The Earliest Period of Germanic History. Proto-Germanic

The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic (PG) language (also termed Common or Primitive Germanic, Primitive Teutonic and simply Germanic). PG is the linguistic ancestor or the parent-language of the Germanic group. It is supposed to have split from related IE tongues sometime between the 15th and 10th c. B.C. The would-be Germanic tribes belonged to the western division of the IE speech community.

As the Indo-Europeans extended over a larger territory, the ancient Germans or Teutons (both names correspond to R ‘германцы’, ‘древние германцы’; to be distinguished from Germans ‘немцы’) moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. This place is regarded as the most probable original home of the Teutons. It is here that they developed their first specifically Germanic linguistic features which made them a separate group in the IE family.

PG is an entirely pre-historical language: it was never recorded in written form. In the 19th c. it was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidence in descendant languages. Hypothetical reconstructed PG forms will sometimes be quoted below, to explain the origin of English forms.

It is believed that at the earliest stages of history PG was fundamentally one language, though dialectally coloured. In its later stages dialectal differences grew, so that towards the beginning of our era Germanic appears divided into dialectal groups and tribal dialects. Dialectal differentiation increased with the migrations and geographical expansion of the Teutons caused by overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.

The external history of the ancient Teutons around the beginning of our era is known from classical writings. The first mention of Germanic tribes was made by Pitheas, a Greek historian and geographer of the 4th c. B.C., in an account of a sea voyage to the Baltic Sea. In the 1st c. B.C. in COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WAR (COMMENTARII DE BELLO GALLICO) Julius Caesar described some mi­litant Germanic tribes − the Suevians − who bordered on the Celts of Gaul in the North-East. The tribal names Germans and Teutons, at first applied to separate tribes, were later extended to the entire group. In the 1st c. A. D. Pliny the Elder, a prominent Roman scientist and writer, in NATURAL HISTORY (NATURALIS HISTORIA) made a classified list of Germanic tribes grouping them under six headings. A few decades later the Roman historian Tacitus compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons DE SITU, MORIBUS ET POPULIS GERMANIAE; in this work he reproduced Pliny's classification of the Germanic tribes. F. Engels made extensive use of these sources in the papers ON THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT GERMANS and THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE. Having made a linguistic analysis of several Germanic dialects of later ages F. Engels came to the conclusion that Pliny's classification of the Teutonic tribes accurately reflected the contemporary dialectal division. In his book on the ancient Teutons F. Engels described the evolution of the economic and social structure of the Teutons from Caesar's to Tacitus's time.

Towards the beginning of our era the common period of Germanic history came to an end. The Teutons had extended over a larger territory and the PG language broke into parts. The tri-partite division of the Germanic languages proposed by 19th c. philologists corresponds, with a few adjustments, to Pliny's grouping of the Old Teutonic tribes. According to this division PG split into three branches: East Germanic (Vindili in Pliny's classification), North Germanic (Hilleviones) and West Germanic (which embraces Ingveones, Ist evones and Herminones in Pliny's list). In due course these branches split into separate Germanic languages.

The traditional tri-partite classification of the Germanic languages was reconsidered and corrected in some recent publications. The development of the Germanic group was not confined to successive splits; it involved both linguistic divergence and convergence. It has also been discovered that originally PG split into two main branches and that the tri-partite division marks a later stage of its history.

The earliest migration of the Germanic tribes from the lower valley of the Elbe consisted in their movement north, to the Scandinavian peninsula, a few hundred years before our era. This geographical segregation must have led to linguistic differentiation and to the division of PG into the northern and southern branches. At the beginning of our era some of the tribes returned to the mainland and settled closer to the Vistula basin, east of the other continental Germanic tribes. It is only from this stage of their history that the Germanic languages can be described under three headings: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic.

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