24 Facts About Common Germanic

The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century.

Proto-Common Germanic language is not directly attested by any coherent surviving texts; it has been reconstructed using the comparative method.

Proto-Common Germanic developed out of pre-Proto-Common Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe.

At about the same time, extending east of the Vistula, Common Germanic speakers came into contact with early Slavic cultures, as reflected in early Common Germanic loans in Proto-Slavic.

The first coherent text recorded in a Common Germanic language is the Gothic Bible, written in the later fourth century in the language of the Thervingi Gothic Christians, who had escaped persecution by moving from Scythia to Moesia in 348.

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Early West Common Germanic text is available from the fifth century, beginning with the Frankish Bergakker inscription.

The Common Germanic languages form a tree with Proto-Common Germanic at its root that is a branch of the Indo-European tree, which in turn has Proto-Indo-European at its root.

Early Indo-European had limited contact between distinct lineages, and, uniquely, the Common Germanic subfamily exhibited a less treelike behaviour, as some of its characteristics were acquired from neighbours early in its evolution rather than from its direct ancestors.

Whether it is to be included under a wider meaning of Proto-Common Germanic is a matter of usage.

Term substrate with reference to Proto-Common Germanic refers to lexical items and phonological elements that do not appear to be descended from Proto-Indo-European.

Table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Common Germanic, ordered and classified by their reconstructed pronunciation.

Grimm's law as applied to pre-proto-Common Germanic is a chain shift of the original Indo-European plosives.

Sometime after Grimm's and Verner's law, Proto-Common Germanic lost its inherited contrastive accent, and all words became stressed on their root syllable.

Diachronically, the rise of consonant gradation in Common Germanic can be explained by Kluge's law, by which geminates arose from stops followed by a nasal in a stressed syllable.

Proto-Common Germanic had four short vowels, five or six long vowels, and at least one "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel.

Diphthongs in Proto-Common Germanic can be analysed as sequences of a vowel plus an approximant, as was the case in Proto-Indo-European.

The monophthongization of unstressed au in Northwest Germanic produced a phoneme which merged with this new word-final long o, while the monophthongization of unstressed ai produced a new e which did not merge with original e, but rather with e2, as it was not lowered to a This split, combined with the asymmetric development in West Germanic, with e lowering but o raising, points to an early difference in the articulation height of the two vowels that was not present in North Germanic.

Proto-Common Germanic allowed any single consonant to occur in one of three positions: initial, medial and final.

Proto-Common Germanic had six cases, three genders, three numbers, three moods, and two voices .

Several sound changes occurred in the history of Proto-Common Germanic that were triggered only in some environments but not in others.

Proto-Common Germanic originally had two demonstratives which could serve as both adjectives and pronouns.

Later Common Germanic languages did innovate new tenses, derived through periphrastic constructions, with Modern English likely possessing the most elaborated tense system .

Verbs in Proto-Common Germanic were divided into two main groups, called "strong" and "weak", according to the way the past tense is formed.

Proto-Common Germanic verbs have two voices, active and passive, the latter deriving from the PIE mediopassive voice.