The so-called Schleicher's fable is a poem composed in PIE, published by August Schleicher in 1868, originally named “The Sheep and the Horses”. It is written here in the different reconstructible IE dialects for comparison.

The immediate parent dialect of each proto-language is enclosed in parentheses.

A Common PIE version (ca. 3500 BC?): H₃owis h₁ekwōs-k^we. • H₃owis, k^wesjo wl̥h₁neh₂ ne h₁est, • h₁ekwoms spekét, • h₁oinom g^wr̥h₃úm wog^hom wég^hontm̥, • h₁oinom-k^we megeh₂m b^horom, • h₁oinom-k^we d^hh₁g^hmonm̥ h₁oh₁ku b^hérontm̥. • H₃owis nu h₁ékwob^hjos weuk^wét: • “Kr̥d h₂ég^hnutoi h₁moí, • h₁ekwoms h₂égontm̥ wih₁róm wídn̥tei”. • H₁ekwōs tu weuk^wónt: “Klud^hí, h₃owi! • kr̥d h₂ég^hnutoi n̥sméi wídn̥tb^hjos: • h₂ner, potis, h₃owjom-r̥ wl̥h₁neh₂m̥ • sweb^hei g^whermom westrom k^wr̥neuti”. • H₃owjom-k^we wl̥hneh₂ ne h₁esti. • Tod kékluwos h₃owis h₂egrom b^hugét.

 

 

 

Translation: « 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. »

The North-West Indo-European dialect continuum, also Europe’s Indo-European, was spoken in the European Subcontinent in the centuries on either side of 2500 BC, evolving into the Pre-Celtic, Pre-Italic, Pre-Latin (probably within Pre-Italic), Pre-Germanic, Pre-Baltic, Pre-Slavic (or Pre-Balto-Slavic) IE dialects, among others. Its original common location is usually traced back to some place to the East of the Rhine, to the North of the Alps and the Carpathian Mountains, to the South of Scandinavia and to the East of the Eastern European Lowlands or Russian Plain, not beyond Moscow.

Europe ca. 3200-2300 BC. The Germanic homeland is usually traced back to Jutland and southern Scandinavia; present-day Germany was the homeland for Celtic and Italic; the Eastern zone corresponds to Balto-Slavic. Beekes (1995).

The Corded Ware complex of cultures traditionally represents for many scholars the arrival of the first speakers of Northern Dialects in central Europe, coming from the Yamna culture. The complex dates from about 3200-2300 BC. The Globular Amphorae culture may be slightly earlier, but the relation between these cultures remains unclear.

NOTE. According to Adrados (1998), “[o]ne has to distinguish, in this huge geographical space, different locations. We have already talked about the situation of Germans to the West, and by their side, Celtic, Latin and Italic speakers; Balts and Slavs to the East, the former to the North of the later. See, among others, works by Bonfante (1983, 1984), about the old location of Baltic and Slavic-speaking communities. Isoglosses of different chronology let us partially reconstruct the language history. Note that the output obtained with Phonetics and Morphology match up essentially those of Porzig, who worked with Lexica”.

Kortlandt (1989), also considers that “[i]t is possible that the speakers of Italo-Celtic must be assigned to the Globular Amphora culture, and that Germanic grew out of a later component of the Corded Ware horizon (…) The Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations became speakers of Balto-Slavic. If the speakers of the other satem languages can be assigned to the Yamnaya horizon and the western Indo-Europeans to the Corded Ware horizon, it is attractive to assign the ancestors of the Balts and the Slavs to the Middle Dnieper culture [an eastern extension of the Corded Ware culture, of northern Ukraine and Belarus]. If the origin of this culture “is to be sought in the Sredny Stog, Yamnaya and Late Tripolye cultures” and this phase is “followed by a middle period where the classic Corded Ware amphorae and beakers appear” (Mallory 1989: 248), the course of events corresponds nicely with the development of a satem language which was drawn into the western Indo-European sphere of influence”. Similarly, Adrados (1980) about the dialectal situation of Slavic (under a linguistic point of view): “To a layer of archaisms, shared or not with other languages (…) Slavic added different innovations, some common to Baltic. Some of them are shared with Germanic, as the oblique cases in -m and feminine participle; others with Indo-Iranian, so satemization, Ruki sound law (more present in Slavic than in Baltic) (…) Most probably, those common characteristics come from a recent time, from secondary contacts between IE III B [=Northern IE] (whose rearguard was formed by Balto-Slavs) and A [=Southern IE] (in a time when Greeks were not in contact anymore, they had already migrated to Greece)”.

