Proto-Germanic language

Proto-Germanic is an old language that we can only guess about by looking at clues. It is thought to be the common ancestor of many languages spoken today, like German, English, and Dutch. These languages are all called Germanic languages.

We know about Proto-Germanic because smart people studied how sounds changed over time. This change is called Grimm's law. By comparing words from different old languages, they figured out what Proto-Germanic might have sounded like.

We don’t have any books or stories written in Proto-Germanic. But we do have some old pieces of evidence. For example, there are special markings carved on old items, like the Vimose inscriptions found in Denmark. There are also words from very old times that show up in other languages, like Finnish. All these clues help us learn about this ancient language.

Archaeology and early historiography

Proto-Germanic grew out of an earlier language during the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe. It likely developed in areas such as Denmark, southern Sweden, southern Norway, and parts of northern Germany.

By around the first century AD, people speaking Proto-Germanic had moved to new areas, reaching places near the Danube and the Upper Rhine. The earliest known writing in a Germanic language comes from runic inscriptions, dating back to around the 2nd century AD. The first full text in a Germanic language is the Gothic Bible, written in the later fourth century.

Evolution

The Proto-Germanic language started from its ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. It developed as people in nearby areas began to speak in a common way, eventually splitting into different groups with their own ways of speaking. Many changes in sounds happened during this time.

Different ideas exist about how Germanic languages are related to other Indo-European languages. The Germanic languages form a branch that comes from Proto-Germanic, which itself comes from Proto-Indo-European. Borrowing words from other languages makes it tricky to see exactly where Germanic fits among other Indo-European languages. Early on, Germanic showed unique traits, gaining some features from nearby groups rather than directly from its ancestors.

Proto-Germanic is thought to have begun around 500 BC. Scholars have different ideas about when certain sound changes happened and how stress on words played a role. Some believe the stress on the first part of a word caused changes in sounds in other parts of the word. Others have found clues in old writings that suggest different timing for these changes.

Phonology

Transcription

The following conventions are used for transcribing Proto-Germanic reconstructed forms:

• Voiced obstruents appear as b, d, g; this does not imply any particular analysis of the underlying phonemes as plosives or fricatives. In other literature, they may be written with a bar to produce [ƀ], [đ], [ǥ].
• Unvoiced fricatives appear as f, þ, h. /x/ may have become /h/ in certain positions at a later stage of Proto-Germanic itself. Similarly for /xʷ/, which later became /hʷ/ or /ʍ/ in some environments.
• Labiovelars appear as kw, hw, gw; this does not imply any particular analysis as single sounds or clusters.
• The yod sound appears as j. Note that the normal convention for representing this sound in Proto-Indo-European is y; the use of j does not imply any actual change in the pronunciation of the sound.
• Long vowels are denoted with a macron over the letter, e.g. ō. When a distinction is necessary, /ɛː/ and /eː/ are transcribed as ē¹ and ē² respectively. ē¹ is sometimes transcribed as æ or ǣ instead, but this is not followed here.
• Overlong vowels appear with circumflexes, e.g. ô. In other literature they are often denoted by a doubled macron, e.g. ō̄.
• Nasal vowels are written here with an ogonek, following Ringe's usage, e.g. ǫ̂ /õːː/. Most commonly in literature, they are denoted simply by a following n. However, this can cause confusion between a word-final nasal vowel and a word-final regular vowel followed by /n/, a distinction which was phonemic. Tildes (ã, ĩ, ũ...) are also used in some sources.
• Diphthongs appear as ai, au, eu, iu, ōi, ōu and perhaps ēi, ēu. However, when immediately followed by the corresponding semivowel, they appear as ajj, aww, eww, iww. u is written as w when between a vowel and j. This convention is based on the usage in Ringe 2006.
• Long vowels followed by a non-high vowel were separate syllables and are written as such here, except for ī, which is written ij in that case.

Consonants

The table below lists the consonantal phonemes of Proto-Germanic, ordered and classified by their reconstructed pronunciation. The slashes around the phonemes are omitted for clarity. When two phonemes appear in the same box, the first of each pair is voiceless, the second is voiced. Phones written in parentheses represent allophones and are not themselves independent phonemes. For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms, follow the links on the column and row headings.

