You may know this from taking French or Spanish: there are certainly irregular verbs, but the irregularity is only rarely just a matter of switching a vowel. In Spanish, you start with an innocent infinitive form like tener (“to have”), and then cut your teeth on mastering that he has is él tiene but he had is él tuvo. It’s not just the u vowel—there is also that random v that comes out of nowhere. Typical—and not just a matter of vowel switches alone, like come, came; drink, drank. These, where it’s all about the one vowel, are Germanic’s kink. In all Germanic languages, there is a long list of verbs whose pasts are formed like this, traditionally termed “strong verbs.”
The reason this is not the case in other Indo-European subfamilies is because Proto-Indo-European was not like this. Its grammar did involve switching vowels—but to do an array of things such as helping to indicate case: if you asked a Proto-Indo-European speaker what a dog was called, they would have said it was a kwōn, with a long o. But in the genitive it was kun-és with a u, and in the accusative, kwón-ṃ with a short o instead of a long one. Indicating past tense was only one thing vowel switching was used for (know, knew was wid, woid)—and only so much. In other branches of Proto-Indo-European, this vowel-switching machinery was passed down in assorted renditions reflecting that array of functions it had in Proto-Indo-European. Only in Proto-Germanic did the all-over-the-place vowel-switching of Proto-Indo-European morph into something as distinct and particular as a long list of past tense verb forms indicated with a vowel change and just that.
Once again, Proto-Germanic is odd. That’s in two ways now. Might there be a reason? Well, what about those Semitic languages again? Interesting—their kink is that they form the past tense by changing the vowels inside the word. In Hebrew today, he writes: hu kotev. But he wrote: hu katav. The consonants stay the same: the vowels change: write, wrote; kotev, katav. All Semitic languages have had this feature, ancient and modern, including good old Akkadian and Aramaic. Hmm.
Even these two things are not quite a smoking gun, but there’s something else.
Proto-Germanic Packed Light
Amid early offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic was like English amid Germanic languages in how much frippery it had lost. Proto-Indo-European marked its nouns with eight cases. Latin, the early Indo-European language most learned in modern times, held on to six: nominative, genitive (“of the table”), dative (“to the table”), accusative (table as object), ablative (“by the table”), and vocative (if you were moved to say “Oh, table!!” but more usually, of course, with names), and then some words had a locative (Romae, “in Rome”). The ancestor of today’s Slavic languages, Old Church Slavonic, had seven cases, as Lithuanian still does. Old Irish, an early Celtic language, had five, like Ancient Greek then and Albanian now.
But Proto-Germanic had just four. Those four cases in German wear out Anglophone learners today, but in the grand scheme of things, they are a broken-down half of what Proto-Indo-European had.
In the same way, as Indo-European languages go, it’s weird that in English the only verb endings are ones for present and past tense. I wait, I waited, and that’s about it. German, as busier as it seems to us Anglophones, is pretty much the same: ich warte, ich wartete. There are no endings that mark the future, for example: English does future with a word, will; German uses its werden in the same way. That’s how it is in all Germanic languages; that’s how it was in Proto-Germanic.
Note, however, that in Spanish, you use endings to mark not only the present (yo hablo) and past (yo hablé), but imperfect (hablaba), future (hablaré), conditional (hablaría), subjunctive (hable), and imperfect subjunctive (hablase). Spanish is not unique here, but normal: it has stayed like Proto-Indo-European was, in which there were separate tables of endings to place things in time according to very specific gradations almost imposingly baroque. In fact, Spanish has taken this even further than Proto-Indo-European did in some ways, sprouting its own new endings. Proto-Indo-European, for example, did not have conditional endings.
This anality about assembling sentences very precisely regarding time and hypotheticality with endings was already de rigueur way back when Spanish was Latin. While Latin was spoken, when Proto-Germanic endings were down to just marking whether something was happening now or already had, Latin endings were painting a much more particular picture of how one experienced actions in time: portō (“I carry”), portābam (“I was carrying”), portāvi (“I carried”), portāveram (“I had carried”), portābo (“I will carry”), portāverō (“I will have carried”).
Where did all of this go in Proto-Germanic? Some descendants of Proto-Indo-European have held on to more of this stuff than others, but in Proto-Germanic it fell away to a peculiar extent, such that we Germanic speakers have dragooned little words like will and would to pick up the slack.
After what we have seen in this book, the reader will intuit that this suggests that Proto-Germanic was not just bastardized by some other language, but beaten up by it. The streamlining of Proto-Germanic, with its four little cases, and suffixes marking just two little tenses, is the sign of busy adults making their way in the language as best they could but never quite mastering the subtleties. Proto-Germanic seems to have been a kind of schoolboy Proto-Indo-European.10
At this point, many will see it as at least worth asking: just who might these people stirring up Proto-Germanic have been?
Proto-Germanic Was Full of Orphan Words
A final and conclusive piece of evidence that there were, at the very least, some people of some kind stirring things up is that no less than a third of the Proto-Germanic vocabulary does not trace back to Proto-Indo-European.
With the other two-thirds, we can first figure out what the Proto-Germanic word was, like daukhtrô for daughter, and then we can compare that word to daughter words in the other Indo-European subfamilies, and work out that the Proto-Indo-European source root was dhugəter.