On the archaeological quest for the Urheimat, Mallory & Adams (2006) make a complete summary of the different frameworks and models used. About the Retrospective Method, still favoured by many linguists, it is the “method where one examines those archaeological cultures that must have been associated with different Indo-European language groups and attempts to work backwards to the ‘proto-culture’. The unit of analysis here is the so-called ‘archaeological culture’, a classification device employed by archaeologists to deal with similar and geographically confined material culture and behaviour (…) Many of the language groups of Europe, i.e. Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic, may possibly be traced back to the Corded Ware horizon of northern, central, and eastern Europe that flourished c. 3200-2300 BC. Some would say that the Iron Age cultures of Italy might also be derived from this cultural tradition. For this reason the Corded Ware culture is frequently discussed as a prime candidate for early Indo-European”.

Italic (with Latin), Celtic and Germanic are usually classified within a common West Indo-European nucleus. Balto-Slavic, on the other hand, is usually placed somewhere outside that West IE core, but always in close contact with it, as a North-West Indo-European dialect. Linguists have pointed out language contacts of Italic with Celtic, Celtic with Germanic, and Germanic with Balto-Slavic. Southern dialectal isoglosses affect Balto-Slavic and Tocharian, and only partially Germanic and Latin.

NOTE 1. Celtic too shares isoglosses with Southern dialects, according to Meier-Brügger (2003): “Celtic contacts with eastern Indo-Europe are ancient. Compare the case, among others, of relative pronouns, which in Celtic, contrarily to the Italic *k^wo-/*k^wi-, is represented by *Hi̯o-, a characteristic that it shares with Greek, Phrygian, Indo-Iranian and Slavic”. Even though classifications of early proto-languages may vary depending on different criteria, they all have a known common origin, which is generally easier to reconstruct than their dialectal groupings. For example, if we had only some texts of Old French, Old Spanish and Old Portuguese, Mediaeval Italian and Modern Romanian and Catalan, then Vulgar Latin (ca. 200 AD) – i.e. the features of the common language spoken by all Romance speakers, not the older, artificial, literary Classical Latin (ca. 100 BC) still less Old Latin (ca. 700 BC) – could be easily reconstructed, but the dialectal groups not. In fact, the actual groupings of the Romance languages are controversial, even knowing well enough Archaic, Classic and Vulgar Latin, and the history of Romance languages. Hence the difficulties in reconstructing and grouping individual North-West IE dialects, but the certainty in reconstructing a common North-West or Europe’s Indo-European language using raw linguistics, better explained if combined with archaeological data.

NOTE 2. On the inclusion of Pre-Latin IE within West Indo-Europe, against it there are some archaeological and linguistic theories (see Szemerényi, Colin Renfrew; v.s. for J.P. Mallory); Polomé (1983) & Schmidt (1984) say  innovations common to Celtic and Germanic (later than those common to Celtic, Latin and Germanic), come from a time when Latin peoples had already migrated to the Italian peninsula. On the unity of Proto-Italic and Proto-Latin, Adrados (1998): “dubious is the old unity scheme, no doubt only partial, between Latin and Osco-Umbrian, which has been rejected by famous Italian linguists, relating every coincidence to recent contacts. I am not so sure about that, as the common innovations are big; cf. Beeler 1966, who doesn’t however dispel the doubts. Obviously, according to the decision taken, there are different historical consequences. If one thinks that both linguistic groups come from the North, through the Alps (cf. Tovar 1950), from the end of the 2^nd millennium, a previous unity can be proposed. But authors like Devoto (1962) or Szemerényi (1962) made Latin peoples come from the East, through Apulia”. There has been a continued archaeological and (especially) linguistic support by mainstream IE studies to the derivation of Italic (and Latin) from a West Indo-European core, even after critics to the old Italo-Celtic concept (C. Watkins Italo-Celtic Revisited, 1963, K.H. Schmidt Latein und Keltisch, 1986); see Porzig (1954), Dressler (1971), Tovar (1970), Pisani (1974), Lehmann (1974), Bonfante (1983, 1984), Beekes (1995), Adrados, Bernabé, Mendoza (1998), etc.; on the archaeological question, see Ghirshman (1977), Thomas (1984), Gimbutas (1985), Harall (1995),…

Evolution of the reconstructed laryngeals of Proto-Indo-European in Europe’s Indo-European include these vowel colourizations and compensatory lengthenings:

·       PIE *H₁, the neutral laryngeal: *h₁a→a, *h₁e→e, *h₁o→o; *ah₁→ā, *eh₁→ē, *oh₁→ō.

·       PIE *H₂, the a-colouring laryngeal: *h₂a→a, *h₂e→a, *h₂o→a; *ah₂→ā, *eh₂→ā.

·       PIE *H₃, the o-colouring laryngeal: h₃e→o, h₃o→o; eh₃→ō, oh₃→ō.

·       Often, but not always, interconsonantal H → a; as, *ph₂tḗr → patḗr (cf. PII pitr).

