch distinctively. This stage contained various consonant and vowel shifts, the loss of contrastive accent, and the beginnings of the reduction of unstressed syllables as a result.
  • Loss of word-final non-high short vowels /e/, /a/, /o/ - "(s)he knows" > >
    • A /j/ or /w/ preceding the vowel is also lost - "of that" > >
    • Single-syllable words were not affected, but clitics were - "and" > >
    • When the lost vowel was accented, the accent shifted to the preceding syllable - "us" > > > > (not , showing that loss occurred before Verner's law)
  • Grimm's law
    Grimm's law
    Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

    : Chain shift of the three series of stops. Note that voiced stops had already been devoiced before a voiceless obstruent prior to this stage. Labiovelars were delabialised before /t/.
    • Voiceless stops become fricatives, unless preceded by another obstruent. In a sequence of two voiceless obstruents, the second obstruent remains a stop.
      • /p/ > /ɸ/ - "father" > >
      • /t/ > /θ/ - "that" > >
      • /k/ > /x/ - "fight" > > ; "axle" > (devoicing) > >
      • /kʷ/ > /xʷ/ - "what" > >
      • Since the second of two obstruents is unaffected, the sequences /sp/, /st/, /sk/, /skʷ/, /tt/ (only in "dad") remain.
      • The above also forms the Germanic spirant law
        Germanic spirant law
        In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law or Primärberührung is a specific historical instance of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in the ancestor of the Germanic languages.-General description:...

        :
        • /bt/, /bʰt/, /pt/ > /ɸt/ - "grabbed" > > > "captive"
        • /gt/, /gʰt/, /kt/ > /xt/ - "eight" > > >
        • /gʷt/, /gʷʰt/, /kʷt/ > /xt/ - "night, acc." > > >
    • Voiced stops are devoiced:
      • /b/ > /p/ - "deep" > > > (reformed as a-stem)
      • /d/ > /t/ - "tooth, acc." > > ; "what" > >
      • /g/ > /k/ - "work" > > >
      • /gʷ/ > /kʷ/ - "(s)he will step, subj." > > "(s)he comes"
    • Aspirated stops become voiced fricatives (which become stops in some environments, such as after nasals, see below):
      • /bʰ/ > /β/, /b/ - "(s)he is carrying" > >
      • /dʰ/ > /ð/, /d/ - "thing put" > > "judgement"
      • /gʰ/ > /ɣ/, /g/ - "goose" > >
      • /gʷʰ/ > /ɣʷ/, /gʷ/ - "chant" > > "song"
  • Verner's law
    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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

    : voiceless fricatives are voiced, allophonically at first, when preceded by an unaccented syllable:
    • /ɸ/ > /β/ - "over" > > >
    • /θ/ > /ð/ - "tribe" > > >
    • /x/ > /ɣ/ - "young" > > > > (with -z by analogy)
    • /xʷ/ > /ɣʷ/ - "wheels (collective)" > > >
    • /s/ > /z/ - "of darkness" > > > ; "wheel" > > >
    • Some small words which were generally unaccented were also affected - , unstressed "I am" > > > ; , unstressed "they are" > > > (the stressed variants, which would have become *ismi and *sinþi, were lost)
  • All words become stressed on their first syllable. The PIE contrastive accent is lost, phonemicising the voicing distinction created by Verner's law.
  • Word-initial /gʷ/ > /b/ - "(s)he is asking for" > > > "(s)he waits" (with -þ- by analogy)
  • Assimilation of sonorants:
    • /nw/ > /nn/ - "thin" ~ fem. > ~ > ~ > ~ > ~
    • /ln/ > /ll/ - "full" > > >
    • /zm/ > /mm/ - "I am, unstr." > > >
  • Unstressed /owo/ > /oː/ - "thematic 1st du." >
  • Unstressed /ew/ > /ow/ before a consonant or word-finally - "u-stem gen. sg." > >
  • Unstressed /e/ > /i/ except before /r/ - "abstract noun suffix" > > >
    • Unstressed /ey/ contracts to /iː/ - "i-stem gen. sg." > > > (with -z by analogy)
    • /e/ before /r/ later becomes /ɑ/, but not until after the application of i-mutation.
    • Some words which could be unstressed as a whole were also affected, often creating stressed/unstressed pairs - *éǵh₂ "I" > *ek > unstressed *ik (remaining beside stressed *ek)
  • Unstressed /ji/ > /i/ - "(s)he is lying down" ~ "they are lying down" > ~ > ~ > ~ (with -þ- by analogy)
    • This process creates diphthongs from originally disyllabic sequences - "thematic optative 3pl" > > > ; "in the morning" > > "early"; "three" > > >
    • The sequence /iji/ becomes /iː/ - "strangers, nom. pl." > > > "guests"
  • Merging of non-high back vowels:
    • /o/, /a/ > /ɑ/ - "stranger" > > "guest"; "fight" > "battle"
    • /oː/, /aː/ > /ɑː/ - "thing put" > > > "judgement"; "sweet" > >
    • /oːː/, /aːː/ > /ɑːː/ (â) - "seeds" > > > ; "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > >

Late Proto-Germanic


By this stage, Germanic had emerged as a distinctive branch and had undergone many of the sound changes that would make its later descendants recognisable as Germanic languages. It had shifted its consonant inventory from a system rich in plosives to one containing primarily fricatives, had lost the PIE mobile pitch accent in favour of a predictable stress accent, and had merged two of its vowels. The stress accent had also begun to cause the erosion of unstressed syllables already, which would continue in its descendants up to the present day. This final stage of the language included the remaining development until the breakup into dialects, and most notably featured the appearance of nasal vowels and the first beginning of umlaut
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...

, another characteristic Germanic feature.
  • Word-final /m/ > /n/ - "that, acc. masc." > > "then"; "a-stem acc. sg." > > > > /n/ before dental consonants - "hundred" > > > ; "ten" > > >
  • Word-final /n/ is lost after unstressed syllables, and the preceding vowel is nasalised (written as following N) - "a-stem acc. sg." > > > ; > > > ; "dative plural" > > >
  • Nasal /ẽː/ is lowered to /ɑ̃ː/ - "I was putting" > > > >
  • Elimination of /ə/:
    • Unstressed /ə/ is lost between consonants - "sand" > > ; "to be silent" > (with added suffix) "they are silent" > > >
    • /ə/ > /ɑ/ elsewhere - "father" > > ; "to be silent" > (with added suffix) "(s)he is silent" > > >
  • Loss of /t/ after unstressed syllables - "ten" > > ; "(s)he would carry, subj." > > ; ~ "honey" > ~ > ~ > ~ > /w/, sometimes /ɣ/ - "snow" > > ; "wheels (collective)" > > >
  • i-mutation
    I-mutation
    I-mutation is an important type of sound change, more precisely a category of regressive metaphony, in which a back vowel is fronted, and/or a front vowel is raised, if the following syllable contains /i/, /ī/ or /j/ I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or...

    : /e/ > /i/ when followed by /i/ or /j/ in the same or next syllable - "(s)he is carrying" > > ; "middle" > > ; "new" > >
    • This eliminates the remaining /ei/, changing it to /iː/ - "god" > > "Týr"; "three" > > > /i/ when followed by a syllable-final nasal - "in" > ; "(s)he chants" > > "(s)he sings"
    • This followed the earliest contact with Finnic people, since Finnish preserves the older vowel in the loanword rengas "ring" (from early Proto-Germanic *hrengaz, later *hringaz).
  • Long a is raised:
    • /ɑː/ > /ɔː/ - "thing put" > > "judgement"; "sweet" > >
    • /ɑːː/ > /ɔːː/ - "seeds" > > ; "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > >
    • This followed the earliest contact with the Romans, since Latin Rōmānī was borrowed as *Rūmānīz and then shifted to *Rūmōnīz. is lost between vowels except after /i/ and /w/ (but it is lost after syllabic /u/). The two vowels that come to stand in hiatus then contract to long vowels or diphthongs - "thematic optative 1sg sg." > > > ; "in the morning" > > "early"
    • This process creates a new /ɑː/ from earlier /ɑjɑ/ - "to stand" > (with suffix added) "they stand" > > is lost before /x/, causing compensatory lengthening
      Compensatory lengthening
      Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda...

       and nasalisation of the preceding vowel - "(s)he hangs" > (phonetically [ˈxɑ̃ːxiði])

Archaeological contributions



In one major 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
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 and Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming 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...

, the center of the Urheimat
Urheimat
Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language...

 or "original home" of the Germanic peoples
Germanic peoples
The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...

, prior to the Nordic Bronze Age
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...

, which began about 4500 years ago. This is the only area where no pre-Germanic place names have been found. 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
Corded Ware 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 culminates in the early Bronze Age.Corded Ware culture is associated with...

 and possibly also with the preceding Funnel-necked beaker culture
Funnelbeaker culture
The Funnelbeaker culture, short TRB from Trichterbecherkultur is the principal north central European megalithic culture of late Neolithic Europe.- Predecessor and successor cultures :...

 developing towards the end of the Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

 culture of Western Europe.


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.

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 which include PGmc *druhtinaz 'lord' (cf. Finnish ruhtinas), *hrengaz 'ring' (cf. Finn rengas, Estonian rõngas), *kuningaz 'king' (cf. Finn kuningas), *lambaz 'lamb' (cf. Finn lampah, lammas), *lunaz 'ransom' (cf. Finn lunnas), *markijanaN 'to spot, catch sight of' (cf. Est märk(ama)), *rīkijaN 'realm, empire' (cf. Est riik 'state, country'), *skappijōN 'cupboard, shelf' (cf. Finn kaappi 'chest of drawers', Est kapp), *skildiz 'shield' (cf. Est silt 'tag, token' ), *werþaN 'worth' (cf. Est väärt).

Linguistic definitions


By definition, Proto-Germanic is the stage of the language constituting the most recent common ancestor of the attested Germanic languages. Current scholarship dates this to the latter half of the first millennium BC. The post-PIE
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 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
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 , Early Proto-Germanic , and Late Proto-Germanic . It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC...

", "pre-Proto-Germanic" or more commonly "pre-Germanic." By 250 BC, Proto-Germanic had branched into five groups of Germanic (two each in the West and the North, and one in the East).
In historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

, Proto-Germanic is a node in the tree model
Tree model
A language tree, or family tree with languages substituted for real family members, has the form of a node-link diagram of a logical tree structure. Additional linguistics terminology derives from it. Such a diagram contains branch points, or nodes, from which the daughter languages descend by...

; 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
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

. One of the problems with the node 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.

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.

W. P. Lehmann
Winfred P. Lehmann
Winfred P. Lehmann was an American linguist noted for his work in historical linguistics, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, as well as for pioneering work in machine translation.-Biography:After receiving B.A. in Humanities at the Northwestern College in Watertown in 1936, he...

 considered that Jacob Grimm
Jacob Grimm
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author 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...

's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's Law
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

 and Verner's Law
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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

, 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. Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch accent comprising "an alternation of high and low tones" 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 but later found runic
Runic alphabet
The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

 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."

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.

Other Indo-European loans


Loans into Proto-Germanic from other Indo-European languages can be relatively dated by how well they conform to Germanic sound laws. Since the dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, using the loans for absolute, or calendar, chronology would be impossible.

Most loans from Celtic
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

 appear to have been made before or during the Germanic Sound Shift
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

. For instance, one specimen *rīkz 'ruler' was borrowed from Celtic *rīgos 'king', with g → k. It is clearly not native because PIE *ē → ī is not typical of Germanic but is a feature of Celtic languages. Another is *walhaz "foreigner; Celt" from the Celtic tribal name Volcae with c → h and o → a. Other likely Celtic loans include *ambahtaz 'servant', *brunjōn 'mailshirt', *gīslaz 'hostage', *īsarna 'iron', *lēkijaz 'healer', *lauđan 'lead', *Rīnaz 'Rhine', and *tūnaz, tūnan 'fortified enclosure'. These loans would likely have been borrowed during the Celtic Hallstatt
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 and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture.By the 6th century BC, the Hallstatt culture extended for some...

 and early La Tène
La Tène culture
The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture named after the archaeological site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where a rich cache of artifacts was discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857....

 cultures when the Celts dominated central Europe, although the period spanned several centuries.

From East Iranian have come *hanapiz 'hemp' (cf. Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 kanab), *humalaz, humalōn 'hops' (cf. Ossetian
Ossetic language
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. Osset kwəræt 'shirt'), *kutan 'cottage' (cf. Pers kad 'house'), *paidō 'cloak', *paþaz 'path' (cf. Avestan pantā, g. pathō), and *wurstwa 'work' (cf. Av vərəštuua). These words could have been transmitted directly by the Scythians from the Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

 plain, groups of whom entered Central Europe via the Danube, and created the Vekerzug Culture in the Carpathian Basin (6th-5th centuries BC), or by later contact with Sarmatians, who followed the same route. Unsure is *marhaz 'horse', which was either borrowed directly from Scytho-Sarmatian or through Celtic mediation.

Non-Indo-European elements



The term substrate
Substratum
In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...

 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
Sigmund Feist
Sigmund Feist was a German Jewish pedagogue and historical linguist. He was the author of the Germanic substrate hypothesis as well as a number of important works concerning Jewish ethnic and racial identity. Feist served as the director of the Jewish Reichenheim Orphanage in Berlin from 1906 to...

, who estimated that about 1/3 of the Proto-Germanic lexical items came from the substrate.

However, research in Germanic etymology continues and as more and more plausible explanations for Germanic words whose origins were previously unclear or controversial are being proposed, and which explain those words in terms of reconstructed Indo-European words and morphology, the proportion of Germanic words without any plausible etymological explanation decreases. Estimates of that proportion are typically outdated or inflated as many proposals were unknown to scholars compiling lists of unexplained Germanic words.

Transcription


The following conventions are used in this article for transcribing Proto-Germanic forms:
  • Voiced obstruents appear as b, d, g; this does not imply any particular analysis of the underlying phonemes as stops /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ or fricatives /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/. In other literature, they may be written as graphemes with a bar
    Bar (diacritic)
    A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others....

     to produce
    {{SpecialChars}}

    Proto-Germanic (often abbreviated PGmc.), or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested,     reconstructed
    Linguistic reconstruction
    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...

     proto-language
    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.Often the proto-language is not known directly...

     of all the Germanic languages
    Germanic languages
    The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

    , such as modern English
    English language
    English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

    , Frisian, Dutch
    Dutch language
    Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

    , Afrikaans, German
    German language
    German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

    , Luxembourgish
    Luxembourgish language
    Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...

