Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
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Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
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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, which arose from West Germanic dialects and remained in continued contact with North Germanic.
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Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any coherent surviving texts; it has been reconstructed using the comparative method.
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The Germanic languages form a tree with Proto-Germanic at its root that is a branch of the Indo-European tree, which in turn has Proto-Indo-European at its root.
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Whether it is to be included under a wider meaning of Proto-Germanic is a matter of usage.
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Winfred P Lehmann regarded Jacob Grimm's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's law, and Verner's law, as pre-Proto-Germanic and held that the "upper boundary" was the fixing of the accent, or stress, on the root syllable of a word, typically on the first syllable.
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Term substrate with reference to Proto-Germanic refers to lexical items and phonological elements that do not appear to be descended from Proto-Indo-European.
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Table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic, ordered and classified by their reconstructed pronunciation.
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Sometime after Grimm's and Verner's law, Proto-Germanic lost its inherited contrastive accent, and all words became stressed on their root syllable.
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Alternation between the present and past of strong verbs remained common and was not levelled in Proto-Germanic, and survives up to the present day in some Germanic languages.
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Proto-Germanic had four short vowels, five or six long vowels, and at least one "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel.
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Diphthongs in Proto-Germanic can be analysed as sequences of a vowel plus an approximant, as was the case in Proto-Indo-European.
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Proto-Germanic allowed any single consonant to occur in one of three positions: initial, medial and final.
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Proto-Germanic had six cases, three genders, three numbers, three moods, and two voices .
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Several sound changes occurred in the history of Proto-Germanic that were triggered only in some environments but not in others.
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Proto-Germanic originally had two demonstratives which could serve as both adjectives and pronouns.
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Verbs in Proto-Germanic were divided into two main groups, called "strong" and "weak", according to the way the past tense is formed.
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Proto-Germanic verbs have two voices, active and passive, the latter deriving from the PIE mediopassive voice.
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