·       PIH *r̥H→r̥̄, *l̥H→l̥̄, *n̥H→n̥̄, *m̥H→m̥̄; also, iH→ī, uH→ū.

·       PIH *H before consonants → EIE Ø; cf. PIE *h₁dent-, EIE dentis (cf. PGk odōnts), “tooth”; PIE *h₂stér-, EIE stḗr (cf. PGk astḗr), etc.

NOTE. The question is often made the other way round in IE studies, i.e. “according to these vowels reconstructed for North-West Indo-European, Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, which combination of laryngeal+vowel or vowel+laryngeal could make them all fit into a common mother-language?” For clarity purposes, Common PIE is taken in this book as example for the phonology of early dialects, but enough certainty in vocalism (for language revival purposes) is to be found only in EIE, PGk and PII; exact regularity or congruence of a common Proto-Indo-European phonology is neither necessary nor searched for, as there are many variations in the laryngeal theories proposed by scholars, who reconstruct from just one (Szemerényi) to eight (Puhvel) or nine (Adrados); a general reconstruction of three laryngeals is used here for its simplicity and wide acceptance today. For more on this see Appendix II.3, The Laryngeal Theory.

A. Germanic

Spread of Germanic languages today.

The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European language family. The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with ca. 340 and some 120 million native speakers, respectively. Other significant languages include Low Germanic dialects (like Dutch) and the Scandinavian languages.

Their common ancestor is Proto-Germanic, probably still spoken in the mid-1^st millennium B.C. in Iron Age Northern Europe, since its separation from an earlier Pre-Proto-Germanic, a dialect of Europe’s Indo-European branch dated ca. 1500-500 BC. The succession of archaeological horizons suggests that before their language differentiated into the individual Germanic branches the Proto-Germanic speakers lived in southern Scandinavia and along the coast from the Netherlands in the west to the Vistula in the east around 750 BC. Early Germanic dialects enter history with the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the 2^nd century.

NOTE.  A few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia dated to ca. 200 are thought to represent a later stage of Proto-Norse; according to Bernard Comrie, it represents a Late Common Germanic which followed the “Proto-Germanic” stage. Several historical linguists have pointed towards the apparent material and social continuity connecting the cultures of the Nordic Bronze Age (1800-500 BCE) and the Pre-Roman Iron Age (500 BCE - 1 CE) as having implications in regard to the stability and later development of the Germanic language group. Lehmann (1977) writes “Possibly the most important conclusion based on archeological evidence with relevance for linguistic purposes is the assumption of 'one huge cultural area' which was undisturbed for approximately a thousand years, roughly from 1500-500 BC Such a conclusion in a stable culture permits inferences concerning linguistic stability, which are important for an interpretation of the Germanic linguistic data”. Also, on setting the upper boundary of a comprehensive description of Proto-Germanic grammar, Lehmann (2005) wrote: “a grammar of Proto-Germanic must be a description of the language from approximately 2500 BC to the beginning of the common era”.

The earliest evidence of the Germanic branch is recorded from names in the 1^st century by Tacitus, and in a single instance in the 2^nd century BC, on the Negau helmet. From roughly the 2^nd century AD, some speakers of early Germanic dialects developed the Elder Futhark. Early runic inscriptions are also largely limited to personal names, and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the 4^th century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic tongue began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters, but in Scandinavia, runic alphabets remained in common use throughout the Viking Age.

Negau helmet. It reads (from right to left): harikastiteiva\\\ip, “Harigast the priest”.

The so-called Grimm’s law is a set of statements describing the inherited Europe’s Indo-European stops as they developed in Pre-Proto-Germanic. As it is presently formulated, Grimm’s Law consists of three parts, which must be thought of as three consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift:

·         PIE voiceless stops change into PGmc. voiceless fricatives: p→f, t→θ, k→x, k^w→x^w.

·         PIE voiced stops become PGmc. voiceless stops: b→p, d→t, g→k, g^w→k^w.

·         PIE voiced aspirated stops lose their aspiration and change into plain voiced stops: b^h→b, d^h→d, g^h→g, g^wh→g^w,g,w.

Verner’s Law addresses a category of exceptions, stating that unvoiced fricatives are voiced when preceded by an unaccented syllable: PGmc. s→z, f→v, θ→ð; as, EIE b^hratēr → PGmc. brōþēr, “brother”, but EIE mātḗr → PGmc. mōðēr “mother”.

NOTE 1. W. P. Lehmann (1961) considered that Jacob Grimm’s “First Germanic Sound Shift”, or Grimm’s Law and Verner's Law, which pertained mainly to consonants and were considered for a good many decades to have generated Proto-Germanic, were Pre-Proto-Germanic, and that the “upper boundary” was the fixing of the accent, or stress, on the root syllable of a word, typically the first. Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch accent comprising “an alternation of high and low tones” as well as stress of position determined by a set of rules based on the lengths of the word's syllables.