Notes:

1. [ŋ] was an allophone of /n/ before velar obstruents.
2. [ŋʷ] was an allophone of /n/ before labiovelar obstruents.
3. /gʷ/ only appeared after [ŋʷ].
4. [β], [ð] and [ɡ] were allophones of /b/, /d/ and /ɣ/ in certain positions (see below).
5. The phoneme written as f was probably still realised as a bilabial fricative (/ɸ/) in Proto-Germanic. Evidence for this is the fact that in Gothic, word-final b (which medially represents a voiced fricative) devoices to f and also Old Norse spellings such as aptr [ɑɸtr], where the letter p rather than the more usual f was used to denote the bilabial realisation before /t/.

Grimm's and Verner's law

Main articles: Grimm's law and Verner's law

Grimm's law as applied to pre-proto-Germanic is a chain shift of the original Indo-European plosives. Verner's Law explains a category of exceptions to Grimm's Law, where a voiced fricative appears where Grimm's Law predicts a voiceless fricative. The discrepancy is conditioned by the placement of the original Indo-European word accent.

p, t, and k did not undergo Grimm's law after a fricative (such as s) or after other plosives (which were shifted to fricatives by the Germanic spirant law); for example, where Latin (with the original t) has stella 'star' and octō 'eight', Middle Dutch has ster and acht (with unshifted t). This original t merged with the shifted t from the voiced consonant; that is, most of the instances of /t/ came from either the original /t/ or the shifted /t/.

(A similar shift on the consonant inventory of Proto-Germanic later generated High German. McMahon says:

Grimm's and Verner's Laws ... together form the First Germanic Consonant Shift. A second, and chronologically later Second Germanic Consonant Shift ... affected only Proto-Germanic voiceless stops ... and split Germanic into two sets of dialects, Low German in the north ... and High German further south

Verner's law is usually reconstructed as following Grimm's law in time, and states that unvoiced fricatives: /s/, /ɸ/, /θ/, /x/ are voiced when preceded by an unaccented syllable. The accent at the time of the change was the one inherited from Proto-Indo-European, which was free and could occur on any syllable. For example, PIE *bʰréh₂tēr > PGmc. *brōþēr 'brother' but PIE *meh₂tḗr > PGmc. *mōdēr 'mother'. The voicing of some /s/ according to Verner's Law produced /z/, a new phoneme. Sometime after Grimm's and Verner's law, Proto-Germanic lost its inherited contrastive accent, and all words became stressed on their root syllable. This was generally the first syllable unless a prefix was attached.

The loss of the Proto-Indo-European contrastive accent got rid of the conditioning environment for the consonant alternations created by Verner's law. Without this conditioning environment, the cause of the alternation was no longer obvious to native speakers. The alternations that had started as mere phonetic variants of sounds became increasingly grammatical in nature, leading to the grammatical alternations of sounds known as grammatischer Wechsel. For a single word, the grammatical stem could display different consonants depending on its grammatical case or its tense. As a result of the complexity of this system, significant levelling of these sounds occurred throughout the Germanic period as well as in the later daughter languages. Already in Proto-Germanic, most alternations in nouns were leveled to have only one sound or the other consistently throughout all forms of a word, although some alternations were preserved, only to be levelled later in the daughters (but differently in each one). Alternations in noun and verb endings were also levelled, usually in favour of the voiced alternants in nouns, but a split remained in verbs where unsuffixed (strong) verbs received the voiced alternants while suffixed (weak) verbs had the voiceless alternants. 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.

Allophones

Some of the consonants that developed from the sound shifts are thought to have been pronounced in different ways (allophones) depending on the sounds around them. With regard to original /k/ or /kʷ/ Trask says:

The resulting /x/ or /xʷ/ were reduced to /h/ and /hʷ/ in word-initial position.

Many of the consonants listed in the table could appear lengthened or prolonged under some circumstances, which is inferred from their appearing in some daughter languages as doubled letters. This phenomenon is termed gemination. Kraehenmann says:

Then, Proto-Germanic already had long consonants ... but they contrasted with short ones only word-medially. Moreover, they were not very frequent and occurred only intervocally almost exclusively after short vowels.

The voiced phonemes /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ɡʷ/ are reconstructed with the pronunciation of stops in some environments and fricatives in others. The pattern of allophony is not completely clear, but generally is similar to the patterns of voiced obstruent allophones in languages such as Spanish. The voiced fricatives of Verner's law, which only occurred in non-word-initial positions, merged with the fricative allophones of /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ɡʷ/. Older accounts tended to suggest that the sounds were originally fricatives and later "hardened" into stops in some circumstances. However, Ringe notes that this belief was largely due to theory-internal considerations of older phonological theories, and in modern theories it is equally possible that the allophony was present from the beginning.

