From TheBestLinks.com
Proto-Germanic, the proto-language believed by scholars to be the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, includes among its descendants Dutch, Yiddish, German, English, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Old Norse, Swedish, Icelandic and Danish. There are no extant documents in Proto-Germanic, which was unwritten, and virtually all our knowledge of this extinct language has been obtained by application of the comparative method. There are a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia dated to circa 200 which many feel represent a stage of the language immediately after the "Proto-Germanic" stage, if not exactly identical.
Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European, which is also the distant ancestor of a great many other languages in Europe and Asia. For the changes undergone by Proto-Germanic during its descent from Proto-Indo-European, see Germanic languages.
Proto-Indo-European speakers are thought by some scholars to have arrived at the plains of southern Sweden and Denmark, regarded to be the original dwelling-place of the Germanic peoples, during the early Bronze Age (ca. 2000 BCE). The Battle-axe people are the best candidate for this immigration.
Colin Renfrew has proposed that the I-E languages were spread much earlier, with agriculture. The archaeological evidence from Scandinavia, however, seem to show that the local population learned agricultural skills without the infusion of a new culture.
Some also suggest that Proto-Germanic may have arisen somewhat as a Creole language due to cultural diffusion among geographically static indigenous population groups. However, considering the inflected character and the homogeneous forms of the Germanic languages, the creation of such a creole would have been a resounding and unique feat indeed.
It has been suggested that proto-Germanic arose as a hybrid of two Indo-European dialects, one each of Centum and Satem types though they would have been mutually intelligible at the time of hybridization. This hypothesis may help to explain the difficulty of placing Germanic in the Indo-European family.
The reconstructed Proto-Germanic vocabulary includes a number of fundamental words (referring to, among other things, parts of the body, animals and nature) which are clearly non-Indo-European in origin, suggesting a vocabulary influence from the earlier inhabitants of northern Europe. The mechanism of this influence is unknown; it may have been simple borrowing, or perhaps retention of old words by people who adopted Proto-Germanic as their new language. For examples, see Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic.
See also
Proto-Germanic discussion group (http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Salon/2385/Theuthiskon.html)
Related links
Top visited
0 of
0 links
[no links posted yet]
>> place link >>
Discussion
Last posted
0 of
0 messages
[no messages posted yet]
>> post message >>
Watch
You can
add this article to your own "watchlist" and receive e-mail notification about all changes in this page.