The fixation of the stress led to sound changes in unstressed syllables. For Lehmann, the “lower boundary” was the dropping of final -a or -e in unstressed syllables; for example, PIE woid-á >, Goth. wait, “knows” (the > and < signs in linguistics indicate a genetic descent). Antonsen (1965) agreed with Lehmann about the upper boundary but later found runic evidence that the -a was not dropped: Gmc. ékwakraz ... wraita, “I wakraz ... wrote (this)”. He says: “We must therefore search for a new lower boundary for Proto-Germanic”.

NOTE 2. Sometimes the shift produced allophones (consonants that were pronounced differently) depending on the context of the original. With regard to original PIE k and k^w, Trask (2000) says that the resulting PGmc. x and x^w were reduced to h and h^w in word-initial position. Consonants were lengthened or prolonged under some circumstances, appearing in some daughter languages as geminated graphemes. Kraehenmann (2003) states that 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 phonemes b, d, g and g^w, says Ringe (2006) were stops in some environments and fricatives in others.

Effects of the aforementioned sound laws include the following examples:

·   p→f: EIE pods “foot”, PGmc. fōts; cf. Goth. fōtus, O.N. fōtr, O.E. fōt, O.H.G. fuoz.

·   t→þ,ð: EIE tritjós “third”, PGmc. þriðjaz; cf. Goth. þridja, O.N. þriðe, OE. þridda, O.H.G. dritto.

·   k→x,h: EIE kwon “dog”, PGmc. xunðaz; cf. Goth. hunds, O.N. hundr, O.E. hund, O.H.G. hunt.

·   k^w→x^w,h^w:  EIE k^wos “what, who”, Gmc. h^woz; cf. Goth. hwas, O.N. hverr, O.S. hwe, O.E. hwā, O.Fris. hwa, O.H.G. hwër.

·   b→p: EIE werbō “throw”, Gmc. werpō; cf. Goth. wairpan, O.S. werpan, O.N. verpa, O.E. weorpan, M.L.G., Du. werpen, Ger. werfen.

·   d→t: EIE dekm̥ “ten”, Gmc. tehun; cf. Goth. taihun, O.S. tehan, O.N. tiu, O.Fris. tian, O.Du. ten, O.H.G. zehan.

·   g→k: EIE gelu “ice”, Gmc. kaldaz; cf. Goth. kalds, O.N. kaldr, O.E. cald, O.H.G. kalt.

·   g^w→kw: EIE g^wīwós “alive”, Gmc. k^wi(k)waz; cf. Goth. k^wius, O.N. kvikr, O.E. cwic, O.H.G. quec.

·   b^h→b: EIE b^hrātēr “brother”, Gmc. brōþēr; cf. Goth. bróþar, O.N. brōþir, O.E. brōþor, O.H.G. bruoder.

·   d^h→d: EIE d^hworis “door”, Gmc. duriz; cf. Goth. daúr, O.N. dyrr, O.E duru, O.H.G. turi.

·   g^h→g: EIE g^hansis “goose”, Gmc. gansiz; cf. Goth gansus, O.N. gās, O.E. gōs, O.H.G. gans.

·   g^wh→gw/g/w: EIE g^whormos “warm”, Gmc. warmaz; cf. O.N. varmr, O.E. wearm, O.H.G. warm. EIE g^whondos “fight”, Gmc. gandaz; cf. Goth. gunþs, O.N. gandr, O.E. gūþ, O.H.G. gund.

A known exception is that the voiceless stops did not become fricatives if they were preceded by PIE s., i.e. sp, st, sk, sk^w. Similarly, PIE t did not become a fricative if it was preceded by p, k, or k^w. This is sometimes treated separately under the Germanic spirant law.

EIE vowels: a,o→a; EIE ā,ō→ō. PGmc. had then short i, u, e, a, and long ī, ū, ē, ō, ǣ?

Germanic dialects in Europe. The line dividesWestern from Northern dialects.

NOTE 1. Similar mergers happened in the Slavic languages, but in the opposite direction. At the time of the merge, the vowels probably were [ɒ] and [ɒ:] before their timbres differentiated into maybe [ɑ] and [ɔ:].

NOTE 2. PGmc. ǣ and ē are also transcribed as 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 probable instances of inherited EIE 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. PGmc. hē²r → Goth.,O.E.,O.N. hēr, “here”). Krahe treats ē² (secondary ē) as identical with ī. It probably continues EIE ei or ēi, and it may have been in the process of transition from a diphthong to a long simple vowel in the Proto-Germanic period. Gothic makes no orthographic and therefore presumably no phonetic distinction between ē¹ and ē². The existence of two Proto-Germanic [e:]-like phonemes is supported by the existence of two e-like Elder Futhark runes, Ehwaz and Eihwaz.