Each of the three voiced phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ had a slightly different pattern of allophony from the others, but in general stops occurred in "strong" positions (word-initial and in clusters) while fricatives occurred in "weak" positions (post-vocalic). More specifically:

• Word-initial /b/ and /d/ were stops [b] and [d].
• A good deal of evidence, however, indicates that word-initial /ɡ/ was [ɣ], subsequently developing to [ɡ] in a number of languages. This is clearest from developments in Anglo-Frisian and other Ingvaeonic languages. Southern varieties of Modern Dutch (e.g. speakers from Limburg, Brabant, Southern Gelderland, as well as most Flemish speech varieties) still preserve the sound of [ɣ] in this position. (However, in most other Western and Northern Dutch varieties like the mainstream Randstad dialect, the historically distinct phonemes ⟨g⟩ [ɣ] and ⟨ch⟩ [x] have merged into the hard g (Dutch: harde g), i.e. a voiceless uvular fricative [χ]).
• Plosives appeared after homorganic nasal consonants: [mb], [nd], [ŋɡ], [ŋʷɡʷ]. This was the only place where a voiced labiovelar [ɡʷ] could still occur.
• When geminate, they were pronounced as stops [bb], [dd], [ɡɡ]. This rule continued to apply at least into the early West Germanic languages, since the West Germanic gemination produced geminated plosives from earlier voiced fricatives.
• /d/ was [d] after /l/ or /z/. Evidence for /d/ after /r/ is conflicting: it appears as a plosive in Gothic waurd 'word' (not *waurþ, with devoicing), but as a fricative in Old Norse orð. /d/ hardened to [d] in all positions in the West Germanic languages.
• In other positions, fricatives occurred singly after vowels and diphthongs, and after non-nasal consonants in the case of /b/ and /ɡ/.

Labiovelars

Labiovelars were affected by the following additional changes:

1. The PIE boukólos rule continues to operate as a surface filter in Proto-Germanic; in newly generated environments where a labiovelar occurred next to /u/, it was immediately converted to a plain velar. This caused alternations in certain verb paradigms, e.g. *singwaną [siŋʷɡʷɑnɑ̃] 'to sing' versus *sungun [suŋɡun] 'they sang'. Apparently, this delabialization also occurred with labiovelars following /un/, showing that the language possessed a labial allophone [ŋʷ] as well. In this case the entire clusters [uŋʷxʷ], [uŋʷkʷ] and [uŋʷɡʷ] are delabialized to [uŋx], [uŋk] and [uŋɡ].
2. (Early) Proto-Germanic /ɡʷ/ knew at least three different outcomes: after /n/, it was preserved (e.g. *sangwaz 'song'); next to /u/ and before /r/ in initial positions it was delabialized to /g/ (e.g. *gudą 'god', *grindaną 'to grind'); in all other positions /ɡʷ/ usually became /w/ (e.g. *warmaz 'warm', *snaiwaz 'snow', *neurô 'kidney'). Evidence for a sound change /ɡʷ/ > /b/ in initial positions is slim.

These various changes often led to complex alternations, e.g. *sehwaną [ˈsexʷɑnɑ̃] 'to see', *sēgun [ˈsɛːɣun] 'they saw' (indicative), *sēwīn [ˈsɛːwiːn] 'they saw' (subjunctive), which were reanalysed and regularised differently in the various daughter languages.

Consonant gradation

Kroonen posits a process of consonant mutation for Proto-Germanic, under the name consonant gradation. (This is distinct from the consonant mutation processes occurring in the neighboring Samic and Finnic languages, also known as consonant gradation since the 19th century.) The Proto-Germanic consonant gradation is not directly attested in any of the Germanic dialects, but may nevertheless be reconstructed on the basis of certain dialectal discrepancies in root of the n-stems and the ōn-verbs.

Diachronically, the rise of consonant gradation in Germanic can be explained by Kluge's law, by which geminates arose from stops followed by a nasal in a stressed syllable. Since this sound law only operated in part of the paradigms of the n-stems and ōn-verbs, it gave rise to an alternation of geminated and non-geminated consonants in the same paradigms. These were largely regularized by various ways of analogy in the Germanic daughter languages.

Since its formulation, the validity of Kluge's Law has been contested. The development of geminate consonants has also been explained by the idea of "expressive gemination". Although this idea remains popular, it does not explain why many words containing geminated stops do not have "expressive" or "intensive" semantics. The idea has been described as "methodically unsound", because it attempts to explain the phonological phenomenon through psycholinguistic factors and other irregular behaviour instead of exploring regular sound laws.