    , Danish
    Danish language
    Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

    , Norwegian
    Norwegian language
    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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

    , Icelandic
    Icelandic language
    Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

    , Faroese
    Faroese language
    Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 Faroese people in Denmark and elsewhere...

    , and Swedish
    Swedish language
    Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

    .

    The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed
    Linguistic reconstruction
    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...

     using the comparative method
    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 with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...

    . However, a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia
    Scandinavia
    Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

     dated to c. 200 are thought to represent a stage of Proto-Norse
    Proto-Norse language
    Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic over the first centuries AD...

     or, according to Bernard Comrie
    Bernard Comrie
    Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology and linguistic universals, and on Caucasian languages....

    , late Common Germanic immediately following the "Proto-Germanic" stage. Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European
    Proto-Indo-European language
    The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

     (PIE).

    Words in Proto-Germanic written in this article are transcribed
    Transcription (linguistics)
    Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

     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.

    Sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic


    The following changes are known or presumed to have occurred in the history of Proto-Germanic up to the point that it began to break up into distinct dialects. The changes are roughly in chronological order, with changes that operate on the outcome of earlier ones appearing later in the list.

    Pre-Proto-Germanic


    This stage began with the separation of the Germanic people, perhaps while still forming part of the Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum. It contained many innovations that were shared with other Indo-European branches to various degrees, probably through areal contacts, and mutual intelligibility with other dialects would have remained for some time.
    • Depalatalisation of PIE palatal stops, merging them with the plain stops (Germanic is therefore a centum language
      Centum-Satem isogloss
      The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...

      ):
      • /ḱ/ > /k/ - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*km̥tóm}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}
      • /ǵ/ > /g/ - {{PIE|*wérǵom}} "work" > {{PIE|*wérgom}} > {{PIE|*werkaN}}
      • /ǵʰ/ > /gʰ/ - {{PIE|*ǵʰóstis}} "stranger" > {{PIE|*gʰóstis}} > {{PIE|*gastiz}} "guest"
    • Epenthesis
      Epenthesis
      In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....

       of /u/ before the syllabic sonorants:
      • /m̥/ > /um/ - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*kumtóm}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}
      • /n̥/ > /un/ - {{PIE|*n̥tér}} "inside" > {{PIE|*untér}} > {{PIE|*under}} "among"
      • /l̥/ > /ul/ - {{PIE|*wĺ̥kʷos}} "wolf" > {{PIE|*wúlkʷos}} > {{PIE|*wulfaz}}
      • /r̥/ > /ur/ - {{PIE|*wŕ̥mis}} "worm" > {{PIE|*wurmis}} > {{PIE|*wurmiz}}
    • An epenthetic /s/ was inserted already in PIE after dental consonants when followed by a suffix beginning with a dental. This sequence now becomes: /TsT/ > /ts/ > /ss/ - {{PIE|*wid-tós}} "known" > {{PIE|*witstós}} > {{PIE|*wissós}} > {{PIE|*wissaz}} "certain"
      • A single example exists where /tt/ was word-internal, in which case it remained (even after Grimm's law
        Grimm's law
        Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

         below)- {{PIE|*atta}} "dad" > *attô
    • Geminate consonants are shortened after a consonant or a long vowel - {{PIE|*káyd-tis}} "act of calling" > {{PIE|*káyssis}} > {{PIE|*káysis}} > {{PIE|*haisiz}} "command"
    • Word-final long vowels are lengthened to "overlong" vowels - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*séh₁mô}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}
    • Loss of laryngeal
      Laryngeal
      Laryngeal may mean*pertaining to the larynx*in Indo-European linguistics, a consonant postulated in the laryngeal theory*in phonetics, an alternate term for glottal sounds....

      s, phonemicising the allophone
      Allophone
      In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

      s of /e/:
      • Word-initial laryngeals are lost before a consonant - {{PIE|*h₁dóntm̥}} "tooth, acc." > {{PIE|*dóntum}} > {{PIE|*tanþuN}}
      • Laryngeals are lost before vowels:
        • /h₁V/ > /V/ - {{PIE|*h₁ésti}} "is" > {{PIE|*ésti}} > {{PIE|*isti}}
        • /h₂e/ > /a/, /h₂V/ > /V/ otherwise - {{PIE|*h₂énti}} "in front" > (with shift of accent) {{PIE|*antí}} > {{PIE|*andi}} "in addition"
        • /h₃e/ > /o/, /h₃V/ > /V/ otherwise - {{PIE|*h₃érō}} "eagle" > {{PIE|*órô}} > {{PIE|*arô}}
      • Laryngeals are lost after vowels, but lengthen the preceding vowel: /VH/ > /Vː/ - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmô}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}
        • Two vowels that come to stand in hiatus
          Hiatus (linguistics)
          In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....

           because of this change contract into an overlong vowel - {{PIE|*-oHom}} "dative plural" > {{PIE|*-ôm}} > {{PIE|*-ôN}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âs}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}
        • In word-final position, the resulting long vowels remain distinct from (shorter than) the overlong vowels that were formed from PIE word-final long vowels - {{PIE|*-oh₂}} "thematic 1st sg." > {{PIE|*-ō}}
      • Laryngeals remain between consonants.
    • Cowgill's law
      Cowgill's law
      Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.-Cowgill's law in Greek:...

      : /h₃/ (and possibly /h₂/) is strengthened to /g/ between a sonorant and /w/ - {{PIE|*n̥h₃mé}} "us two" > {{PIE|*n̥h₃wé}} > {{PIE|*ungwé}} > {{PIE|*unk}}
    • Vocalisation of remaining laryngeals: /H/ > /ə/ - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*pətḗr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}; {{PIE|*sámh₂dʰos}} "sand" > {{PIE|*sámədʰos}} > {{PIE|*samdaz}}
    • Velars are labialised by following /w/: {{PIE|*éḱwos}} "horse" > {{PIE|*ékwos}} > {{PIE|*ékʷos}} > {{PIE|*ehwaz}}
    • Labiovelars are delabialised next to /u/ (or /un/) and before /t/ - {{PIE|*gʷʰénti-}} ~ {{PIE|*gʷʰn̥tí-}} "killing" > {{PIE|*gʷʰúntis}} > {{PIE|*gʰúntis}} > {{PIE|*gunþiz}} "battle"
      • This rule continued to operate into the Proto-Germanic period.

    Early Proto-Germanic


    This stage began its evolution as a form of centum PIE that had lost its laryngeals and had five long and six short vowels, as well as one or two overlong vowels. The consonant system was still that of PIE minus palatovelars and laryngeals, but the loss of syllabic resonants already made the language markedly different from PIE proper. Mutual intelligibility might have still existed, but strained, and this period marked the definitive break of Germanic from the other Indo-European languages and the beginning of Germanic proper, containing most of the sound changes that are now held to define this branch distinctively. This stage contained various consonant and vowel shifts, the loss of contrastive accent, and the beginnings of the reduction of unstressed syllables as a result.
    • Loss of word-final non-high short vowels /e/, /a/, /o/ - {{PIE|*wóyde}} "(s)he knows" > {{PIE|*wóyd}} > {{PIE|*wait}}
      • A /j/ or /w/ preceding the vowel is also lost - {{PIE|*tósyo}} "of that" > {{PIE|*tós}} > {{PIE|*þas}}
      • Single-syllable words were not affected, but clitics were - {{PIE|*-kʷe}} "and" > {{PIE|*-kʷ}} > {{PIE|*-hw}}
      • When the lost vowel was accented, the accent shifted to the preceding syllable - {{PIE|*n̥smé}} "us" > {{PIE|*n̥swé}} > {{PIE|*unswé}} > {{PIE|*úns}} > {{PIE|*uns}} (not {{PIE|*unz}}, showing that loss occurred before Verner's law)
    • Grimm's law
      Grimm's law
      Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

      : Chain shift of the three series of stops. Note that voiced stops had already been devoiced before a voiceless obstruent prior to this stage. Labiovelars were delabialised before /t/.
      • Voiceless stops become fricatives, unless preceded by another obstruent. In a sequence of two voiceless obstruents, the second obstruent remains a stop.
        • /p/ > /ɸ/ ({{PIE|f}}) - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*fəþḗr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}
        • /t/ > /θ/ ({{PIE|þ}}) - {{PIE|*tód}} "that" > {{PIE|*þód}} > {{PIE|*þat}}
        • /k/ > /x/ ({{PIE|h}}) - {{PIE|*kátus}} "fight" > {{PIE|*háþus}} > {{PIE|*haþuz}}; {{PIE|*h₂eǵs-}} "axle" > (devoicing) {{PIE|*aks-}} > {{PIE|*ahs-}} > {{PIE|*ahsō}}
        • /kʷ/ > /xʷ/ ({{PIE|hw}}) - {{PIE|*kʷód}} "what" > {{PIE|*hʷód}} > {{PIE|*hwat}}
        • Since the second of two obstruents is unaffected, the sequences /sp/, /st/, /sk/, /skʷ/, /tt/ (only in {{PIE|*atta}} "dad") remain.
        • The above also forms the Germanic spirant law
          Germanic spirant law
          In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law or Primärberührung is a specific historical instance of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in the ancestor of the Germanic languages.-General description:...

          :
          • /bt/, /bʰt/, /pt/ > /ɸt/ - {{PIE|*kh₂ptós}} "grabbed" > {{PIE|*kəptós}} > {{PIE|*həftós}} > {{PIE|*haftaz}} "captive"
          • /gt/, /gʰt/, /kt/ > /xt/ - {{PIE|*oḱtṓw}} "eight" > {{PIE|*oktṓw}} > {{PIE|*ohtṓw}} > {{PIE|*ahtōu}}
          • /gʷt/, /gʷʰt/, /kʷt/ > /xt/ - {{PIE|*nokʷtm̥}} "night, acc." > {{PIE|*noktum}} > {{PIE|*nohtum}} > {{PIE|*nahtuN}}
      • Voiced stops are devoiced:
        • /b/ > /p/ - {{PIE|*dʰewbu-}} "deep" > {{PIE|*dʰewpu-}} > {{PIE|*dewpu-}} > {{PIE|*deupaz}} (reformed as a-stem)
        • /d/ > /t/ - {{PIE|*h₁dóntm̥}} "tooth, acc." > {{PIE|*tónþum}} > {{PIE|*tanþuN}}; {{PIE|*kʷód}} "what" > {{PIE|*hʷód}} > {{PIE|*hwat}}
        • /g/ > /k/ - {{PIE|*wérǵom}} "work" > {{PIE|*wérgom}} > {{PIE|*wérkom}} > {{PIE|*werkaN}}
        • /gʷ/ > /kʷ/ ({{PIE|kw}}) - {{PIE|*gʷémeti}} "(s)he will step, subj." > {{PIE|*kʷémeþi}} > {{PIE|*kwimidi}} "(s)he comes"
      • Aspirated stops become voiced fricatives (which become stops in some environments, such as after nasals, see below):
        • /bʰ/ > /β/, /b/ ({{PIE|b}}) - {{PIE|*bʰéreti}} "(s)he is carrying" > {{PIE|*béreþi}} > {{PIE|*biridi}}
        • /dʰ/ > /ð/, /d/ ({{PIE|d}}) - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dṓmos}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"
        • /gʰ/ > /ɣ/, /g/ ({{PIE|g}}) - {{PIE|*gʰáns}} "goose" > {{PIE|*gáns}} > {{PIE|*gans}}
        • /gʷʰ/ > /ɣʷ/, /gʷ/ ({{PIE|gw}}) - {{PIE|*sóngʷʰos}} "chant" > {{PIE|*sóngʷos}} > {{PIE|*sangwaz}} "song"
    • Verner's law
      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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

