The Germanic subfamily

A. The next step to English is Germanic, one of the many branches that Proto-Indo-European developed as its speakers moved into Europe and eastward into Asia. Germanic is thought to have emerged in southern Scandinavia or in Denmark and around the Elbe River in about 1000 B.C. The Germanic proto-language was English’s next closest ancestor after Proto-Indo-European.

B. Erosion of endings. In this language, stress in words tended to drift to the first syllable. This left the final sounds in words highly unstressed, vulnerable to wearing away. Because of this, Proto-Germanic did not have as many endings on nouns and verbs as many other IndoEuropean languages had. Recall Lithuanian’s seven cases: Proto-Germanic had just four. This set the scene for how few case marking suffixes English has.

C. Semitic vocabulary?

1. Proto-Germanic was also odd in that one in three Germanic words do not trace to Proto-Indo-European (sheep is one of them). This suggests that a group of speakers of some other language learned a branch of Proto-Indo-European and lent it many of their original words.

2. Recall Grimm’s Law, where Proto-Indo-European p changed to f, d to t, and so on, only in Germanic. This is a very odd kind of change, which suggests that it was the result of speakers of a language with a very different sound system than Proto-Indo-European’s.

3. But what would the language have been? Linguist Theo Vennemann thinks it was a Semitic language, given that Semitic-speaking sailors traveled the European coast far back in antiquity. The word maiden, cognate to German Mädchen, traces back to a Proto-Germanic word *maghatis. The reconstructed Proto-Semitic word for girl is *maḥat. In Germanic, a verb often marks past tense with a change of vowel instead of adding -ed, such as sink, sank. Recall how Semitic words work, kitāb, “book”; kātib, “writer.”