The origin of the Germanic geminate consonants remains a disputed part of historical linguistics with no clear consensus at present.

The reconstruction of grading paradigms in Proto-Germanic explains root alternations such as Old English steorra 'star'

Notes:

1. /e/ could not occur in unstressed syllables except before /r/, where it may have been lowered to /ɑ/ already in late Proto-Germanic times.^{[citation needed]}
2. All nasal vowels except /ɑ̃ː/, /ĩː/, and /ũː/ only occurred word-finally, and of these, only /ĩː/ also occurred word-finally. Word-internal nasal vowels only occurred before /x/, and derived from their earlier respective short vowels (/ɑ/, /i/, and /u/) followed by /nx/.

PIE ə, a, o merged into PGmc a; PIE ā, ō merged into PGmc ō. At the time of the merger, the vowels probably were [ɑ] and [ɑː], or perhaps [ɒ] and [ɒː]. Their timbres then differentiated by raising (and perhaps rounding) the long vowel to [ɔː]. It is known that the raising of ā to ō can not have occurred earlier than the earliest contact between Proto-Germanic speakers and the Romans. This can be verified by the fact that Latin Rōmānī later emerges in Gothic as Rumoneis (that is, Rūmōnīs). It is explained by Ringe that at the time of borrowing, the vowel matching closest in sound to Latin ā was a Proto-Germanic ā-like vowel (which later became ō). And since Proto-Germanic therefore lacked a mid(-high) back vowel, the closest equivalent of Latin ō was Proto-Germanic ū: Rōmānī > *Rūmānīz > *Rūmōnīz > Gothic Rumoneis.

A new ā was formed following the shift from ā to ō when intervocalic /j/ was lost in -aja- sequences. It was a rare phoneme, and occurred only in a handful of words, the most notable being the verbs of the third weak class. The agent noun suffix *-ārijaz (Modern English -er in words such as baker or teacher) was likely borrowed from Latin around or shortly after this time.

Diphthongs

The following diphthongs are known to have existed in Proto-Germanic:

• Short: /ɑu/, /ɑi/, /eu/, /iu/ (from i-umlaut of /eu/) before /i/ or /j/
• Long: /ɔːu/, /ɔːi/, (possibly /ɛːu/, /ɛːi/)

Note the change /e/ > /i/ before /i/ or /j/ in the same or following syllable. This removed /ei/ (which became /iː/) but created /iu/ from earlier /eu/.

Diphthongs in Proto-Germanic can also be analysed as sequences of a vowel plus an approximant, as was the case in Proto-Indo-European. This explains why /j/ was not lost in *niwjaz ('new'); the second element of the diphthong iu was still underlyingly a consonant and therefore the conditioning environment for the loss was not met. This is also confirmed by the fact that later in the West Germanic gemination, -wj- is geminated to -wwj- in parallel with the other consonants (except /r/).

Overlong vowels

Proto-Germanic had two overlong or trimoraic long vowels ô [ɔːː] and ê [ɛːː], the latter mainly in adverbs (cf. *hwadrê 'whereto, whither'). None of the documented languages still include such 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.

Trimoraic vowels generally occurred at morpheme boundaries where a bimoraic long vowel and a short vowel in hiatus contracted, especially after the loss of an intervening laryngeal (-VHV-). One example, without a laryngeal, includes the class II weak verbs (ō-stems) where a -j- was lost between vowels, so that -ōja → ōa → ô (cf. *salbōjaną → *salbôną → Gothic salbōn 'to anoint'). However, the majority occurred in word-final syllables (inflectional endings) probably because in this position the vowel could not be resyllabified. Additionally, Germanic, like Balto-Slavic, lengthened bimoraic long vowels in absolute final position, perhaps to better conform to a word's prosodic template; e.g., PGmc *arô 'eagle' ← PIE **h₃ér-ō just as Lith akmuõ 'stone', OSl kamy ← *aḱmō̃ ← PIE **h₂éḱ-mō. Contrast:

• contraction after loss of laryngeal: gen.pl. *wulfǫ̂ 'wolves' ← *wulfôn ← pre-Gmc *wúlpōom ← PIE **wĺ̥kʷoHom; ō-stem gen.pl. **-ôz ← pre-Gmc **-āas ← PIE **-eh₂es.
• contraction of short vowels: a-stem nom.pl. *wulfôz 'wolves' ← PIE **wĺ̥kʷoes.