      : voiceless fricatives are voiced, allophonically at first, when preceded by an unaccented syllable:
      • /ɸ/ > /β/ - {{PIE|*upéri}} "over" > {{PIE|*uféri}} > {{PIE|*ubéri}} > {{PIE|*ubiri}}
      • /θ/ > /ð/ - {{PIE|*tewtéh₂}} "tribe" > {{PIE|*þewþā́}} > {{PIE|*þewdā́}} > {{PIE|*þeudō}}
      • /x/ > /ɣ/ - {{PIE|*h₂yuHn̥ḱós}} "young" > {{PIE|*yunkós}} > {{PIE|*yunhós}} > {{PIE|*yungós}} > {{PIE|*jungaz}} (with -z by analogy)
      • /xʷ/ > /ɣʷ/ - {{PIE|*kʷekʷléh₂}} "wheels (collective)" > {{PIE|*hʷehʷlā́}} > {{PIE|*hʷegʷlā́}} > {{PIE|*hweulō}}
      • /s/ > /z/ - {{PIE|*h₁régʷeses}} "of darkness" > {{PIE|*rékʷeses}} > {{PIE|*rékʷezez}} > {{PIE|*rikwiziz}}; {{PIE|*kʷékʷlos}} "wheel" > {{PIE|*hʷéhʷlos}} > {{PIE|*hʷéhʷloz}} > {{PIE|*hwehwlaz}}
      • Some small words which were generally unaccented were also affected - {{PIE|*h₁ésmi}}, unstressed {{PIE|*h₁esmi}} "I am" > {{PIE|*esmi}} > {{PIE|*ezmi}} > {{PIE|*immi}}; {{PIE|*h₁sénti}}, unstressed {{PIE|*h₁senti}} "they are" > {{PIE|*senþi}} > {{PIE|*sendi}} > {{PIE|*sindi}} (the stressed variants, which would have become *ismi and *sinþi, were lost)
    • All words become stressed on their first syllable. The PIE contrastive accent is lost, phonemicising the voicing distinction created by Verner's law.
    • Word-initial /gʷ/ > /b/ - {{PIE|*gʷʰédʰyeti}} "(s)he is asking for" > {{PIE|*gʷédyedi}} > {{PIE|*bédyedi}} > {{PIE|*bidiþi}} "(s)he waits" (with -þ- by analogy)
    • Assimilation of sonorants:
      • /nw/ > /nn/ - {{PIE|*ténh₂us}} "thin" ~ fem. {{PIE|*tn̥h₂éwih₂}} > {{PIE|*tn̥h₂ús}} ~ {{PIE|*tn̥h₂wíh₂}} > {{PIE|*þunus}} ~ {{PIE|*þunwī}} > {{PIE|*þunus}} ~ {{PIE|*þunnī}} > {{PIE|*þunnuz}} ~ {{PIE|*þunnī}}
      • /ln/ > /ll/ - {{PIE|*pl̥h₁nós}} "full" > {{PIE|*fulnos}} > {{PIE|*fullos}} > {{PIE|*fullaz}}
      • /zm/ > /mm/ - {{PIE|*h₁esmi}} "I am, unstr." > {{PIE|*ezmi}} > {{PIE|*emmi}} > {{PIE|*immi}}
    • Unstressed /owo/ > /oː/ - {{PIE|*-owos}} "thematic 1st du." > {{PIE|*-ōz}}
    • Unstressed /ew/ > /ow/ before a consonant or word-finally - {{PIE|*-ews}} "u-stem gen. sg." > {{PIE|*-owz}} > {{PIE|*-auz}}
    • Unstressed /e/ > /i/ except before /r/ - {{PIE|*-éteh₂}} "abstract noun suffix" > {{PIE|*-eþā}} > {{PIE|*-iþā}} > {{PIE|*-iþō}}
      • Unstressed /ey/ contracts to /iː/ - {{PIE|*-éys}} "i-stem gen. sg." > {{PIE|*-iys}} > {{PIE|*-īs}} > {{PIE|*-īz}} (with -z by analogy)
      • /e/ before /r/ later becomes /ɑ/, but not until after the application of i-mutation.
      • Some words which could be unstressed as a whole were also affected, often creating stressed/unstressed pairs - *éǵh₂ "I" > *ek > unstressed *ik (remaining beside stressed *ek)
    • Unstressed /ji/ > /i/ - {{PIE|*légʰyeti}} "(s)he is lying down" ~ {{PIE|*légʰyonti}} "they are lying down" > {{PIE|*legyidi}} ~ {{PIE|*legyondi}} > {{PIE|*legidi}} ~ {{PIE|*legyondi}} > {{PIE|*ligiþi}} ~ {{PIE|*ligjanþi}} (with -þ- by analogy)
      • This process creates diphthongs from originally disyllabic sequences - {{PIE|*-oyend}} "thematic optative 3pl" > {{PIE|*-oyint}} > {{PIE|*-oint}} > {{PIE|*-ain}}; {{PIE|*áyeri}} "in the morning" > {{PIE|*ayiri}} > {{PIE|*airi}} "early"; {{PIE|*tréyes}} "three" > {{PIE|*þreyiz}} > {{PIE|*þreiz}} > {{PIE|*þrīz}}
      • The sequence /iji/ becomes /iː/ - {{PIE|*gʰósteyes}} "strangers, nom. pl." > {{PIE|*gostiyiz}} > {{PIE|*gostīz}} > {{PIE|*gastīz}} "guests"
    • Merging of non-high back vowels:
      • /o/, /a/ > /ɑ/ - {{PIE|*gʰóstis}} "stranger" > {{PIE|*gostiz}} > {{PIE|*gastiz}} "guest"; {{PIE|*kátus}} "fight" > {{PIE|*haþuz}} "battle"
      • /oː/, /aː/ > /ɑː/ - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dōmoz}} > {{PIE|*dāmaz}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"; {{PIE|*swā́dus}} "sweet" > {{PIE|*swātuz}} > {{PIE|*swōtuz}}
      • /oːː/, /aːː/ > /ɑːː/ (â) - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmô}} > {{PIE|*sēmâ}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âz}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}

    Late Proto-Germanic


    By this stage, Germanic had emerged as a distinctive branch and had undergone many of the sound changes that would make its later descendants recognisable as Germanic languages. It had shifted its consonant inventory from a system rich in plosives to one containing primarily fricatives, had lost the PIE mobile pitch accent in favour of a predictable stress accent, and had merged two of its vowels. The stress accent had also begun to cause the erosion of unstressed syllables already, which would continue in its descendants up to the present day. This final stage of the language included the remaining development until the breakup into dialects, and most notably featured the appearance of nasal vowels and the first beginning of umlaut
    Germanic umlaut
    In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...

    , another characteristic Germanic feature.
    • Word-final /m/ > /n/ - {{PIE|*tóm}} "that, acc. masc." > {{PIE|*þam}} > {{PIE|*þan}} "then"; {{PIE|*-om}} "a-stem acc. sg." > {{PIE|*-am}} > {{PIE|*-an}} > {{PIE|*-aN}} > /n/ before dental consonants - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*humdan}} > {{PIE|*hundan}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}; {{PIE|*déḱm̥d}} "ten" > {{PIE|*tehumt}} > {{PIE|*tehunt}} > {{PIE|*tehun}}
    • Word-final /n/ is lost after unstressed syllables, and the preceding vowel is nasalised (written as following N) - {{PIE|*-om}} "a-stem acc. sg." > {{PIE|*-am}} > {{PIE|*-an}} > {{PIE|*-aN}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂m}} > {{PIE|*-ān}} > {{PIE|*-āN}} > {{PIE|*-ōN}}; {{PIE|*-oHom}} "dative plural" > {{PIE|*-ân}} > {{PIE|*-âN}} > {{PIE|*-ôN}}
    • Nasal /ẽː/ is lowered to /ɑ̃ː/ - {{PIE|*dʰédʰeh₁m}} "I was putting" > {{PIE|*dedēn}} > {{PIE|*dedēN}} > {{PIE|*dedāN}} > {{PIE|*dedōN}}
    • Elimination of /ə/:
      • Unstressed /ə/ is lost between consonants - {{PIE|*sámh₂dʰos}} "sand" > {{PIE|*samədaz}} > {{PIE|*samdaz}}; {{PIE|*takéh₁-}} "to be silent" > (with added suffix) {{PIE|*takəyónti}} "they are silent" > {{PIE|*þagəyanþi}} > {{PIE|*þagyanþi}} > {{PIE|*þagjanþi}}
      • /ə/ > /ɑ/ elsewhere - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*fədēr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}; {{PIE|*takéh₁-}} "to be silent" > (with added suffix) {{PIE|*takəyéti}} "(s)he is silent" > {{PIE|*þagəyiþi}} > {{PIE|*þagəiþi}} > {{PIE|*þagaiþi}}
    • Loss of /t/ after unstressed syllables - {{PIE|*déḱm̥d}} "ten" > {{PIE|*tehunt}} > {{PIE|*tehun}}; {{PIE|*bʰéroyd}} "(s)he would carry, subj." > {{PIE|*berayt}} > {{PIE|*berai}}; {{PIE|*mélid}} ~ {{PIE|*mélit-}} "honey" > {{PIE|*melit}} ~ {{PIE|*melid-}} > {{PIE|*meli}} ~ {{PIE|*melid-}} > {{PIE|*mili}} ~ {{PIE|*milid-}} > /w/, sometimes /ɣ/ - {{PIE|*snóygʷʰos}} "snow" > {{PIE|*snaygʷaz}} > {{PIE|*snaiwaz}}; {{PIE|*kʷekʷléh₂}} "wheels (collective)" > {{PIE|*hʷegʷlā}} > {{PIE|*hʷewlā}} > {{PIE|*hweulō}}
    • i-mutation
      I-mutation
      I-mutation is an important type of sound change, more precisely a category of regressive metaphony, in which a back vowel is fronted, and/or a front vowel is raised, if the following syllable contains /i/, /ī/ or /j/ I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or...

      : /e/ > /i/ when followed by /i/ or /j/ in the same or next syllable - {{PIE|*bʰéreti}} "(s)he is carrying" > {{PIE|*beridi}} > {{PIE|*biridi}}; {{PIE|*médʰyos}} "middle" > {{PIE|*medyaz}} > {{PIE|*midjaz}}; {{PIE|*néwios}} "new" > {{PIE|*newyaz}} > {{PIE|*niwjaz}}
      • This eliminates the remaining /ei/, changing it to /iː/ - {{PIE|*deywós}} "god" > {{PIE|*teywaz}} > {{PIE|*Tīwaz}} "Týr"; {{PIE|*tréyes}} "three" > {{PIE|*þreiz}} > {{PIE|*þrīz}} > /i/ when followed by a syllable-final nasal - {{PIE|*en}} "in" > {{PIE|*in}}; {{PIE|*séngʷʰeti}} "(s)he chants" > {{PIE|*sengʷidi}} > {{PIE|*singwidi}} "(s)he sings"
      • This followed the earliest contact with Finnic people, since Finnish preserves the older vowel in the loanword rengas "ring" (from early Proto-Germanic *hrengaz, later *hringaz).
    • Long a is raised:
      • /ɑː/ > /ɔː/ - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dāmaz}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"; {{PIE|*swā́dus}} "sweet" > {{PIE|*swātuz}} > {{PIE|*swōtuz}}
      • /ɑːː/ > /ɔːː/ - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmâ}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âz}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}
      • This followed the earliest contact with the Romans, since Latin Rōmānī was borrowed as *Rūmānīz and then shifted to *Rūmōnīz. is lost between vowels except after /i/ and /w/ (but it is lost after syllabic /u/). The two vowels that come to stand in hiatus then contract to long vowels or diphthongs - {{PIE|*-oyh₁m̥}} "thematic optative 1sg sg." > {{PIE|*-oyum}} > {{PIE|*-ayuN}} > {{PIE|*-auN}}; {{PIE|*áyeri}} "in the morning" > {{PIE|*ayiri}} > {{PIE|*airi}} "early"
      • This process creates a new /ɑː/ from earlier /ɑjɑ/ - {{PIE|*steh₂-}} "to stand" > (with suffix added) {{PIE|*sth₂yónti}} "they stand" > {{PIE|*stayanþi}} > {{PIE|*stānþi}} is lost before /x/, causing compensatory lengthening
        Compensatory lengthening
        Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda...

         and nasalisation of the preceding vowel - {{PIE|*ḱónketi}} "(s)he hangs" > {{PIE|*hanhidi}} (phonetically [ˈxɑ̃ːxiði])

    Archaeological contributions



    In one major{{Citation needed|reason=how to do reference to this theory? (for example a name of theory)|date=August 2008}} 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
    Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

     and Jutland
    Jutland
    Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming 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...

    , the center of the Urheimat
    Urheimat
    Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language...

     or "original home" of the Germanic peoples
    Germanic peoples
    The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...

    , prior to the Nordic Bronze Age
    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...

    , which began about 4500 years ago. This is the only area where no pre-Germanic place names have been found. 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
    Corded Ware 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 culminates in the early Bronze Age.Corded Ware culture is associated with...

     and possibly also with the preceding Funnel-necked beaker culture
    Funnelbeaker culture
    The Funnelbeaker culture, short TRB from Trichterbecherkultur is the principal north central European megalithic culture of late Neolithic Europe.- Predecessor and successor cultures :...

     developing towards the end of the Neolithic
    Neolithic
    The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

     culture of Western Europe.


    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.

    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 which include PGmc *druhtinaz 'lord' (cf. Finnish ruhtinas), *hrengaz 'ring' (cf. Finn rengas, Estonian rõngas), *kuningaz 'king' (cf. Finn kuningas), *lambaz 'lamb' (cf. Finn lampah, lammas), *lunaz 'ransom' (cf. Finn lunnas), *markijanaN 'to spot, catch sight of' (cf. Est märk(ama)), *rīkijaN 'realm, empire' (cf. Est riik 'state, country'), *skappijōN 'cupboard, shelf' (cf. Finn kaappi 'chest of drawers', Est kapp), *skildiz 'shield' (cf. Est silt 'tag, token' ), *werþaN 'worth' (cf. Est väärt). {{Citation needed|date=May 2010}}

    Linguistic definitions


    By definition, Proto-Germanic is the stage of the language constituting the most recent common ancestor of the attested Germanic languages. Current scholarship dates this to the latter half of the first millennium BC. The post-PIE
    Proto-Indo-European language
    The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

     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
    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 , Early Proto-Germanic , and Late Proto-Germanic . It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC...

    ", "pre-Proto-Germanic" or more commonly "pre-Germanic." By 250 BC, Proto-Germanic had branched into five groups of Germanic (two each in the West and the North, and one in the East).
    {{details|Germanic languages}}

    In historical linguistics
    Historical linguistics
    Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

    , Proto-Germanic is a node in the tree model
    Tree model
    A language tree, or family tree with languages substituted for real family members, has the form of a node-link diagram of a logical tree structure. Additional linguistics terminology derives from it. Such a diagram contains branch points, or nodes, from which the daughter languages descend by...

    ; 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
    Proto-Indo-European language
    The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

    . One of the problems with the node 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.

    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.

    W. P. Lehmann
    Winfred P. Lehmann
    Winfred P. Lehmann was an American linguist noted for his work in historical linguistics, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, as well as for pioneering work in machine translation.-Biography:After receiving B.A. in Humanities at the Northwestern College in Watertown in 1936, he...

     considered that Jacob Grimm
    Jacob Grimm
    Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author 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...

    's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's Law
    Grimm's law
    Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

     and Verner's Law
    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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

    , 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. Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch accent comprising "an alternation of high and low tones" 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 but later found runic
    Runic alphabet
    The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

     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."

    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.

    Other Indo-European loans


    Loans into Proto-Germanic from other Indo-European languages can be relatively dated by how well they conform to Germanic sound laws. Since the dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, using the loans for absolute, or calendar, chronology would be impossible.

    Most loans from Celtic
    Celtic languages
    The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

     appear to have been made before or during the Germanic Sound Shift
    Grimm's law
    Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

    . For instance, one specimen *rīkz 'ruler' was borrowed from Celtic *rīgos 'king', with g → k. It is clearly not native because PIE *ē → ī is not typical of Germanic but is a feature of Celtic languages. Another is *walhaz "foreigner; Celt" from the Celtic tribal name Volcae with c → h and o → a. Other likely Celtic loans include *ambahtaz 'servant', *brunjōn 'mailshirt', *gīslaz 'hostage', *īsarna 'iron', *lēkijaz 'healer', *lauđan 'lead', *Rīnaz 'Rhine', and *tūnaz, tūnan 'fortified enclosure'. These loans would likely have been borrowed during the Celtic Hallstatt
    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 and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture.By the 6th century BC, the Hallstatt culture extended for some...

     and early La Tène
    La Tène culture
    The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture named after the archaeological site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where a rich cache of artifacts was discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857....

     cultures when the Celts dominated central Europe, although the period spanned several centuries.

    From East Iranian have come *hanapiz 'hemp' (cf. Persian
    Persian language
    Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

     kanab), *humalaz, humalōn 'hops' (cf. Ossetian
    Ossetic language
    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. Osset kwəræt 'shirt'), *kutan 'cottage' (cf. Pers kad 'house'), *paidō 'cloak', *paþaz 'path' (cf. Avestan pantā, g. pathō), and *wurstwa 'work' (cf. Av vərəštuua). These words could have been transmitted directly by the Scythians from the Ukraine
    Ukraine
    Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

     plain, groups of whom entered Central Europe via the Danube, and created the Vekerzug Culture in the Carpathian Basin (6th-5th centuries BC), or by later contact with Sarmatians, who followed the same route. Unsure is *marhaz 'horse', which was either borrowed directly from Scytho-Sarmatian or through Celtic mediation.

