Ur-Germanic

alternative Urgermanic · alternative Urgermanish

1. human sciencesHypothetical prehistoric ancestor language of all Germanic languages, including English; Proto-Germanic.

   They stood in relation to these various tribes as an Ur-Germanic people of remarkable size and prowess.

   2010, John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

   5 more examples

   If now these prefixes are to be connected, as it seems they should be, they point to an urgermanic vowel sound differing but little, if any, in degree of openness from urgermanic e.

   1896, Frank Hamilton Fowler, The negatives of the Indo-European languages

   In Germanic the distinction between perfectives and imperfectives is a survival of what was perhaps a vital distinction in Ur-germanic.

   1917, University of North Carolina (1793-1962). Philological Club, Studies in philology

   OE. changes unstressed 'i' into 'e' and drops '-n' in Uroe.; the oblique cases in OE. are: micile throughout, the Urgermanic forms were: acc. [...]

   1939, Niels Bøgholm, English speech from an historical point of view

   We are immediately confronted with a compound triple disjunction: 1) -*s and -*z fell together in Ur-Germanic as nondistinctive variants of a single phoneme ; or 2) they fell together in Ur-Germanic as a single sound [...]

   1941, Douglas Chrétien, Indo-European final-*s in Germanic

   This practice of divided sovereignty over land, which survived into the twentieth century as the Almen of Upper Germany, seemed also to Biicher to respond to “an Ur-Germanic instinct,” [...]

   2005, Heath Pearson, Origins of Law and Economics

   Synonyms: Common Germanic, Germanic, Proto-Germanic