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Old High German (OHG; German: Althochdeutsch (Ahdt., Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally identified as the period from around 500/750 to 1050. Rather than representing a single supra-regional form of German, Old High German encompasses the numerous West Germanic dialects that had undergone the set of consonantal ...
Linguists postulate that an early Proto-Germanic language existed and was distinguishable from the other Indo-European languages as far back as 500 BCE. [1]From what is known, the early Germanic tribes may have spoken mutually intelligible dialects derived from a common parent language but there are no written records to verify this fact.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated
All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance, languages. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but ...
Loans into Proto-Germanic from other (known) languages or from Proto-Germanic into other languages can be dated relative to each other by which Germanic sound laws have acted on them. Since the dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, it is not possible to use loans to establish absolute or calendar chronology.
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD. [3]
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
As in the other Germanic languages, the Germanic sound shift changed the realization of all stop consonants, with each consonant shifting to a different one: bʰ → b → p → f dʰ → d → t → θ gʰ → g → k → x (Later initial x → h) gʷʰ → gʷ → kʷ → xʷ (Later initial xʷ → hʷ) Each original consonant shifted one ...