    Non-Indo-European elements


    {{Main|Germanic substrate hypothesis}}
    The term substrate
    Substratum
    In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...

     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
    Sigmund Feist
    Sigmund Feist was a German Jewish pedagogue and historical linguist. He was the author of the Germanic substrate hypothesis as well as a number of important works concerning Jewish ethnic and racial identity. Feist served as the director of the Jewish Reichenheim Orphanage in Berlin from 1906 to...

    , who estimated that about 1/3 of the Proto-Germanic lexical items came from the substrate.

    However, research in Germanic etymology continues and as more and more plausible explanations for Germanic words whose origins were previously unclear or controversial are being proposed, and which explain those words in terms of reconstructed Indo-European words and morphology, the proportion of Germanic words without any plausible etymological explanation decreases. Estimates of that proportion are typically outdated or inflated as many proposals were unknown to scholars compiling lists of unexplained Germanic words.

    Transcription


    The following conventions are used in this article for transcribing Proto-Germanic forms:
    • Voiced obstruents appear as b, d, g; this does not imply any particular analysis of the underlying phonemes as stops /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ or fricatives /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/. In other literature, they may be written as graphemes with a bar
      Bar (diacritic)
      A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others....

       to produce
      {{SpecialChars}}

      Proto-Germanic (often abbreviated PGmc.), or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested,       reconstructed
      Linguistic reconstruction
      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...

       proto-language
      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.Often the proto-language is not known directly...

       of all the Germanic languages
      Germanic languages
      The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

      , such as modern English
      English language
      English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

      , Frisian, Dutch
      Dutch language
      Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

      , Afrikaans, German
      German language
      German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

      , Luxembourgish
      Luxembourgish language
      Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...

      , Danish
      Danish language
      Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

      , Norwegian
      Norwegian language
      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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

      , Icelandic
      Icelandic language
      Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

      , Faroese
      Faroese language
      Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 Faroese people in Denmark and elsewhere...

      , and Swedish
      Swedish language
      Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

      .

      The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed
      Linguistic reconstruction
      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...

       using the comparative method
      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 with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...

      . However, a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia
      Scandinavia
      Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

       dated to c. 200 are thought to represent a stage of Proto-Norse
      Proto-Norse language
      Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic over the first centuries AD...

       or, according to Bernard Comrie
      Bernard Comrie
      Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology and linguistic universals, and on Caucasian languages....

      , late Common Germanic immediately following the "Proto-Germanic" stage. Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European
      Proto-Indo-European language
      The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

       (PIE).

      Words in Proto-Germanic written in this article are transcribed
      Transcription (linguistics)
      Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

       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.

      Sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic


      The following changes are known or presumed to have occurred in the history of Proto-Germanic up to the point that it began to break up into distinct dialects. The changes are roughly in chronological order, with changes that operate on the outcome of earlier ones appearing later in the list.

      Pre-Proto-Germanic


      This stage began with the separation of the Germanic people, perhaps while still forming part of the Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum. It contained many innovations that were shared with other Indo-European branches to various degrees, probably through areal contacts, and mutual intelligibility with other dialects would have remained for some time.
      • Depalatalisation of PIE palatal stops, merging them with the plain stops (Germanic is therefore a centum language
        Centum-Satem isogloss
        The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...

        ):
        • /ḱ/ > /k/ - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*km̥tóm}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}
        • /ǵ/ > /g/ - {{PIE|*wérǵom}} "work" > {{PIE|*wérgom}} > {{PIE|*werkaN}}
        • /ǵʰ/ > /gʰ/ - {{PIE|*ǵʰóstis}} "stranger" > {{PIE|*gʰóstis}} > {{PIE|*gastiz}} "guest"
      • Epenthesis
        Epenthesis
        In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....

         of /u/ before the syllabic sonorants:
        • /m̥/ > /um/ - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*kumtóm}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}
        • /n̥/ > /un/ - {{PIE|*n̥tér}} "inside" > {{PIE|*untér}} > {{PIE|*under}} "among"
        • /l̥/ > /ul/ - {{PIE|*wĺ̥kʷos}} "wolf" > {{PIE|*wúlkʷos}} > {{PIE|*wulfaz}}
        • /r̥/ > /ur/ - {{PIE|*wŕ̥mis}} "worm" > {{PIE|*wurmis}} > {{PIE|*wurmiz}}
      • An epenthetic /s/ was inserted already in PIE after dental consonants when followed by a suffix beginning with a dental. This sequence now becomes: /TsT/ > /ts/ > /ss/ - {{PIE|*wid-tós}} "known" > {{PIE|*witstós}} > {{PIE|*wissós}} > {{PIE|*wissaz}} "certain"
        • A single example exists where /tt/ was word-internal, in which case it remained (even after Grimm's law
          Grimm's law
          Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

           below)- {{PIE|*atta}} "dad" > *attô
      • Geminate consonants are shortened after a consonant or a long vowel - {{PIE|*káyd-tis}} "act of calling" > {{PIE|*káyssis}} > {{PIE|*káysis}} > {{PIE|*haisiz}} "command"
      • Word-final long vowels are lengthened to "overlong" vowels - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*séh₁mô}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}
      • Loss of laryngeal
        Laryngeal
        Laryngeal may mean*pertaining to the larynx*in Indo-European linguistics, a consonant postulated in the laryngeal theory*in phonetics, an alternate term for glottal sounds....

        s, phonemicising the allophone
        Allophone
        In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

        s of /e/:
        • Word-initial laryngeals are lost before a consonant - {{PIE|*h₁dóntm̥}} "tooth, acc." > {{PIE|*dóntum}} > {{PIE|*tanþuN}}
        • Laryngeals are lost before vowels:
          • /h₁V/ > /V/ - {{PIE|*h₁ésti}} "is" > {{PIE|*ésti}} > {{PIE|*isti}}
          • /h₂e/ > /a/, /h₂V/ > /V/ otherwise - {{PIE|*h₂énti}} "in front" > (with shift of accent) {{PIE|*antí}} > {{PIE|*andi}} "in addition"
          • /h₃e/ > /o/, /h₃V/ > /V/ otherwise - {{PIE|*h₃érō}} "eagle" > {{PIE|*órô}} > {{PIE|*arô}}
        • Laryngeals are lost after vowels, but lengthen the preceding vowel: /VH/ > /Vː/ - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmô}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}
          • Two vowels that come to stand in hiatus
            Hiatus (linguistics)
            In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....

             because of this change contract into an overlong vowel - {{PIE|*-oHom}} "dative plural" > {{PIE|*-ôm}} > {{PIE|*-ôN}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âs}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}
          • In word-final position, the resulting long vowels remain distinct from (shorter than) the overlong vowels that were formed from PIE word-final long vowels - {{PIE|*-oh₂}} "thematic 1st sg." > {{PIE|*-ō}}
        • Laryngeals remain between consonants.
      • Cowgill's law
        Cowgill's law
        Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.-Cowgill's law in Greek:...

        : /h₃/ (and possibly /h₂/) is strengthened to /g/ between a sonorant and /w/ - {{PIE|*n̥h₃mé}} "us two" > {{PIE|*n̥h₃wé}} > {{PIE|*ungwé}} > {{PIE|*unk}}
      • Vocalisation of remaining laryngeals: /H/ > /ə/ - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*pətḗr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}; {{PIE|*sámh₂dʰos}} "sand" > {{PIE|*sámədʰos}} > {{PIE|*samdaz}}
      • Velars are labialised by following /w/: {{PIE|*éḱwos}} "horse" > {{PIE|*ékwos}} > {{PIE|*ékʷos}} > {{PIE|*ehwaz}}
      • Labiovelars are delabialised next to /u/ (or /un/) and before /t/ - {{PIE|*gʷʰénti-}} ~ {{PIE|*gʷʰn̥tí-}} "killing" > {{PIE|*gʷʰúntis}} > {{PIE|*gʰúntis}} > {{PIE|*gunþiz}} "battle"
        • This rule continued to operate into the Proto-Germanic period.

      Early Proto-Germanic


      This stage began its evolution as a form of centum PIE that had lost its laryngeals and had five long and six short vowels, as well as one or two overlong vowels. The consonant system was still that of PIE minus palatovelars and laryngeals, but the loss of syllabic resonants already made the language markedly different from PIE proper. Mutual intelligibility might have still existed, but strained, and this period marked the definitive break of Germanic from the other Indo-European languages and the beginning of Germanic proper, containing most of the sound changes that are now held to define this branch distinctively. This stage contained various consonant and vowel shifts, the loss of contrastive accent, and the beginnings of the reduction of unstressed syllables as a result.
      • Loss of word-final non-high short vowels /e/, /a/, /o/ - {{PIE|*wóyde}} "(s)he knows" > {{PIE|*wóyd}} > {{PIE|*wait}}
        • A /j/ or /w/ preceding the vowel is also lost - {{PIE|*tósyo}} "of that" > {{PIE|*tós}} > {{PIE|*þas}}
        • Single-syllable words were not affected, but clitics were - {{PIE|*-kʷe}} "and" > {{PIE|*-kʷ}} > {{PIE|*-hw}}
        • When the lost vowel was accented, the accent shifted to the preceding syllable - {{PIE|*n̥smé}} "us" > {{PIE|*n̥swé}} > {{PIE|*unswé}} > {{PIE|*úns}} > {{PIE|*uns}} (not {{PIE|*unz}}, showing that loss occurred before Verner's law)
      • Grimm's law
        Grimm's law
        Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

        : Chain shift of the three series of stops. Note that voiced stops had already been devoiced before a voiceless obstruent prior to this stage. Labiovelars were delabialised before /t/.
        • Voiceless stops become fricatives, unless preceded by another obstruent. In a sequence of two voiceless obstruents, the second obstruent remains a stop.
          • /p/ > /ɸ/ ({{PIE|f}}) - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*fəþḗr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}
          • /t/ > /θ/ ({{PIE|þ}}) - {{PIE|*tód}} "that" > {{PIE|*þód}} > {{PIE|*þat}}
          • /k/ > /x/ ({{PIE|h}}) - {{PIE|*kátus}} "fight" > {{PIE|*háþus}} > {{PIE|*haþuz}}; {{PIE|*h₂eǵs-}} "axle" > (devoicing) {{PIE|*aks-}} > {{PIE|*ahs-}} > {{PIE|*ahsō}}
          • /kʷ/ > /xʷ/ ({{PIE|hw}}) - {{PIE|*kʷód}} "what" > {{PIE|*hʷód}} > {{PIE|*hwat}}
          • Since the second of two obstruents is unaffected, the sequences /sp/, /st/, /sk/, /skʷ/, /tt/ (only in {{PIE|*atta}} "dad") remain.
          • The above also forms the Germanic spirant law
            Germanic spirant law
            In linguistics, the Germanic spirant law or Primärberührung is a specific historical instance of dissimilation that occurred as part of an exception of Grimm's law in the ancestor of the Germanic languages.-General description:...

            :
            • /bt/, /bʰt/, /pt/ > /ɸt/ - {{PIE|*kh₂ptós}} "grabbed" > {{PIE|*kəptós}} > {{PIE|*həftós}} > {{PIE|*haftaz}} "captive"
            • /gt/, /gʰt/, /kt/ > /xt/ - {{PIE|*oḱtṓw}} "eight" > {{PIE|*oktṓw}} > {{PIE|*ohtṓw}} > {{PIE|*ahtōu}}
            • /gʷt/, /gʷʰt/, /kʷt/ > /xt/ - {{PIE|*nokʷtm̥}} "night, acc." > {{PIE|*noktum}} > {{PIE|*nohtum}} > {{PIE|*nahtuN}}
        • Voiced stops are devoiced:
          • /b/ > /p/ - {{PIE|*dʰewbu-}} "deep" > {{PIE|*dʰewpu-}} > {{PIE|*dewpu-}} > {{PIE|*deupaz}} (reformed as a-stem)
          • /d/ > /t/ - {{PIE|*h₁dóntm̥}} "tooth, acc." > {{PIE|*tónþum}} > {{PIE|*tanþuN}}; {{PIE|*kʷód}} "what" > {{PIE|*hʷód}} > {{PIE|*hwat}}
          • /g/ > /k/ - {{PIE|*wérǵom}} "work" > {{PIE|*wérgom}} > {{PIE|*wérkom}} > {{PIE|*werkaN}}
          • /gʷ/ > /kʷ/ ({{PIE|kw}}) - {{PIE|*gʷémeti}} "(s)he will step, subj." > {{PIE|*kʷémeþi}} > {{PIE|*kwimidi}} "(s)he comes"
        • Aspirated stops become voiced fricatives (which become stops in some environments, such as after nasals, see below):
          • /bʰ/ > /β/, /b/ ({{PIE|b}}) - {{PIE|*bʰéreti}} "(s)he is carrying" > {{PIE|*béreþi}} > {{PIE|*biridi}}
          • /dʰ/ > /ð/, /d/ ({{PIE|d}}) - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dṓmos}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"
          • /gʰ/ > /ɣ/, /g/ ({{PIE|g}}) - {{PIE|*gʰáns}} "goose" > {{PIE|*gáns}} > {{PIE|*gans}}
          • /gʷʰ/ > /ɣʷ/, /gʷ/ ({{PIE|gw}}) - {{PIE|*sóngʷʰos}} "chant" > {{PIE|*sóngʷos}} > {{PIE|*sangwaz}} "song"
      • Verner's law
        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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