But vowels that were lengthened by laryngeals did not become overlong. Compare:

• ō-stem nom.sg. *-ō ← *-ā ← PIE **-eh₂;
• ō-stem acc.sg. *-ǭ ← *-ān ← *-ām (by Stang's law) ← PIE **-eh₂m;
• ō-stem acc.pl. *-ōz ← *-āz ← *-ās (by Stang's law) ← PIE **-eh₂ns;

Trimoraic vowels are distinguished from bimoraic vowels by their outcomes in attested Germanic languages: word-final trimoraic vowels remained long vowels while bimoraic vowels developed into short vowels. Older theories about the phenomenon claimed that long and overlong vowels were both long but differed in tone, i.e., ô and ê had a "circumflex" (rise-fall-rise) tone while ō and ē had an "acute" (rising) tone, much like the tones of modern Scandinavian languages, Baltic, and Ancient Greek, and asserted that this distinction was inherited from PIE. However, this view was abandoned since languages in general do not combine distinctive intonations on unstressed syllables with contrastive stress and vowel length. Modern theories have reinterpreted overlong vowels as having superheavy syllable weight (three moras) and therefore greater length than ordinary long vowels.

By the end of the Proto-Germanic period, word-final long vowels were shortened to short vowels. Following that, overlong vowels were shortened to regular long vowels in all positions, merging with originally long vowels except word-finally (because of the earlier shortening), so that they remained distinct in that position. This was a late dialectal development, because the result was not the same in all Germanic languages: word-final ē shortened to a in East and West Germanic but to i in Old Norse, and word-final ō shortened to a in Gothic but to o (probably [o]) in early North and West Germanic, with a later raising to u (the sixth century Salic law still has maltho in late Frankish).

The shortened overlong vowels in final position developed as regular long vowels from that point on, including the lowering of ē to ā in North and West Germanic. The monophthongization of unstressed au in Northwest Germanic produced a phoneme which merged with this new word-final long ō, while the monophthongization of unstressed ai produced a new ē which did not merge with original ē, but rather with ē₂, as it was not lowered to ā. This split, combined with the asymmetric development in West Germanic, with ē lowering but ō raising, points to an early difference in the articulation height of the two vowels that was not present in North Germanic. It could be seen as evidence that the lowering of ē to ā began in West Germanic at a time when final vowels were still long, and spread to North Germanic through the late Germanic dialect continuum, but only reaching the latter after the vowels had already been shortened.

ē₁ and ē₂

ē₂ is uncertain as a phoneme and only reconstructed from a small number of words; it is posited by the comparative method because whereas all provable instances of inherited (PIE) *ē (PGmc. *ē₁) are distributed in Gothic as ē and the other Germanic languages as *ā, all the Germanic languages agree on some occasions of ē (e.g., Goth/OE/ON hēr 'here' ← late PGmc. *hē₂r). Gothic makes no orthographic and therefore presumably no phonetic distinction between ē₁ and ē₂, but the existence of two Proto-Germanic long e-like phonemes is supported by the existence of two e-like Elder Futhark runes, Ehwaz and Eihwaz.

Krahe treats ē₂ (secondary ē) as identical with ī. It probably continues PIE ēi, and it may have been in the process of transition from a diphthong to a long simple vowel in the Proto-Germanic period. Lehmann lists the following origins for ē₂:

• ēi: Old High German fiara, fera 'ham', Goth fera 'side, flank' ← PGmc *fē₂rō ← *pēi-s-eh₂ ← PIE **(s)peh₁i-.
• ea: The preterite of class 7 strong verbs with ai, al or an plus a consonant, or ē₁; e.g. OHG erien 'to plow' ← *arjanan vs. preterite iar, ier ← *e-ar-
• iz, after loss of -z: OEng mēd, OHG miata 'reward' (vs. OEng meord, Goth mizdō) ← PGmc *mē₂dō ← *mizdō ← PIE **misdʰ-eh₂.
• Certain pronominal forms, e.g. OEng hēr, OHG hiar 'here' ← PGmc *hiar, derivative of *hi- 'this' ← PIE **ḱi- 'this'
• Words borrowed from Latin ē or e in the root syllable after a certain period (older loans also show ī).

