![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() By the first century AD, Germanic expansion reached the Danube and the Upper Rhine in the south and the Germanic peoples first entered the historical record. A number of Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic have been identified. Įarly Germanic expansion in the Pre-Roman Iron Age (fifth to first centuries BC) placed Proto-Germanic speakers in contact with the Continental Celtic La Tène horizon. According to Mallory, Germanicists "generally agree" that the Urheimat ('original homeland') of the Proto-Germanic language, the ancestral idiom of all attested Germanic dialects, was primarily situated in an area corresponding to the extent of the Jastorf culture. It is possible that Indo-European speakers first arrived in southern Scandinavia with the Corded Ware culture in the mid-3rd millennium BC, developing into the Nordic Bronze Age cultures by the early second millennium BC. 500 BC, and Proto-Norse from the second century AD and later is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.Īccording to Musset (1965), the Proto-Germanic language developed in southern Scandinavia (Denmark, south Sweden and southern Norway) and the northern-most part of Germany in Schleswig Holstein and northern Lower Saxony, the Urheimat (original home) of the Germanic tribes. Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. According to the Germanic substrate hypothesis, it may have been influenced by non-Indo-European cultures, such as the Funnelbeaker culture, but the sound change in the Germanic languages known as Grimm's law points to a non-substratic development away from other branches of Indo-European. Proto-Germanic developed out of pre-Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe. AD 90 ).Īrchaeology and early historiography Įastward expansion of the Wielbark culture ![]() However, there is fragmentary direct attestation of (late) Proto-Germanic in early runic inscriptions (specifically the second-century AD Vimose inscriptions and the second-century BC Negau helmet inscription), and in Roman Empire-era transcriptions of individual words (notably in Tacitus' Germania, c. The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any coherent surviving texts it has been reconstructed using the comparative method. While Proto-Germanic refers only to the reconstruction of the most recent common ancestor of Germanic languages, the Germanic parent language refers to the entire journey that the dialect of Proto-Indo-European that would become Proto-Germanic underwent through the millennia. The alternative term " Germanic parent language" may be used to include a larger scope of linguistic developments, spanning the Nordic Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe (second to first millennia BC) to include "Pre-Germanic" (PreGmc), "Early Proto Germanic" (EPGmc) and "Late Proto-Germanic" (LPGmc). The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century. As it is probable that the development of this sound shift spanned a considerable time (several centuries), Proto-Germanic cannot adequately be reconstructed as a simple node in a tree model but rather represents a phase of development that may span close to a thousand years. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic, which however remained in contact over a considerable time, especially the Ingvaeonic languages (including English), which arose from West Germanic dialects and remained in continued contact with North Germanic.Ī defining feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process described by Grimm's law, a set of sound changes that occurred between its status as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European and its gradual divergence into a separate language. Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. ![]()
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