        : voiceless fricatives are voiced, allophonically at first, when preceded by an unaccented syllable:
        • /ɸ/ > /β/ - {{PIE|*upéri}} "over" > {{PIE|*uféri}} > {{PIE|*ubéri}} > {{PIE|*ubiri}}
        • /θ/ > /ð/ - {{PIE|*tewtéh₂}} "tribe" > {{PIE|*þewþā́}} > {{PIE|*þewdā́}} > {{PIE|*þeudō}}
        • /x/ > /ɣ/ - {{PIE|*h₂yuHn̥ḱós}} "young" > {{PIE|*yunkós}} > {{PIE|*yunhós}} > {{PIE|*yungós}} > {{PIE|*jungaz}} (with -z by analogy)
        • /xʷ/ > /ɣʷ/ - {{PIE|*kʷekʷléh₂}} "wheels (collective)" > {{PIE|*hʷehʷlā́}} > {{PIE|*hʷegʷlā́}} > {{PIE|*hweulō}}
        • /s/ > /z/ - {{PIE|*h₁régʷeses}} "of darkness" > {{PIE|*rékʷeses}} > {{PIE|*rékʷezez}} > {{PIE|*rikwiziz}}; {{PIE|*kʷékʷlos}} "wheel" > {{PIE|*hʷéhʷlos}} > {{PIE|*hʷéhʷloz}} > {{PIE|*hwehwlaz}}
        • Some small words which were generally unaccented were also affected - {{PIE|*h₁ésmi}}, unstressed {{PIE|*h₁esmi}} "I am" > {{PIE|*esmi}} > {{PIE|*ezmi}} > {{PIE|*immi}}; {{PIE|*h₁sénti}}, unstressed {{PIE|*h₁senti}} "they are" > {{PIE|*senþi}} > {{PIE|*sendi}} > {{PIE|*sindi}} (the stressed variants, which would have become *ismi and *sinþi, were lost)
      • All words become stressed on their first syllable. The PIE contrastive accent is lost, phonemicising the voicing distinction created by Verner's law.
      • Word-initial /gʷ/ > /b/ - {{PIE|*gʷʰédʰyeti}} "(s)he is asking for" > {{PIE|*gʷédyedi}} > {{PIE|*bédyedi}} > {{PIE|*bidiþi}} "(s)he waits" (with -þ- by analogy)
      • Assimilation of sonorants:
        • /nw/ > /nn/ - {{PIE|*ténh₂us}} "thin" ~ fem. {{PIE|*tn̥h₂éwih₂}} > {{PIE|*tn̥h₂ús}} ~ {{PIE|*tn̥h₂wíh₂}} > {{PIE|*þunus}} ~ {{PIE|*þunwī}} > {{PIE|*þunus}} ~ {{PIE|*þunnī}} > {{PIE|*þunnuz}} ~ {{PIE|*þunnī}}
        • /ln/ > /ll/ - {{PIE|*pl̥h₁nós}} "full" > {{PIE|*fulnos}} > {{PIE|*fullos}} > {{PIE|*fullaz}}
        • /zm/ > /mm/ - {{PIE|*h₁esmi}} "I am, unstr." > {{PIE|*ezmi}} > {{PIE|*emmi}} > {{PIE|*immi}}
      • Unstressed /owo/ > /oː/ - {{PIE|*-owos}} "thematic 1st du." > {{PIE|*-ōz}}
      • Unstressed /ew/ > /ow/ before a consonant or word-finally - {{PIE|*-ews}} "u-stem gen. sg." > {{PIE|*-owz}} > {{PIE|*-auz}}
      • Unstressed /e/ > /i/ except before /r/ - {{PIE|*-éteh₂}} "abstract noun suffix" > {{PIE|*-eþā}} > {{PIE|*-iþā}} > {{PIE|*-iþō}}
        • Unstressed /ey/ contracts to /iː/ - {{PIE|*-éys}} "i-stem gen. sg." > {{PIE|*-iys}} > {{PIE|*-īs}} > {{PIE|*-īz}} (with -z by analogy)
        • /e/ before /r/ later becomes /ɑ/, but not until after the application of i-mutation.
        • Some words which could be unstressed as a whole were also affected, often creating stressed/unstressed pairs - *éǵh₂ "I" > *ek > unstressed *ik (remaining beside stressed *ek)
      • Unstressed /ji/ > /i/ - {{PIE|*légʰyeti}} "(s)he is lying down" ~ {{PIE|*légʰyonti}} "they are lying down" > {{PIE|*legyidi}} ~ {{PIE|*legyondi}} > {{PIE|*legidi}} ~ {{PIE|*legyondi}} > {{PIE|*ligiþi}} ~ {{PIE|*ligjanþi}} (with -þ- by analogy)
        • This process creates diphthongs from originally disyllabic sequences - {{PIE|*-oyend}} "thematic optative 3pl" > {{PIE|*-oyint}} > {{PIE|*-oint}} > {{PIE|*-ain}}; {{PIE|*áyeri}} "in the morning" > {{PIE|*ayiri}} > {{PIE|*airi}} "early"; {{PIE|*tréyes}} "three" > {{PIE|*þreyiz}} > {{PIE|*þreiz}} > {{PIE|*þrīz}}
        • The sequence /iji/ becomes /iː/ - {{PIE|*gʰósteyes}} "strangers, nom. pl." > {{PIE|*gostiyiz}} > {{PIE|*gostīz}} > {{PIE|*gastīz}} "guests"
      • Merging of non-high back vowels:
        • /o/, /a/ > /ɑ/ - {{PIE|*gʰóstis}} "stranger" > {{PIE|*gostiz}} > {{PIE|*gastiz}} "guest"; {{PIE|*kátus}} "fight" > {{PIE|*haþuz}} "battle"
        • /oː/, /aː/ > /ɑː/ - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dōmoz}} > {{PIE|*dāmaz}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"; {{PIE|*swā́dus}} "sweet" > {{PIE|*swātuz}} > {{PIE|*swōtuz}}
        • /oːː/, /aːː/ > /ɑːː/ (â) - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmô}} > {{PIE|*sēmâ}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âz}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}

      Late Proto-Germanic


      By this stage, Germanic had emerged as a distinctive branch and had undergone many of the sound changes that would make its later descendants recognisable as Germanic languages. It had shifted its consonant inventory from a system rich in plosives to one containing primarily fricatives, had lost the PIE mobile pitch accent in favour of a predictable stress accent, and had merged two of its vowels. The stress accent had also begun to cause the erosion of unstressed syllables already, which would continue in its descendants up to the present day. This final stage of the language included the remaining development until the breakup into dialects, and most notably featured the appearance of nasal vowels and the first beginning of umlaut
      Germanic umlaut
      In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...

      , another characteristic Germanic feature.
      • Word-final /m/ > /n/ - {{PIE|*tóm}} "that, acc. masc." > {{PIE|*þam}} > {{PIE|*þan}} "then"; {{PIE|*-om}} "a-stem acc. sg." > {{PIE|*-am}} > {{PIE|*-an}} > {{PIE|*-aN}} > /n/ before dental consonants - {{PIE|*ḱm̥tóm}} "hundred" > {{PIE|*humdan}} > {{PIE|*hundan}} > {{PIE|*hundaN}}; {{PIE|*déḱm̥d}} "ten" > {{PIE|*tehumt}} > {{PIE|*tehunt}} > {{PIE|*tehun}}
      • Word-final /n/ is lost after unstressed syllables, and the preceding vowel is nasalised (written as following N) - {{PIE|*-om}} "a-stem acc. sg." > {{PIE|*-am}} > {{PIE|*-an}} > {{PIE|*-aN}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂m}} > {{PIE|*-ān}} > {{PIE|*-āN}} > {{PIE|*-ōN}}; {{PIE|*-oHom}} "dative plural" > {{PIE|*-ân}} > {{PIE|*-âN}} > {{PIE|*-ôN}}
      • Nasal /ẽː/ is lowered to /ɑ̃ː/ - {{PIE|*dʰédʰeh₁m}} "I was putting" > {{PIE|*dedēn}} > {{PIE|*dedēN}} > {{PIE|*dedāN}} > {{PIE|*dedōN}}
      • Elimination of /ə/:
        • Unstressed /ə/ is lost between consonants - {{PIE|*sámh₂dʰos}} "sand" > {{PIE|*samədaz}} > {{PIE|*samdaz}}; {{PIE|*takéh₁-}} "to be silent" > (with added suffix) {{PIE|*takəyónti}} "they are silent" > {{PIE|*þagəyanþi}} > {{PIE|*þagyanþi}} > {{PIE|*þagjanþi}}
        • /ə/ > /ɑ/ elsewhere - {{PIE|*ph₂tḗr}} "father" > {{PIE|*fədēr}} > {{PIE|*fadēr}}; {{PIE|*takéh₁-}} "to be silent" > (with added suffix) {{PIE|*takəyéti}} "(s)he is silent" > {{PIE|*þagəyiþi}} > {{PIE|*þagəiþi}} > {{PIE|*þagaiþi}}
      • Loss of /t/ after unstressed syllables - {{PIE|*déḱm̥d}} "ten" > {{PIE|*tehunt}} > {{PIE|*tehun}}; {{PIE|*bʰéroyd}} "(s)he would carry, subj." > {{PIE|*berayt}} > {{PIE|*berai}}; {{PIE|*mélid}} ~ {{PIE|*mélit-}} "honey" > {{PIE|*melit}} ~ {{PIE|*melid-}} > {{PIE|*meli}} ~ {{PIE|*melid-}} > {{PIE|*mili}} ~ {{PIE|*milid-}} > /w/, sometimes /ɣ/ - {{PIE|*snóygʷʰos}} "snow" > {{PIE|*snaygʷaz}} > {{PIE|*snaiwaz}}; {{PIE|*kʷekʷléh₂}} "wheels (collective)" > {{PIE|*hʷegʷlā}} > {{PIE|*hʷewlā}} > {{PIE|*hweulō}}
      • i-mutation
        I-mutation
        I-mutation is an important type of sound change, more precisely a category of regressive metaphony, in which a back vowel is fronted, and/or a front vowel is raised, if the following syllable contains /i/, /ī/ or /j/ I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or...

        : /e/ > /i/ when followed by /i/ or /j/ in the same or next syllable - {{PIE|*bʰéreti}} "(s)he is carrying" > {{PIE|*beridi}} > {{PIE|*biridi}}; {{PIE|*médʰyos}} "middle" > {{PIE|*medyaz}} > {{PIE|*midjaz}}; {{PIE|*néwios}} "new" > {{PIE|*newyaz}} > {{PIE|*niwjaz}}
        • This eliminates the remaining /ei/, changing it to /iː/ - {{PIE|*deywós}} "god" > {{PIE|*teywaz}} > {{PIE|*Tīwaz}} "Týr"; {{PIE|*tréyes}} "three" > {{PIE|*þreiz}} > {{PIE|*þrīz}} > /i/ when followed by a syllable-final nasal - {{PIE|*en}} "in" > {{PIE|*in}}; {{PIE|*séngʷʰeti}} "(s)he chants" > {{PIE|*sengʷidi}} > {{PIE|*singwidi}} "(s)he sings"
        • This followed the earliest contact with Finnic people, since Finnish preserves the older vowel in the loanword rengas "ring" (from early Proto-Germanic *hrengaz, later *hringaz).
      • Long a is raised:
        • /ɑː/ > /ɔː/ - {{PIE|*dʰóh₁mos}} "thing put" > {{PIE|*dāmaz}} > {{PIE|*dōmaz}} "judgement"; {{PIE|*swā́dus}} "sweet" > {{PIE|*swātuz}} > {{PIE|*swōtuz}}
        • /ɑːː/ > /ɔːː/ - {{PIE|*séh₁mō}} "seeds" > {{PIE|*sēmâ}} > {{PIE|*sēmô}}; {{PIE|*-eh₂es}} "eh₂-stem nom. pl." > {{PIE|*-âz}} > {{PIE|*-ôz}}
        • This followed the earliest contact with the Romans, since Latin Rōmānī was borrowed as *Rūmānīz and then shifted to *Rūmōnīz. is lost between vowels except after /i/ and /w/ (but it is lost after syllabic /u/). The two vowels that come to stand in hiatus then contract to long vowels or diphthongs - {{PIE|*-oyh₁m̥}} "thematic optative 1sg sg." > {{PIE|*-oyum}} > {{PIE|*-ayuN}} > {{PIE|*-auN}}; {{PIE|*áyeri}} "in the morning" > {{PIE|*ayiri}} > {{PIE|*airi}} "early"
        • This process creates a new /ɑː/ from earlier /ɑjɑ/ - {{PIE|*steh₂-}} "to stand" > (with suffix added) {{PIE|*sth₂yónti}} "they stand" > {{PIE|*stayanþi}} > {{PIE|*stānþi}} is lost before /x/, causing compensatory lengthening
          Compensatory lengthening
          Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda...

           and nasalisation of the preceding vowel - {{PIE|*ḱónketi}} "(s)he hangs" > {{PIE|*hanhidi}} (phonetically [ˈxɑ̃ːxiði])

      Archaeological contributions



      In one major{{Citation needed|reason=how to do reference to this theory? (for example a name of theory)|date=August 2008}} 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
      Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

       and Jutland
      Jutland
      Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming 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...

      , the center of the Urheimat
      Urheimat
      Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language...

       or "original home" of the Germanic peoples
      Germanic peoples
      The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...

      , prior to the Nordic Bronze Age
      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...

      , which began about 4500 years ago. This is the only area where no pre-Germanic place names have been found. 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
      Corded Ware 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 culminates in the early Bronze Age.Corded Ware culture is associated with...

       and possibly also with the preceding Funnel-necked beaker culture
      Funnelbeaker culture
      The Funnelbeaker culture, short TRB from Trichterbecherkultur is the principal north central European megalithic culture of late Neolithic Europe.- Predecessor and successor cultures :...

       developing towards the end of the Neolithic
      Neolithic
      The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

       culture of Western Europe.


      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.

      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 which include PGmc *druhtinaz 'lord' (cf. Finnish ruhtinas), *hrengaz 'ring' (cf. Finn rengas, Estonian rõngas), *kuningaz 'king' (cf. Finn kuningas), *lambaz 'lamb' (cf. Finn lampah, lammas), *lunaz 'ransom' (cf. Finn lunnas), *markijanaN 'to spot, catch sight of' (cf. Est märk(ama)), *rīkijaN 'realm, empire' (cf. Est riik 'state, country'), *skappijōN 'cupboard, shelf' (cf. Finn kaappi 'chest of drawers', Est kapp), *skildiz 'shield' (cf. Est silt 'tag, token' ), *werþaN 'worth' (cf. Est väärt). {{Citation needed|date=May 2010}}

      Linguistic definitions


      By definition, Proto-Germanic is the stage of the language constituting the most recent common ancestor of the attested Germanic languages. Current scholarship dates this to the latter half of the first millennium BC. The post-PIE
      Proto-Indo-European language
      The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

       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
      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 , Early Proto-Germanic , and Late Proto-Germanic . It is intended to cover the time of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC...

