Lethargic Man (anag.)

It won't come as much of a surprise to most of my readership that I am interested in philology. In particular, my engagement with German has prompted me to learn more of where German words came from and their cognates in English. Of course, the two originated as dialects of a common language, dubbed Common Germanic, spoken from about 500 BCE to the fourth century CE^*, which was ancestral to all the historical Germanic languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish.

* Though Old Norse and the East Germanic languages (Gothic, Burgundian, Vandalian) were already splitting off by then.

Philologists talk about languages as evolving to unintelligibility over the course of a millennium, which made me wonder how different Common Germanic must have been to Old English (which is of course unintelligible to non-scholars today). So I headed off to Wikipedia to find out—and here's my findings, essentially boiling down the most interesting bits of what I read into one blog post (which I suspect will mostly be of interest just to me, but now I've got it in a form I can readily refer to in the future).

Common Germanic is not quite an entirely reconstructed proto-language; fragmentary direct attestation exists of the later form of the languages in early runic inscriptions (specifically, if anyone is interested, the second-century CE Vimose inscriptions and the second-century BCE Negau helmet inscription), and in Roman Empire era transcriptions of individual words (notably in Tacitus' first century essay Germania).

Common Germanic is descended from Proto-Indo-European, but about a third of the words in it are not, including any number of basic English words (such as "hand", to give just one example). This is thought to reflect the first Germanic people living in contact with speakers of a substrate language from a vanished non-Indo-European language family, from whom they picked up terms.

Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, discovered in the nineteenth century, outline the changes which Indo-European consonants underwent as PIE evolved into Common Germanic. The fact that, for instance, PIE /p/ became Common Germanic /f/ (compare, for example, Latin pater with English father) means that any time you see a word in English beginning with P, you know it's a loanword, and not a native term.

One can see evidence of the stages producing Common Germanic from the form Germanic words take when loaned into other languages at various points over history, and vice versa.

So, what sort of features did Common Germanic have, which later languages did not?

Phonology

One feature (which did persist into descendant languages) was gemination—pronouncing double consonants as longer than single ones. This is not in evidence in English or German today, though there is the odd counterexample, such as the difference in pronunciation between "unnamed" and "unaimed".

Word-initial /ɡ/ was [ɣ] (a voiced equivalent of כ). In German this would go on to harden into G; in English it softened into [j] (the sound of Y as a consonant), though remained spelled with G until the Norman invasion led to English being respelled along Norman French orthographical lines.

Other interesting sounds Common Germanic had include [ɸ], a version of F in which both lips are doing the same thing (you use it, as I have just discovered, when you say "pfft!"), and its voiced equivalent [β]. Also nasalised vowels, some of which survived into the early descendant languages (at least 1125 in the case of Old Icelandic), but none of which to today (though Elfdalian (a language spoken by up to 3000 people in central Sweden) possesses nasalised vowels of other origin). However nasalised vowels did leave a legacy; they're the reason apparently for different vowels in English "goose" versus German Gans, English "tooth" versus German Zahn, and English "brought" versus German gebracht.

Another sound Common Germanic had which no descendant languages have is overlong vowels. "Their reconstruction is due to the comparative method, particularly as a way of explaining an otherwise unpredictable two-way split of reconstructed long ō in final syllables, which unexpectedly remained long in some morphemes but shows normal shortening in others."

Grammar

I-mutation

Something one thinks about when one thinks of Germanic languages is the phenomenon called umlaut, or i-mutation. In German and the Scandinavian languages, it's very evident because it's visible in the use of the diacritic that bears the same name, but it's also to be found in English, in the change of vowel between "man" and "men", for example; there are also plenty of cases where a case of umlaut has been mangled by subsequent vowel changes, such as "mouse"/"mice" or "long"/"length".

Given its prevalence in the later languages, I was surprised to discover i-mutation was not present in Common Germanic (it is not seen in Gothic, or the fragmentary evidence of Common Germanic from centuries around the turn of the first millennium), which means it must have appeared and then (in the case of Ö) disappeared in (West Saxon) Old English in the space of only two or three centuries.

I was then further surprised to discover that although the forms of umlaut represented by Ä, Ö and Ü in German today were not present in Common Germanic, the form that converts E into I when followed by /i/ or /j/ in the same or next syllable (as represented by nehmen > nimmt in German^*) was present. (I don't think this change survived the Old English period in the case of English.)

* If you're asking where the following /i/ or /j/ is, the answer is it didn't survive the following millennium and a half of history. But you can deduce its presence by comparing German „Ich mache“, „du machst“, „er macht“ with Early Modern English "I make", "thou makest", "he maketh". Going back to nehmen^†, or, to give it its Common Germanic form, *nemaną (where the hook on the final letter indicates a nasal vowel), I was surprised to see in the corresponding sequence *nemō, *nimizi, *nimidi, a lack of any terminal T in the second person.

† A verb which got displaced out of English by Norse-derived "take"; derivatives survive in "numb" and "nimble".

Other verbal grammar

I was wondering once why the subjunctive (i.e. what is called Konjunktiv II in German) is so different in English and German. The answer turns out to be because the ancestral language, and even more recent stages such as Old English, lacked a subjunctive altogether, so the mood has no common ancestry. The same applies to passive voice, but with a twist: Common Germanic had passive; Old English did not.

Demonstratives

The diversity of the plethora of forms in Old English corresponding to Modern English "the" used to just wash over me without my taking it in at all until I started learning German. Then I would see þam and think "Aha! That looks like German dem so it must be dative", or see þonne and similarly deduce masculine accusative based on resemblance to German den.

One can already see this sequence in the Common Germanic declension of the distal demonstrative:

Case	Common Germanic	Modern German
Nominative	*sa (masc.), *þat (neut)	der, das
Accusative	*þanǭ	den
Genitive	*þas	des
Dative	*þammai	dem
Instrumental	*þana?	(obsolete)

Dual

The dual is a form many of my readers will be familiar with from Hebrew: סֵפֶר a book, סִפְרַיִים two books, סְפָרִים (more than two) books. Apparently Common Germanic had a dual too, in pronouns (where it survived into all the oldest languages) and verbs (where it survived only into Gothic). The (presumed) nominal and adjectival dual forms were lost before the oldest records; these may have been lost before Proto-Germanic became a different branch at all (as seems to have been the case for the Italic languages).

Miscellany

Lastly, I was struck years ago by the fact that the epithet הַסַּנְדְּלָר hassandlār "the sandal maker" of one of the rabbis in Ethics of the Fathers looks (aside from the definitive article prefix) almost as if it could be English; evidently Latin -arius was borrowed into Mishnaic Hebrew. I assumed that the English agent noun suffix -er (as in "baker" or "teacher") and Latin -arius were cognate to each other through Proto-Indo-European, but it turns out that at (roughly) the same time Hebrew was borrowing the Latin suffix as ār, Common Germanic was borrowing it as *-ārijaz.

There was, it turns out, quite a few other terms that were borrowed from Latin into Common Germanic at this time too.