We are family. A brief language history of the Germanic family

‘eventide’)

dickst(en) thickest

have, at some time in the past, borrowed heavily from one another (or that both of them have borrowed heavily from some third language).

This has happened in the history of English before – case in point, relationship between English and French since the Norman Invasion of England in 1066

crown country people baron color war
peace officer judge court crime marry
religion altar virtue beef pork joy

borrowed vocabulary forms from French and not general grammatical patterns

Correspondences between English and German are all encompassing (lexical and grammatical)

Conclusion: Option 1 is a bust

time in the distant past, the ancestors of English and German were merely dialects of the same language.

Differences in the modern languages (i.e., English and German) are due to changes (e.g., lexical borrowing, sound changes, grammatical paradigms, word order (syntax), etc.)

in the lands that extend from India to Europe

12 major divisions: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hittite, Indic, Iranian, Italic, Slavic, Tocharian,

Important note: We have no attested written documents in PIE. The PIE language is a “reconstructed” proto-form (usually indicated with a star - *dagas (days))

back to a common ancestor language, we say that they are genetically related.

Relationships: Proto/Parent language
Daughter language/dialect

Related words are referred to as cognates.

The Comparative Method

fôtus foot
þrīe drî þrír þreis three
þú dû þú þu thou
cūðe konda kunna kunþa could
ōðer andar annarr anþar other

Question: What is the relationship between /d/ and /þ/? Which is the proto-form?

stops: bh, dh, gh Voiced spirants: (becoming) the voiced
unaspirated stops b, d, g
in certain phonetic
environments in the
historical daughter
languages)
Voiced unaspirated stops: b, d, g Voiceless unaspirated
stops: p, t, k

voiceless spirants f, þ, χ:

Latin Gothic
pecu faíhu “cattle”
três þreis “three”
cornû haúrn “horn”
(Gothic h equals χ)

Verner (1875) was the crucial factor of accent in combination with surrounding sounds: On the basis of evidence from PIE languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, Verner was able to show that all the words in PIE *p had changed in Germanic to f either had that *p as the first sound in the word, or >>

*p, as in the examples below:
IE *pətér > Gothic fadar “father”
IE *népôt > ON nefi “nefi”

On the other hand, those *p’s that eventually became German b where those that had NOT stood in initial position and that had not had the accent on the immediately preceding syllable, as in the example below:

IE *sep(t)m > Gothic sibun “seven”
IE *upéri > OHG ubar “over”

groups.

The Indo-Europeans appear to have been organized into rather small groups or clans, based on the fact that there is no widespread cognate with the constructed meaning “king” (though a word for “clan chieftian” does exist).

Heavy reliance on hunting and animal husbandry for food; metals were virtually unknown.

Reconstructed cognates for “winter” and “snow” suggest the Indo-Europeans didn’t live too far south.

is correct, then it is significant for the location of the Indo-European homeland, since in prehistoric times the beech was apparently not indigenous to any areas east of a line drawn from Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) in the western Soviet Union to the Crimea, north of the Black Sea.

Kurgan Culture – potential archeological link between Indo-Europeans and a culture (fifth millennium B.C.E.) located north of the Black Sea.

homeland in modern Denmark and southern Sweden.

“Battle-ax Culture” from roughly third millennium B.C.E.

Only at a relatively late era is there evidence about the Germanic people that is neither linguistic nor archeological. About 200 B.C.E. Greek and Roman historians wrote about the Germanic tribes.

Runic inscriptions – after the second half of the second century, we have written evidence from the Germanic peoples themselves.

their languages, along with a migration southward out of their original homeland in southern Scandinavia.

By 200 B.C.E., Germanic tribes had apparently spread across the area show below (see map), from northern Belgium in the west to the Vistula in the east, and south as far as the upper Elbe.