      ", "pre-Proto-Germanic" or more commonly "pre-Germanic." By 250 BC, Proto-Germanic had branched into five groups of Germanic (two each in the West and the North, and one in the East).
      {{details|Germanic languages}}

      In historical linguistics
      Historical linguistics
      Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

      , Proto-Germanic is a node in the tree model
      Tree model
      A language tree, or family tree with languages substituted for real family members, has the form of a node-link diagram of a logical tree structure. Additional linguistics terminology derives from it. Such a diagram contains branch points, or nodes, from which the daughter languages descend by...

      ; 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
      Proto-Indo-European language
      The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

      . One of the problems with the node 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.

      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.

      W. P. Lehmann
      Winfred P. Lehmann
      Winfred P. Lehmann was an American linguist noted for his work in historical linguistics, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, as well as for pioneering work in machine translation.-Biography:After receiving B.A. in Humanities at the Northwestern College in Watertown in 1936, he...

       considered that Jacob Grimm
      Jacob Grimm
      Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author 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...

      's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's Law
      Grimm's law
      Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

       and Verner's Law
      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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

      , 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. Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch accent comprising "an alternation of high and low tones" 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 but later found runic
      Runic alphabet
      The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

       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."

      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.

      Other Indo-European loans


      Loans into Proto-Germanic from other Indo-European languages can be relatively dated by how well they conform to Germanic sound laws. Since the dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, using the loans for absolute, or calendar, chronology would be impossible.

      Most loans from Celtic
      Celtic languages
      The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

       appear to have been made before or during the Germanic Sound Shift
      Grimm's law
      Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

      . For instance, one specimen *rīkz 'ruler' was borrowed from Celtic *rīgos 'king', with g → k. It is clearly not native because PIE *ē → ī is not typical of Germanic but is a feature of Celtic languages. Another is *walhaz "foreigner; Celt" from the Celtic tribal name Volcae with c → h and o → a. Other likely Celtic loans include *ambahtaz 'servant', *brunjōn 'mailshirt', *gīslaz 'hostage', *īsarna 'iron', *lēkijaz 'healer', *lauđan 'lead', *Rīnaz 'Rhine', and *tūnaz, tūnan 'fortified enclosure'. These loans would likely have been borrowed during the Celtic Hallstatt
      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 and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture.By the 6th century BC, the Hallstatt culture extended for some...

       and early La Tène
      La Tène culture
      The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture named after the archaeological site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where a rich cache of artifacts was discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857....

       cultures when the Celts dominated central Europe, although the period spanned several centuries.

      From East Iranian have come *hanapiz 'hemp' (cf. Persian
      Persian language
      Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

       kanab), *humalaz, humalōn 'hops' (cf. Ossetian
      Ossetic language
      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. Osset kwəræt 'shirt'), *kutan 'cottage' (cf. Pers kad 'house'), *paidō 'cloak', *paþaz 'path' (cf. Avestan pantā, g. pathō), and *wurstwa 'work' (cf. Av vərəštuua). These words could have been transmitted directly by the Scythians from the Ukraine
      Ukraine
      Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

       plain, groups of whom entered Central Europe via the Danube, and created the Vekerzug Culture in the Carpathian Basin (6th-5th centuries BC), or by later contact with Sarmatians, who followed the same route. Unsure is *marhaz 'horse', which was either borrowed directly from Scytho-Sarmatian or through Celtic mediation.

      Non-Indo-European elements


      {{Main|Germanic substrate hypothesis}}
      The term substrate
      Substratum
      In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...

       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
      Sigmund Feist
      Sigmund Feist was a German Jewish pedagogue and historical linguist. He was the author of the Germanic substrate hypothesis as well as a number of important works concerning Jewish ethnic and racial identity. Feist served as the director of the Jewish Reichenheim Orphanage in Berlin from 1906 to...

      , who estimated that about 1/3 of the Proto-Germanic lexical items came from the substrate.

      However, research in Germanic etymology continues and as more and more plausible explanations for Germanic words whose origins were previously unclear or controversial are being proposed, and which explain those words in terms of reconstructed Indo-European words and morphology, the proportion of Germanic words without any plausible etymological explanation decreases. Estimates of that proportion are typically outdated or inflated as many proposals were unknown to scholars compiling lists of unexplained Germanic words.

      Transcription


      The following conventions are used in this article for transcribing Proto-Germanic forms:
      • Voiced obstruents appear as b, d, g; this does not imply any particular analysis of the underlying phonemes as stops /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ or fricatives /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/. In other literature, they may be written as graphemes with a bar
        Bar (diacritic)
        A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others....

         to produce {{Unicode
        B with stroke
        B with stroke is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed from B with the addition of a bar, which can be through either the ascender or the bowl...

        , {{Unicode
        D with stroke
        Đ , formed from D with the addition of a bar or stroke through the letter. This is the same modification that was used to create eth , but eth is based on an insular variant of d while đ is based on its usual upright shape...

         and {{Unicode.
      • Unvoiced fricatives appear as f, þ, h (perhaps /ɸ/, /θ/, /x/). /x/ may have become /h/ in certain positions at a later stage of Proto-Germanic itself. Similarly for /xʷ/, which later became /hʷ/ or /ʍ/ in some environments.
      • Labiovelars appear as kw, hw, gw; this does not imply any particular analysis as single sounds (e.g. /kʷ/, /xʷ/, /ɡʷ/) or clusters (e.g. /kw/, /xw/, /ɡw/).
      • The "yod" sound appears as j /j/. Note that the normal convention for representing this sound in Proto-Indo-European
        Proto-Indo-European language
        The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

         is y; the use of j does not imply any actual change in the pronunciation of the sound.

      • Long vowels are denoted with a macron over the letter, e.g. ō. When a distinction is necessary, /ɛː/ and /eː/ are transcribed as ē¹ and ē² respectively. ē¹ is sometimes transcribed as æ or {{Unicode|ǣ}} instead, but this is not followed here.
      • Overlong vowels appear with circumflexes, e.g. ô. In other literature they are often denoted by a doubled macron.
      • Nasal vowels are written here with following N, e.g. ôN /õːː/. Most commonly in literature, they are denoted simply by a following n. However, this can cause confusion between a word-final nasal vowel and a word-final regular vowel followed by /n/; a distinction which was phonemic. Tildes (ã, ĩ, ũ...) are also used. Don Ringe denotes them with ogonek
        Ogonek
        The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.-Use:...

        s (ą, į, ų...).
      • Diphthongs appear as ai, au, eu, iu, ōi, ōu and perhaps ēi, ēu. However, when immediately followed by the corresponding semivowel, they appear as ajj, aww, eww, iww. u is written as w when between a vowel and j. This convention is based on the usage in Don Ringe's recent book From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.
      • Long vowels followed by a non-high vowel were separate syllables and are written as such here, except for ī, which is written ij in that case.

      Consonants


      The table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic classified by reconstructed pronunciation. The slashes around the phonemes are omitted for clarity. If two phonemes appear in the same box, the first of each pair is voiceless, the second is voiced. Phonemes written in parentheses represent allophone
      Allophone
      In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

      s and are not independent phonemes. For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms, follow the links on the headings.
      Proto-Germanic consonants
        Bilabial
      Bilabial consonant
      In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...

      		 Dental
      Interdental consonant
      Interdental consonants are produced by placing the blade of the tongue against the upper incisors...

      		 Alveolar
      Alveolar consonant
      Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...

      		 Palatal
      Palatal consonant
      Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...

      		 Velar
      Velar consonant
      Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....

      		 Labial-velar
      Labial-velar consonant
      Labial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as and the approximant ....
      Nasal
      Nasal consonant
      A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...

      		 m   n   (ŋ) (ŋʷ)
      Plosive
      Stop consonant
      In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...

      		 p  b t  d     k  ɡ kʷ  ɡʷ
      Fricative
      Fricative consonant
      Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...

      		 ɸ  (β) θ  (ð) s  z   x  (ɣ) xʷ
      Trill
      Trill consonant
      In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....

      		     r      
      Approximant
      Approximant consonant
      Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...

      		       j   w
      Lateral
      Lateral consonant
      A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....

      		     l      


      Notes:
      1. [ŋ] was an allophone of /n/ before velar obstruents.
      2. [ŋʷ] was an allophone of /n/ before labial-velar obstruents.
      3. [β], [ð] and [ɣ] were allophones of /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ in certain positions (see below).
      4. The phoneme written as f was certainly still realised as a bilabial fricative (/ɸ/) in Proto-Germanic. This can be deduced from the fact that in Gothic, word-final b devoices to f, and also from Old Norse spellings such as aptr [ɑɸtr], where the letter p rather than the more usual f was used to denote the bilabial realisation before /t/.

      Grimm's and Verner's law


      {{Main|Grimm's Law|Verner's law}}
      Grimm's law as applied to pre-proto-Germanic is a chain shift
      Chain shift
      In phonology, a chain shift is a phenomenon in which several sounds move stepwise along a phonetic scale. The sounds involved in a chain shift can be ordered into a "chain" in such a way that, after the change is complete, each phoneme ends up sounding like what the phoneme before it in the chain...

       of the original Indo-European stop consonants. 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. The discrepancy is conditioned by the placement of the original Indo-European word accent.
      Labiovelar reduction (near u) Grimm's law: Voiceless to fricative Grimm's law: Voiced to plosive Grimm's law: Aspirated to voiced Verner's law Labiovelar dissolution
      labials p > ɸ b > p bʱ > b, β ɸ > b, β
      dentals t > θ d > t dʱ > d, ð θ > d, ð
      velars k > x ɡ > k ɡʱ > ɡ, ɣ x > ɡ, ɣ
      labiovelars kʷ > k
      ɡʷ > ɡ
      ɡʷʱ > ɡʱ      		 kʷ > xʷ ɡʷ > kʷ ɡʷʱ > ɡʷ, ɣʷ xʷ > ɡʷ, ɣʷ ɡʷ > b
      ɣʷ > w, ɣ


      p, t, and k did not undergo Grimm's law 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). 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
      Low German
      Low German or Low Saxon is an Ingvaeonic West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands...

       in the north … and High German further south ...."

      Verner's law follows 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, and was still free and could occur on any syllable. For example, PIE *bhrátēr > PGmc. *brōþēr "brother" but PIE *mātér > PGmc. *mōdēr "mother." The voicing of some /s/ according to Verner's Law produced /z/, a new phoneme. Following Grimm's and Verner's law, Proto-Germanic lost its inherited contrastive accent, and all words became stressed on their root syllable. This was usually the first syllable unless a prefix was attached.

      As a result of the loss of contrastive accent, the conditioning environment for the original consonant alternations created by Verner's law was lost. As a result, since the original cause of the alternation was no longer obvious to native speakers, significant levelling occurred throughout the Germanic period as well as in the later daughter languages. The alternations became less phonetic and increasingly grammatical in nature, leading to the phenomenon known as Grammatischer Wechsel
      Grammatischer Wechsel
      In historical linguistics, the German term Grammatischer Wechsel refers to the effects of Verner's law when viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.-Overview:...

      . Already in Proto-Germanic, most alternations in nouns were levelled in one direction or the other, although some were preserved, only to be levelled later in the daughters (but differently in each 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.

      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."

      Many of the phonemes listed in the table represent can appear lengthened or prolonged under some circumstances, appearing in some daughter languages as geminated graphemes. The phenomenon is therefore termed gemination
      Gemination
      In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it....

      . 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 phonemes /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ɡʷ/ "were stops in some environments and fricatives in others. The pattern of allophony is not clear in every detail." 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:
      • Word-initial /b/ and /d/ were or became [b] and [d].
      • Word-initial /ɡ/ was [ɣ], judging from developments in Anglo-Frisian
        Anglo-Frisian languages
        The Anglo-Frisian languages form a group of West Germanic languages consisting of Old English, Old Frisian, and their descendants...

        .
      • Stops appeared after homorganic nasal consonants: [mb], [nd], [ŋɡ], [ŋʷɡʷ]. This was the only place where a voiced labiovelar [ɡʷ] could still occur.
      • Gemination produced [bb], [dd], [ɡɡ]. This rule continued to apply at least into the early West Germanic languages, since the West Germanic gemination
        West Germanic Gemination
        West Germanic gemination is a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages, around 300 AD. All single consonants except were geminated before . The second element of the diphthongs iu and au was still underlyingly at this time and therefore was still considered a consonant, so...

         produced geminated plosives from earlier voiced fricatives. was [d] after l or z. Evidence for /d/ after /r/ is conflicting: it appears as a stop in Gothic waurd "word" (not *waurþ, with devoicing), but as a fricative in Old Norse orð.

      Labiovelars


      Numerous additional changes affected the labiovelars.
      1. Even before the operation of Grimm's law
        Grimm's law
        Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

        , they were reduced to plain velars next to /u/. This appears to be a sound law that was inherited from PIE and continued to operate as a surface filter
        Surface filter
        In linguistics, a surface filter is type of sound change that does not operate on a single set of sounds at a particular point in time, but continues to operate over a longer period. Surface filters normally affect any phonetic combination that is not permitted according to the language's phonetic...

        , i.e. if a sound change generated a new environment in which a labiovelar occurred near a /u/, it was immediately converted to a plain velar. This caused certain alternations in verb paradigms, such as *singwanaN [siŋɡʷɑnɑ̃] ('to sing') versus *sungun [suŋɡun] ('they sang'). Apparently, this delabialization also occurred after /un/, showing that the language possessed a labial allophone [ŋʷ] as well. In this case the entire clusters [uŋʷxʷ], [uŋʷkʷ] and [uŋʷgʷ] are delabialized to [uŋx], [uŋk] and [uŋg].
      2. After the operation of Verner's law
        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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

        , various changes conspired to almost completely eliminate voiced labiovelars. Initially, [ɡʷ] became [b], e.g. PIE *gʷʱédʱyeti > PGmc. bidiþi "(s)he asks for". The fricative variant [ɣʷ] (which occurred in most non-initial environments) usually became [w], but sometimes instead turned into [ɣ]. The only environment in which a voiced labiovelar remained was after a nasal, e.g. in *singwanaN [siŋɡʷɑnɑ̃] "to sing". These various changes often led to complex alternations, e.g. *sehwanaN [sexʷɑnɑ̃] ('to see'), *sēgun [sɛːɣun] ('they saw', indicative), *sēwīn [sɛːwiːn] ('they saw', subjunctive), which were reanalysed and regularised differently in the various daughter languages.

      Vowels


      Proto-Germanic had four short vowels five or six long vowels, and at least one "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel. The exact phonetic quality of the vowels is uncertain. All vowels could also be nasalized when word-final.
      Proto-Germanic vowels
      Front
      Front vowel
      A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

      		 Back
      Back vowel
      A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
      short long overl. short long overl.
      Close
      Close vowel
      A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...

      		 i iː u uː
      Close-mid
      Close-mid vowel
      A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...

      		 e eː?
      Open-mid
      Open-mid vowel
      An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...

