Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The reconstructed prehistoric ancestor of the Germanic languages.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun Hypothetical
prehistoric ancestor language of allGermanic languages, including English.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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“Further” is the ealier form, from the same Proto-Germanic source as “forth”.
What’s the deal with further and farther? « Motivated Grammar 2008
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Again, Proto-Germanic appears to be contemporaneous with Proto-Celtic.
My sweet honey bee 2010
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Evidence and counter-evidence: Essays in honour of Frederik Kortlandt (2008), p.417 (see link): "In a number of papers Kortlandt (1988a, b; 2000; 2003) has suggested that the ejectives that both he and I reconstruct for Proto-Indo-European changed into preglottalised stops in Proto-Germanic before they became plain voiceless stops in the individual daughter languages."
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Again, Proto-Germanic appears to be contemporaneous with Proto-Celtic.
My sweet honey bee 2010
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While it's immediately tempting to see an origin in PIE *gʰend- 'to grasp' which yielded Latin praehendere, Greek χανδάνειν and Gothic bi-gitan, formal sound correspondences between PIE and Proto-Germanic forbid us to assume a direct connection with the Germanic root.
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I would agree with PhoeniX - if "hand" were to be a early Latin loan in Germanic, I would expect to see many more Latin loans in Proto-Germanic.
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Proto-Germanic was undergoing several major changes, including mora-loss, at the period when first contact was established with Rome, and was also simultaneously splitting into Northwest and East Germanic.
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First, let's get nonsense out of the way by letting a published author state the obvious about origins of the Proto-Germanic etymon *handuz 'hand' that are most implausible yet unfortunately popular among idle hobbyists online.
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One would expect a hypothetical PIE u-stem **gʰóndus 'grasper; hand' to end up as **gantuz in Proto-Germanic but certainly not *handuz which rather suggests a non-existent PIE stem **kondʰ-u-.
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Since there are already a few known Proto-Germanic terms borrowed from Latin in the early first millenium BCE after Grimm's Law had taken place cf.
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