Archeological findings

Proto-Germanic language, its development from Proto-Indo-European

Lecture 2

Historically, all the Germanic languages originated from one ancestor language. It is called Proto-Germanic. It developed from P-I-E spoken in pre-historic times. Speaking about the date. Archeological findings provide data that I-E tribes came to Europe in 3000-2500 B.C. (Northern part of Europe). Before that time the coasts of the Baltic and the North Seas were inhabited by a different group. I-E newcomers mixed with this group and formed the tribes that later became known as Germanic tribes. The Germanic group of languages developed its specific trades during the first millennium B.C. At about this time the Germanic tribes separated from other west I-E tribes. In the course of many centuries radical developments occurred in the P-I-E spoken by those I-E tribes who lived in Denmark and origins there. The result of these developments was that P-G became a separate language between the 15th – 10th centuries B.C. P-G was distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, stress patterns and vocabulary. The ancient Germans moved further than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. Southern Scandinavia including Jutland peninsula is the probable homeland of P-G. It was only a spoken language. P-G was most probably spoken just before the beginning of the Christian era. The forms of P-G can only be reconstructed. This was done in the 19th century by methods of comparative linguistics. The Germans didn’t lose touch with other I-E languages. They migrated and these migrations caused new contacts. This was reflected in the speech. The Germanic tribes came into contact with East European tribes, and the languages later formed the Baltic and Slavonic groups. The Germanic tribes also had contacts with Italian tribes that lived in southern Europe. Thus, Latin language influenced the language of Germanic tribes. These contacts found reflections in the borrowings into the languages of these nations. Most important are the borrowings into the Finnish language in the beginning of our era. The borrowings were well preserved in the Finnish language. They had the ancient type of morphological structure that can hardly be found in the forms of the verbs in the earliest documents written in Germanic languages. Suffixes and inflections are used in their full forms that were lost by the time the Germans had their first written documents. By the third and the 4th centuries suffixes and inflections had undergone the process of reduction.

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