Nasal vowels

Proto-Germanic developed nasal vowels from two sources. The earlier and much more frequent source was word-final -n (from PIE -n or -m) in unstressed syllables, which at first gave rise to short -ą, -į, -ų, long -į̄, -ę̄, -ą̄, and overlong -ę̂, -ą̂. -ę̄ and -ę̂ then merged into -ą̄ and -ą̂, which later developed into -ǭ and -ǫ̂. Another source, developing only in late Proto-Germanic times, was in the sequences -inh-, -anh-, -unh-, in which the nasal consonant lost its occlusion and was converted into lengthening and nasalisation of the preceding vowel, becoming -ą̄h-, -į̄h-, -ų̄h- (still written as -anh-, -inh-, -unh- in this article).

In many cases, the nasality was not contrastive and was merely present as an additional surface articulation. No Germanic language that preserves the word-final vowels has their nasality preserved. Word-final short nasal vowels do not show different reflexes compared to non-nasal vowels. However, the comparative method does require a three-way phonemic distinction between word-final *-ō, *-ǭ and *-ōn, which each has a distinct pattern of reflexes in the later Germanic languages:

The distinct reflexes of nasal -ǭ versus non-nasal -ō are caused by the Northwest Germanic raising of final -ō /ɔː/ to /oː/, which did not affect -ǭ. When the vowels were shortened and denasalised, these two vowels no longer had the same place of articulation, and did not merge: -ō became /o/ (later /u/) while -ǭ became /ɔ/ (later /ɑ/). This allowed their reflexes to stay distinct.

The nasality of word-internal vowels (from -nh- sequences) was more stable, and survived into the early dialects intact.

Phonemic nasal vowels definitely occurred in Proto-Norse and Old Norse. They were preserved in Old Icelandic down to at least a.d. 1125, the earliest possible time for the creation of the First Grammatical Treatise, which documents nasal vowels. The PG nasal vowels from -nh- sequences were preserved in Old Icelandic as shown by examples given in the First Grammatical Treatise. For example:

• há̇r 'shark' *-an, but *-anaz > *-ænæ > *-en. Therefore, the Anglo-Frisian brightening must necessarily have occurred very early in the history of the Anglo-Frisian languages, before the loss of final -ą.

The outcome of final vowels and combinations in the various daughters is shown in the table below:

Some Proto-Germanic endings have merged in all of the literary languages but are still distinct in runic Proto-Norse, e.g. *-īz vs. -ijaz (þrijōz dohtrīz 'three daughters' in the Tune stone vs. the name Holtijaz in the Gallehus horns).

Morphology

Main article: Proto-Germanic grammar

The Proto-Germanic language is reconstructed because it was never written down. Scholars figure it out by comparing older Germanic languages and looking at old inscriptions and words borrowed from other languages.

Proto-Germanic had special ways to change words to show things like who or what they are, how many there are, and their role in a sentence. It shared some features with other ancient languages but also had its own unique patterns. Over time, many of these patterns changed or disappeared in the languages that came after it.

Schleicher's PIE fable rendered into Proto-Germanic

August Schleicher wrote a fable in an ancient language he studied. The story is still known by his name today. Below is a version of this fable changed to look like an old Germanic language.

The first version changes the sounds from the original language directly. It does not change the ways people would naturally speak. For example, the original uses a tense that was lost in the old Germanic language. The second version changes the grammar and words to be closer to what people would have actually said.

Reconstructed Proto-Germanic, phonetic evolution derived from reconstructed PIE only

*Awiz ehwōz-uh: awiz, hwisi wullō ne est, spihi ehwanz, ainą kurų wagą wegandų, ainą-uh mekǭ burą, ainą-uh gumanų ahu berandų. Awiz nu ehwamaz wiuhi: hert agnutai mek, witandī ehwanz akandų gumanų. Ehwōz weuhą: hludi, awi! hert agnutai uns witundumaz: gumô, fadiz, wullǭ awją hwurniudi sibi warmą westrą. Awją-uh wullō ne isti. Þat hehluwaz awiz akrą buki.

Reconstructed Proto-Germanic, with more probable grammar and vocabulary derived from later Germanic languages

*Awiz ehwōz-uh: awiz, sō wullǭ ne habdē, sahw ehwanz, ainanǭ kurjanǭ wagną teuhandų, ainanǭ-uh mikilǭ kuriþǭ, ainanǭ-uh gumanų sneumundô berandų. Awiz nu ehwamaz sagdē: hertô sairīþi mek, sehwandē ehwanz akandų gumanų. Ehwōz sagdēdun: gahauzī, awi! hertô sairīþi uns sehwandumiz: gumô, fadiz, uz awīz wullō wurkīþi siz warmą wastijǭ. Awiz-uh wullǭ ne habaiþi. Þat hauzidaz awiz akrą flauh.

English

The Sheep and the Horses: A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.