      		 ɛː ɛːː ɔː ɔːː
      Open
      Open vowel
      An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...

      		 ɑ ɑː


      PIE ə a o merged into PGmc a; PIE ā ō merged into PGmc ō. At the time of the merger, the vowels probably were [ɑ] and [ɑː], or perhaps [ɒ] and [ɒː]. Their timbres then differentiated by raising (and perhaps rounding) the long vowel to [ɔː]{{Citation needed|date=June 2007}}. It is known that the raising of ā to ō can not have occurred earlier than the earliest contact between Proto-Germanic speakers and the Romans. This can be verified by the fact that Latin Rōmānī later emerges in Gothic as Rumoneis (that is, Rūmōnīs). It is explained by Ringe that at the time of borrowing, the vowel matching closest in sound to Latin ā was a Proto-Germanic ā-like vowel (which later became ō). And since Proto-Germanic therefore lacked a mid(-high) back vowel, the closest equivalent of Latin ō was Proto-Germanic ū: Rōmānī > *Rūmānīz > *Rūmōnīz > Gothic Rumoneis.

      A new ā was formed following the shift from ā to ō when intervocalic /j/ was lost in -aja- sequences. It was a rare phoneme, and occurred only in a handful of words, the most notable being the verbs of the third weak class. The agent noun suffix *-ārijaz (Modern English -er) was likely borrowed from Latin around or shortly after this time.

      Diphthongs


      The following diphthongs are known to have existed in Proto-Germanic:
      • Short: /ɑu/, /ɑi/, /eu/, /iu/
      • Long: /ɔːu/, /ɔːi/, (possibly /ɛːu/, /ɛːi/)


      Note the change /e/ > /i/ before /i/ or /j/ in the same or following syllable. This removed /ei/ (which became /iː/) but created /iu/ from earlier /eu/.

      Diphthongs in Proto-Germanic can also be analysed as sequences of a vowel plus an approximant, as was the case in Proto-Indo-European. This explains why /j/ was not lost in *niwjaz ("new"); the second element of the diphthong iu was still underlyingly a consonant and therefore the conditioning environment for the loss was not met. This is also confirmed by the fact that later in the West Germanic gemination
      West Germanic Gemination
      West Germanic gemination is a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages, around 300 AD. All single consonants except were geminated before . The second element of the diphthongs iu and au was still underlyingly at this time and therefore was still considered a consonant, so...

      , -wj- is geminated to -wwj- in parallel with the other consonants (except /r/).

      Overlong vowels


      Proto-Germanic had two overlong or trimoraic long vowels ô [ɔːː] and ê [ɛːː], the latter mainly in adverbs (cf. *hwadrê "whereto, whither"). Trimoraic vowels generally occurred at morpheme
      Morpheme
      In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

       boundaries where a bimoraic long vowel and a short vowel in hiatus contracted, especially after the loss of an intervening laryngeal
      Laryngeal
      Laryngeal may mean*pertaining to the larynx*in Indo-European linguistics, a consonant postulated in the laryngeal theory*in phonetics, an alternate term for glottal sounds....

       (-VHV-). One example, without a laryngeal, includes the class II weak verbs (ō-stems) where a -j- was lost between vowels, so that -ōja → ōa → ô (cf. *salbōjanaN → *salbônaN → Gothic salbōn "to anoint"). However, the majority occurred in word-final syllables (inflectional endings) probably because in this position the vowel could not be resyllabified. Additionally, Germanic, like Balto-Slavic, lengthened bimoraic long vowels in absolute final position, perhaps to better conform to a word's prosodic
      Prosody (linguistics)
      In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...

       template; e.g., PGmc *arô "eagle" ← PIE *h₃érō just as Lith akmuő "stone", OSl kamy ← *aḱmō̃ ← PIE *h₂éḱmō). Contrast:
      • contraction after loss of laryngeal: gen.pl. *wulfôN "wolves'" ← *wulfôn ← pre-Gmc *wúlpōom ← PIE *{{PIE|wĺ̥kʷoHom}}; ō-stem nom.pl. *-ôz ← PIE *-eh₂es.
      • contraction of short vowels: a-stem nom.pl. *wulfôz "wolves" ← PIE *wĺ̥kʷoes.


      But vowels that were lengthened by laryngeals did not become overlong. Compare:
      • ō-stem nom.sg. *-ō ← *-ā ← PIE *{{PIE|-eh₂}};
      • ō-stem acc.sg. *-ōN ← *-ān ← *-ām (by Stang's law
        Stang's law
        Stang's law is a Proto-Indo-European phonological rule named after Norwegian linguist Christian Stang. The law governs the word-final sequences of a vowel, followed by a laryngeal or a semivowel */y/ or */w/, followed by a nasal, and according to the law those sequences are simplified in a way that...

        ) ← PIE *{{PIE|-eh₂m}};
      • ō-stem acc.pl. *-ōz ← *-āz ← *-ās (by Stang's law
        Stang's law
        Stang's law is a Proto-Indo-European phonological rule named after Norwegian linguist Christian Stang. The law governs the word-final sequences of a vowel, followed by a laryngeal or a semivowel */y/ or */w/, followed by a nasal, and according to the law those sequences are simplified in a way that...

        ) ← PIE *{{PIE|-eh₂ns}};


      Trimoraic vowels are distinguished from bimoraic vowels by their outcomes in attested Germanic languages: word-final trimoraic vowels remained long vowels while bimoraic vowels developed into short vowels. Older theories about the phenomenon claimed that long and overlong vowels were both long but differed in tone
      Tone (linguistics)
      Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

      , i.e., ô and ê had a "circumflex" (rise-fall-rise) tone while ō and ē had an "acute" (rising) tone, much like the tones of modern Scandinavian languages, Baltic, and Ancient Greek, and asserted that this distinction was inherited from PIE. However, this view was abandoned since languages do not combine distinctive intonations on unstressed syllables with contrastive stress and vowel length. Modern theories have reinterpreted overlong vowels as having superheavy syllable weight (three mora
      Mora (linguistics)
      Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...

      s) and therefore greater length than ordinary long vowels.

      By the end of the Proto-Germanic period, word-final long vowels were shortened to short vowels. Following that, overlong vowels were shortened to regular long vowels in all positions, merging with originally long vowels except word-finally (because of the earlier shortening), so that they remained distinct in that position. This was a late dialectal development, because the end result was not the same in all Germanic languages: word-final ē shortened to a in East and West Germanic but to i in Old Norse, and word-final ō shortened to a in Gothic but to o (probably [o]) in early North and West Germanic, with a later raising to u (the 6th century Salic law
      Salic law
      Salic law was a body of traditional law codified for governing the Salian Franks in the early Middle Ages during the reign of King Clovis I in the 6th century...

       still has maltho in late Frankish).

      The shortened overlong vowels in final position developed as regular long vowels from that point on, including the lowering of ē to ā in North and West Germanic. The monopthongization of unstressed au in Northwest Germanic produced a phoneme which merged with this new word-final long ō, while the monophthongization of unstressed ai produced a new ē which did not merge with original ē, but rather with ē2, as it was not lowered to ā. This split, combined with the asymmetric development in West Germanic, with ē lowering but ō raising, points to an early difference in the articulation height of the two vowels that was not present in North Germanic. It could be seen as evidence that the lowering of ē to ā began in West Germanic at a time when final vowels were still long, and spread to North Germanic through the late Germanic dialect continuum, but only reaching the latter after the vowels had already been shortened.

      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). Gothic makes no orthographic and therefore presumably no phonetic distinction between ē¹ and ē², but the existence of two Proto-Germanic long e-like phonemes is supported by the existence of two e-like Elder Futhark
      Elder Futhark
      The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of the runic alphabet, used by Germanic tribes for Northwest Germanic and Migration period Germanic dialects of the 2nd to 8th centuries for inscriptions on artifacts such as jewellery, amulets, tools, weapons and runestones...

       runes, Ehwaz
      Ehwaz
      *Ehwaz is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune , meaning "horse"...

       and Eihwaz
      Eihwaz
      Eiwaz or Eihaz was a Proto-Germanic word for "yew", and the reconstructed name of the rune ....

      .

      Krahe treats ē² (secondary ē) as identical with ī. It probably continues PIE ēi, and it may have been in the process of transition from a diphthong to a long simple vowel in the Proto-Germanic period. Lehmann lists the following origins for ē²:
      • ēi - Old High German fiara (side).
      • The preterite of class VII strong verbs with ai, al or an plus a consonant, or ē¹.
      • iz - Old English mēd, Old High German miata (reward) versus Ancient Greek μισθός (misthos).
      • Certain pronomial forms, e.g. Old English hēr (here).
      • Words borrowed from Latin ē or e in the root syllable after a certain period (older loans also show ī).

      Nasal vowels


      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
      Old Norse
      Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

       down to at least 1125 AD, the earliest possible time for the creation of the First Grammatical Treatise
      First Grammatical Treatise
      The First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...

       (which documents nasal vowels). 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/-uN/-un in *fehu "livestock" vs. *nahtuN "night (acc.)" vs. *tehun "ten". Since final -uN comes from earlier -un while final -un comes from earlier -unt, it could be claimed that Proto-Germanic actually had an underlying phonemic contrast -u/-un/-unt and that the development of phonemic nasality occurred only after Proto-Norse split off. This makes it hard to account for the relative chronology of sound changes, however. The process of nasalisation must have occurred before the loss of word-final -t, because from earlier -nt, -n remained in the 3rd person plural ending, and also some numerals. And that change in turn must have preceded the loss of word-final -a and -e, because earlier -at remained as -a in the nominative/accusative singular of adjectives (from which Gothic ƕa "what" by analogy). Therefore the analysis with word-final nasal vowels is most likely to be correct.

      It is somewhat doubtful whether nasality was phonemic for overlong vowels. The later phonetic developments of word-final overlong vowels are the same whether they are reconstructed as nasal or not. Both -ô (adverbial suffix) and -ôN (genitive plural ending) develop the same way in all daughter languages, showing up as -ō in Gothic, as -a in Old English and Old Norse and as -o in Old High German. This probably indicates an early phonemic merger, possibly within Proto-Germanic times.

      Phonotactics


      Proto-Germanic allowed the following clusters in initial and medial position:
      • Plosive + l: pl, kl, fl, hl, sl, bl, gl, wl
      • Plosive + r: pr, tr, kr, fr, þr, hr, br, dr, gr, wr
      • Non-labial obstruent + w: tw, dw, kw, þw, hw, sw
      • Velar + nasal, s + nasal: kn, hn, sm, sn


      It allowed the following clusters in medial position only:
      • tl
      • Liquid + w: lw, rw
      • Geminates: pp, tt, kk, ss, bb, dd, gg, mm, nn, ll, rr, jj, ww
      • Consonant + j: pj, tj, kj, fj, þj, hj, zj, bj, dj, gj, mj, nj, lj, rj


      It allowed the following clusters in medial and final position only:
      • Fricative + obstruent: ft, ht, fs, hs, zd
      • Nasal + obstruent: mp, mf, ms, mb, nt, nk, nþ, nh, ns, nd, ng (however nh was simplified to h, with nasalisation and lengthening of the previous vowel, in late Proto-Germanic)
      • l + consonant: lp, lt, lk, lf, lþ, lh, ls, lb, ld, lg, lm
      • r + consonant: rp, rt, rk, rf, rþ, rh, rs, rb, rd, rg, rm, rn


      The s + voiceless stop clusters, sp, st, sk, could appear in any position in a word.

      Later developments


      Due to the emergence of a word-initial stress accent, 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. Already in Proto-Germanic, word-final /e/ and /ɑ/ had been lost, and /e/ had merged with /i/ in unstressed syllables. Vowels in third syllables were also generally lost before dialect diversification began, such as final -i of some present tense verb endings, and in -maz and -miz of the dative plural ending and 1st person plural present of verbs.

      Word-final short nasal vowels were however preserved longer, as is reflected Proto-Norse which still preserved word-final -aN (horna on the Gallehus horns
      Golden horns of Gallehus
      The Golden Horns of Gallehus were two horns made of sheet gold, discovered in Gallehus, north of Møgeltønder in South Jutland, Denmark.The horns date to the early 5th century, i.e. the beginning of the Germanic Iron Age....

      ), while the dative plural appears as -mz (gestumz on the Stentoften Runestone
      Stentoften Runestone
      The Stentoften Runestone, listed in the Rundata catalog as DR 357, is a runestone which contains a curse in Proto-Norse that was discovered in Stentoften, Blekinge, Sweden....

      ). Somewhat greater reduction is found in Gothic
      Gothic language
      Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

      , which lost all final-syllable short vowels except u. Old High German
      Old High German
      The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

       and Old English
      Old English language
      Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...

       initially preserved unstressed i and u, but later lost them in long-stemmed words and then Old High German lost them in many short-stemmed ones as well, by analogy.

      Old English shows indirect evidence that word-final -aN was preserved into the separate history of the language. This can be seen in the infinitive ending -an (< *anaN) and the strong past participle ending -en (< *-anaz). Since the early Old English fronting of /ɑ/ to /æ/ did not occur in nasalized vowels or before back vowels, this created a vowel alternation because the nasality of the back vowel aN in the infinitive ending prevented the fronting of the preceding vowel: *-anaN > *-an, but *-anaz > *-ænæ > *-en. Therefore, the Anglo-Frisian brightening must necessarily have occurred very early in the history of the Anglo-Frisian languages, before the loss of final -aN.

      The outcome of final vowels and combinations in the various daughters is shown in the table below:
      Ending(s) PG Goth NGm ON WGm OHG OE
      a-stem masculine accusative singular aN - a - a? - -
      a-stem masculine nominative singular az s az r
      i-stem masculine accusative singular iN - i? - i i/- e/-
      i-stem nominative singular iz s iz r
      u-stem accusative singular uN u u? - u u/- u/-
      u-stem nominative singular uz us uz r
      1st person singular present of verbs ō a o > u - o > u
      ō-stem adjective accusative singular ōN ō a ā a e
      ō-stem accusative plural ōz ōs ōz ar
      3rd person singular past of weak verbs ē a e > i i a
      a-stem dative singular ai ē ē e e
      short ja-stem neuter nominative singular jaN i ja - i > ī i e
      short ja-stem masculine nominative singular jaz is > jis jaz r
      i-stem nominative plural īz eis (=īs) īz ir ī
      long ja-stem masculine nominative singular ijaz ijaz
      long ja-stem neuter nominative singular ijaN i ija i
      3rd person singular past subjunctive ī ī
      adverb suffix ô ō ō a ō o a
      genitive plural ôN
      ō-stem nominative plural ôz ōs ōz ar
      u-stem genitive singular auz aus
      adverb suffix ê ē ā a ā a e

      Morphology


      {{main|Proto-Germanic grammar}}
      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 (*).

