Marc wrote
> Perhaps Germanic
underwent more foreign influence, so that Gothic retained much less
PIE grammar than Latin, Greek or Sanskrit?
Foreign influence is not needed.
Gothic shows all the basic PIE morphology that we expect, in both nouns and
verbs. It lacks only the developments which built the verbal systems of
Greek, I-I and Latin. It can be argued that Greek and I-I retained contact
and developed the perfect-aorist system together at a late, post PIE stage,
albeit in slightly different ways. The elements from which this system was
built were re-formed in Latin, Celtic and so on, and are also to be found in
Gothic, with the single exception of the -s- aorist, which we suspect for
other reasons is a late development (one scholar even denies its existence
for PIE!)
Peter