Re: Proto-Germanic Morphology

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 9871
Date: 2001-09-29

There are several handbooks that cover such problems, e.g.

Robinson, Orrin. 1993. _Old English and its Closest Relatives: a
Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages_. Stanford University Press.

Ramat, Paolo. 1998. "The Germanic languages". In: Anna Giacalone Ramat
and Paolo Ramat (eds.), _The Indo-European Languages_. London:
Routledge. 380-414.

The classical reference book on Germanic is:

Prokosch, Eduard. 1938. A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

For more refs, see here:

http://www.unc.edu/student/orgs/cams/IElinguistics.htm

Very briefly:

Proto-Germanic had two tenses (pres., pret.) and six cases (nom.,
acc., gen., dat., ins., voc.), with the last two already in retreat.
Verbs retained dual forms and there were also 1st and 2nd person dual
personal pronouns. Inflections varied quite a lot (there were weak,
strong and irregular verbs, and several different noun declensions).

Piotr


--- In cybalist@..., "Dan Jones" <dan@...> wrote:
> Is there anyone on the list who knows about the morphology of
> proto-Germanic? After searching on the web I found countless pages
> describing Gimm's and Verner's Laws but nothing on the actual
*forms* of the
> language. For instance, what were the person endings in the
prensent tense?
> How many tenses were there? How many cases, and how did they
inflect? If
> anyone could help me with these questions I would be most grateful.
>
> Dan Jones