      It is often asserted that the Germanic languages have a highly reduced system of inflections as compared with Greek
      Greek language
      Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

      , Latin
      Latin
      Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

      , or Sanskrit
      Sanskrit
      Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

      . 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 the 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
      Latin
      Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

       and Sanskrit
      Sanskrit
      Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

      , respectively, and overall probably no more archaic than Gothic. In addition, some parts of the inflectional systems of Greek
      Greek language
      Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

      , Latin
      Latin
      Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

      , and Sanskrit
      Sanskrit
      Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

       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), and two voices (active and passive (PIE middle)). This is quite similar to the state of Latin, Greek, and Middle Indic
      Middle Indo-Aryan languages
      The Middle Indo-Aryan languages are the early medieval dialects of the Indo-Aryan languages, the descendants of the Old Indo-Aryan dialects such as Vedic & Classical Sanskrit, and the predecessors of the late medieval languages such as Apabhramsha or Abahatta, which eventually evolved into the...

       of c. 200 AD.

      Nouns and adjectives were declined in (at least) six cases: vocative, nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, genitive. The locative case had merged into the dative case, and the ablative may have merged with either the genitive, dative or instrumental cases. However, 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
      Dual (grammatical number)
      Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun...

      , and plural
      Plural
      In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...

      . 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.

      Consonant and vowel alternations


      Several sound changes occurred in the history of Proto-Germanic that were triggered only in some environments but not in others. Some of these were grammaticalised while others were still triggered by phonetic rules and were partially allophonic or surface filter
      Surface filter
      In linguistics, a surface filter is type of sound change that does not operate on a single set of sounds at a particular point in time, but continues to operate over a longer period. Surface filters normally affect any phonetic combination that is not permitted according to the language's phonetic...

      s.

      Probably the most far-reaching alternation was between voiceless and voiced fricatives, known as Grammatischer Wechsel
      Grammatischer Wechsel
      In historical linguistics, the German term Grammatischer Wechsel refers to the effects of Verner's law when viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.-Overview:...

       and triggered by the earlier operation of Verner's law. It was found in various environments:
      • In the person-and-number endings of verbs, which were voiceless in weak verbs and voiced in strong verbs.
      • Between different grades of strong verbs. The voiceless alternants appeared in the present and past singular indicative, the voiced alternants in the remaining past tense forms.
      • Between strong verbs (voiceless) and causative verbs derived from them (voiced).
      • Between verbs and derived nouns.
      • Between the singular and plural forms of some nouns.


      Another form of alternation was triggered by the Germanic spirant law, which continued to operate into the separate history of the individual daughter languages. It is found in environments with suffixal -t, including:
      • The second-person singular past ending *-t of strong verbs.
      • The past tense of weak verbs with no vowel infix in the past tense.
      • Nouns derived from verbs by means of the suffixes *-tiz, *-tuz, *-taz, which also possessed variants in -þ- and -d- when not following an obstruent.


      An alternation not triggered by sound change was Sievers' law
      Sievers' law
      Sievers' law in Indo-European linguistics accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable. Specifically it refers to the alternation between and , and possibly and , in Indo-European languages...

      , which caused alternation of suffixal -j- and -ij- depending on the length of the preceding part of the morpheme. If preceded within the same morpheme by only short vowel followed by a single consonant, -j- appeared. In all other cases, such as when preceded by a long vowel or diphthong, by two or more consonants, or by more than one syllable, -ij- appeared. The distinction between morphemes and words is important here, as the alternant -j- appeared also in words that contained a distinct suffix that in turn contained -j- in its second syllable. A notable example was the verb suffix *-atjanaN, which retained -j- despite being preceded by two syllables in a fully formed word.

      Related to the above was the alternation between -j- and -i-, and likewise between -ij- and -ī-. This was caused by the earlier loss of -j- before -i-, and appeared whenever an ending was attached to a verb or noun with an -(i)j- suffix (which were numerous). Similar, but much more rare, were alternations between -ā- and -ai-, and between -aV- and -aiC- from the loss of -j- between two vowels.

      I-mutation was the most important source of vowel alternation, and continued well into the history of the individual daughter languages (although it was either absent or not apparent in Gothic). In Proto-Germanic, only -e- was affected, which was raised by -i- or -j- in the following syllable. Examples are numerous:
      • Verb endings beginning with -i-: present second and third person singular, third person plural.
      • Noun endings beginning with -i- in u-stem nouns: dative singular, nominative and genitive plural.
      • Causatives derived from strong verbs with a -j- suffix.
      • Verbs derived from nouns with a -j- suffix.
      • Nouns derived from verbs with a -j- suffix.
      • Nouns and adjectives derived with a variety of suffixes including -il-, -iþō, -īN, -iskaz, -ingaz.

      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
      German language
      German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

      ). 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.
      Nouns in -a-| Nouns in -i-
      Singular| Plural| Singular| Plural
      Nominative *wulfaz *wulfôs, -ôz *gastiz *gastīz
      Accusative *wulfaN *wulfanz *gastiN *gastinz
      Genitive *wulfas, -is *wulfôN *gastīz *gastijôN
      Dative *wulfai *wulfamaz *gastī *gastimaz
      Instrumental *wulfō *wulfamiz *gastī *gastimiz
      Vocative *wulf *wulfôz *gasti *gastīz

      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
      German language
      German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

       and Old English
      Old English language
      Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...

      , where the strong declensions have more distinct endings. In the proto-language, as in Gothic
      Gothic language
      Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

      , 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.
      Strong Declension| Weak Declension
      Masculine| Feminine| Neuter| Singular| Plural
      Singular| Plural| Singular| Plural| Singular| Plural
      Nominative *blindaz *blindai *blindō *blindōz *blinda, -atō *blindō *blindanō *blindaniz
      Accusative *blindanō *blindanz *blindō *blindōz *blindana *blindaniz, -anuniz
      Genitive *blindez(a) *blindaizō *blindezōz *blindaizō *blindez(a) *blindaizō *blindeniz *blindanō
      Dative *blinde/asmē/ā *blindaimiz *blindai *blindaimiz *blinde/asmē/ā *blindaimiz *blindeni *blindanmiz
      Instrumental *blindō

      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
      Definite Article
      Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...

      , and underlies the English determiners the and that. In the North and West Germanic languages (but not in Gothic), a second demonstrative with proximal semantics (i.e. "this" as opposed to "that") evolved by appending -si to the Proto-Germanic demonstrative, with complex subsequent developments in the various daughter languages. This new demonstrative underlies the English determines this, these and those. (Originally, those was masculine plural this and these was feminine plural this.)
      Masculine| Feminine| Neuter
      Singular Plural Singular Plural Singular Plural
      Nominative *sa *þai *sō *þōz *þat *þō, *þiō
      Accusative *þen(ō), *þan(ō) *þans *þō
      Genitive *þes(a) *þezō *þezōz *þaizō
      Dative *þesmō, *þasmō *þemiz, *þaimiz *þezai *þaimiz
      Locative *þī
      Instrumental *þiō

      Verbs


      {{See also|Germanic verb|Germanic strong verb|Germanic weak verb}}

      Proto-Germanic had only two tenses (past and present), compared to the six or seven in Greek
      Ancient Greek
      Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

      , Latin
      Latin
      Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

      , and Sanskrit
      Sanskrit
      Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

      . Some of this difference is due to deflexion
      Deflexion (linguistics)
      Deflexion is a linguistic process related to inflectional languages. All members of the Indo-European language family belong to these kinds of languages and are subject to some degree of deflexional change. The process is typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language...

      , featured by a loss of tenses present in Proto-Indo-European. For example, Donald Ringe
      Donald Ringe
      Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist.He received Ph.D in linguistics at the Yale University in 1984 under the supervision of the late Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985, and since 1985 he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the...

       assumes for Proto-Germanic an early loss of the PIE imperfect aspect (something that also occurred in most other branches), followed by merging of the aspectual categories present-aorist and the mood categories indicative-subjunctive. (This assumption allows him to account for cases where Proto-Germanic has present indicative verb forms that look like PIE aorist subjunctives.)

      However, many of the tenses of the other languages (e.g. future, future perfect, pluperfect, Latin imperfect) are not cognate with each other and represent separate innovations in each language. For example, the Greek future uses an /s/ ending, apparently derived from a desiderative
      Desiderative
      In linguistics, a desiderative form is one that has the meaning of "wanting to X". Desiderative forms are often verbs, derived from a more basic verb through a process of morphological derivation.-Sanskrit:...

       construction that in PIE was part of the system of derivational morphology
      Derivational morphology
      Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class...

       (not the inflectional system); the Sanskrit future uses an /sy/ ending, from a different desiderative verb construction and often with a different ablaut grade from Greek; while the Latin future uses endings derived either from the PIE subjunctive or from the PIE verb /bʱuː/ "to be". Similarly, the Latin imperfect and pluperfect stem from Italic innovations and are not cognate with the corresponding Greek or Sanskrit forms; and while the Greek and Sanskrit pluperfect tenses appear cognate, there are no parallels in any other Indo-European languages, leading to the conclusion that this tense is either a shared Greek-Sanskrit innovation or separate, coincidental developments in the two languages. In this respect, Proto-Germanic can be said to be characterized by the failure to innovate new synthetic tenses as much as the loss of existing tenses. Later Germanic languages did innovate new tenses, derived through periphrastic constructions, with Modern English
      Modern English
      Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...

       likely possessing the most elaborated tense system ("Yes, the house will still be being built a month from now").

      Verbs in Proto-Germanic were divided into two main groups, called "strong
      Germanic strong verb
      In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...

      " and "weak
      Germanic weak verb
      In Germanic languages, including English, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, which are therefore often regarded as the norm, though historically they are not the oldest or most original group.-General description:...

      ", according to the way the past tense is formed. Strong verbs use ablaut (i.e. a different vowel in the stem) and/or reduplication
      Reduplication
      Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....

       (derived primarily from the Proto-Indo-European
      Proto-Indo-European language
      The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

       perfect), 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 (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
      Old Norse
      Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

       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
      Denominal verb
      In grammar, denominal verbs are verbs derived from nouns. This can be found in the English language but also in many other languages. An example from English:* [The original verb, one recognizes, is 'destroy'.]...

      , 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 suffix -éi̯e/éi̯o 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 -éi̯e/éi̯o) 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
      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, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

       voicing applied (the reflex of the PIE accent on the -éi̯e/éi̯o 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
      Preverb
      Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian , Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs.Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element...

       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
      Clitic
      In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...

       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
      Bound morpheme
      In morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that only appears as part of a larger word; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone.Affixes are always bound. English language affixes are either prefixes or suffixes. E.g., -ment in "shipment" and pre- in "prefix"...

       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
      Sanskrit
      Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

      , different from Latin), e.g. ga-ga-waírþjan "to reconcile".

      An example verb: *nemanaN "to take" (class IV strong verb).
      Indicative Subjunctive Imperative
      Active Passive Active Passive Active
      Present 1st sing *nemō *nemôi? *nemai? *nema-uN ??? –
      2nd sing *nimizi *nemazai *nemaiz *nemaizau? *nem
      3rd sing *nimidi *nemadai *nemai *nemaidau? *nemadau
      1st dual *nemōz (?) *nemandai *nemaiw *nemaindau? –
      2nd dual *nemadiz (?) *nemandai *nemaidiz (?) *nemaindau? *nemadiz?
      1st plur *nemamaz *nemandai *nemaim *nemaindau? –
      2nd plur *nimid *nemandai *nemaid *nemaindau? *nimid
      3rd plur *nemandi *nemandai *nemain *nemaindau? *nemandau
      Past 1st sing *nam – *nēmijuN (?; or *nēmīN??) – –
      2nd sing *namt *nēmīz
      3rd sing *nam *nēmī
      1st dual *nēmū (?) *nēmīw
      2nd dual *nēmudiz (?) *nēmīdiz (?)
      1st plur *nēmum *nēmīm
      2nd plur *nēmud *nēmīd
      3rd plur *nēmun *nēmīn
      Infinitive *nemanaN
      Present Participle *nemandaz
      Past Participle *numanaz

      Schleicher's PIE fable rendered into Proto-Germanic


      August Schleicher
      August Schleicher
      August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...

       wrote a fable
      Schleicher's fable
      Schleicher's fable is an artificial text composed in the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European , published by August Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a text in PIE. The fable is entitled Avis akvāsas ka...

       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.

      The first is a direct phonetic evolution of the Indo-European text. It does not take into account various idiomatic and grammatical shifts that occurred over the period. For example, the original text uses the imperfect tense, which disappeared in Proto-Germanic. The second version takes these differences into account, and is therefore closer to the language the Germanic people would have actually spoken.

      Proto-Germanic, phonetic evolution only
      {{lang|gem|Awiz ehwaz-uh: awiz, hwisi wullō ne est, spihi ehwanz, ainaN kuruN wagaN weganduN, ainaN-uh mekōN buraN, ainaN-uh gumanuN ahu beranduN. Awiz nu ehwamaz wiuhi: hert agnutai mek, witandī ehwanz akanduN gumanuN. Ehwaz weuhaN: hludi, awi! hert agnutai uns witundumaz: gumô, fadiz, wullōN awjaN hwurniudi sibi warmaN westraN. AwjaN-uh wullō ne isti. þat hehluwaz awiz akraN buki.}}


      Proto-Germanic, with grammar and vocabulary modernised
      {{lang|gem|Awiz ehwaz-uh: awiz, sō wullōN ne habdē, sahw ehwanz, ainanōN kurjanōN wagnaN teuhanduN, ainanōN-uh mikilōN kuriþōN, ainanōN-uh gumanuN sneumundô beranduN. Awiz nu ehwamaz sagdē: hertô sairīþi mek, sehwandē ehwanz akanduN gumanuN. Ehwaz sagdēdun: gahauzī, awi! hertô sairīþi uns sehwandumiz: gumô, fadiz, uz awīz wullō wurkīþi siz warmaN wastijōN. Awiz-uh wullōN ne habaiþi. þat hauzidaz awiz akraN flauh.}}


      English
      {{lang|en|The Sheep and the Horses: a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses”. The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool”. Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.}}

      External links



      {{Germanic philology}}

      {{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Germanic Language}}