But with a mysterious many of the Proto-Germanic words, we just hit a wall. There are no cognates of these words in other Indo-European languages, and thus no ancestral Proto-Indo-European word can be reconstructed. Earlier than Proto-Germanic the trail runs cold. The words quite often refer to seafaring (sea, ship, strand, sail), war-making (sword), fish (carp, eel), and formal social institutions (knight). Note, for example, that there is no word akin to sea in any other European language you might be familiar with. In Romance, it’s words like French’s mer and Italian’s mare. In the Slavic languages, Russian has more, Polish morze. Over in Celtic, in Welsh the word is môr. From the shape of all those words, it is no surprise that it is thought that in Proto-Indo-European there was a word mere that referred, at least, to something like a lake. But in English we instead have this sea thing, with cognates like German’s See and Dutch’s zee. Why don’t we English speakers refer to eating something like “Mar-food” instead of seafood? Sure, Germans, for example, also have Meer as an alternate. But where did their See come from?
Now, one way of approaching this is to just treat it as an accident. Who knows, after all, whether in other Indo-European languages, words related to the seemingly orphan ones in Proto-Germanic were once alive, but happened to drop out of use by chance? Maybe it happened that a Proto-Indo-European root now survives only in one of the many branches of the family. Although we would have to wonder why it would have blown away in so many branches so uniformly—but still.
Or, the meanings of words can change so much over time that a Proto-Germanic word could possibly trace to a Proto-Indo-European root with a completely different meaning, such that no one would suspect the connection. The word punch, when referring to a drink, comes not from a Proto-Indo-European word for some kind of liquid, but from its word for five—through Hindi’s five word, used because the original recipe was developed in India and used five ingredients. Shitte happens.
And besides, when scholars put their heads to it they can often figure out a Proto-Indo-European root that the Proto-Germanic word
s could have come from, via likenesses that no one happened to notice before.
So one leading scholar of how languages change has only this to say about the issue in a recent work:
Shifts in the meanings of words and the replacement of old lexemes by new ones are universal types of language change; it is therefore not surprising that the lexicon of PGmc [Proto-Germanic], like that of all language, included many words of doubtful or unknown origin (e.g. *blōþa “blood,” *bainą “bone,” *handuz “hand,” *regną “rain,” *stainaz “stone,” *gōdaz “good,” *drinkaną “drink,” etc).
Well, yes. But what about when the mysterious words look—mysteriously—like ones in other language families? Like, say, Semitic?
For example, one of those words that does not trace before Proto-Germanic is fright. Its spelling reflects that there was once an extra consonant sound before the final t, and its rendition in other Germanic languages often gives us a better sense of the original, such as German’s Furcht, pronounced “foorkht.” The extra consonant was the sound of ch in Bach: the Proto-Germanic form was furkhtaz.
But check this out. The Proto-Semitic verb for “to fear,” as it happens, had the consonants p-r-kh. I give no vowels because Semitic verbs are their trios of consonants; the vowels change to mark tense and other distinctions, as in kotev/katav (“write/wrote”) above, and there is no “default” vowel pattern that means nothing and signifies a “basic” form. Thus, the closest we can come to what “the word” for fear in Proto-Semitic was is p-r-kh.
Now, we can compare p-r-kh with the consonants in furkhtaz:
p—r—kh
f—r—kh—t
The f and the p don’t look related at first, but then remember that in Proto-Germanic, p got turned into f! The p-r-kh root for “to fear” just might have also ended up as the word fright in England, and hence, on this page.
Or, folk started in Germanic as a word referring to a division of an army, and only later morphed into meaning a tribe or a nation. The Proto-Germanic word was fulka; the early Semitic root for divide—i.e., as in making a division—was p-l-kh:
p—l—kh
f—l—k
In the early Semitic language Assyrian, that root was used to mean district (i.e., a division of land), with the kh softening into a g (puluggu). In Hebrew today, a detachment is a plaga. Maybe in Northern Europe, that root came out as fulka in the same meaning.
Maiden was, in Old English, mægden and mægþ. The same word in Old Scandinavian was magað, in Old High German magad, in Gothic magaþs. Based on them, a plausible Proto-Germanic form would be magaþ. To which we can compare what can be reconstructed as an early Semitic form, makhat:
As we saw with puluggu in Assyrian, kh easily becomes g. Then, the change from t to th is that Proto-Germanic kink again.
Of course one must be careful making too much of it when words with the same meaning have similar shapes in different languages. As often as not, it’s just an accident: the word for “hang down” is sagaru in Japanese, but not because Germanic-speaking Vikings made a hitherto unrecorded swing over to Japan and married a bunch of the women!
But the Semitic parallels with the orphan Proto-Germanic words get more interesting when it’s relationships between words that are paralleled as well. Biblical Hebrew had a word ʕeƀεr that meant “to cross,” and the three-consonant root was also used in the word for shore. Interesting that in Old English, ofer was the word for both shore and over, as in the direction one goes when crossing.
ʕeƀεr and ofer are more similar than they may seem at first. The ʕ at the beginning of ʕeƀεr was something we can treat as trivial, a sound produced back in the throat, similar to the one we would make if we were talking about apples and someone insisted on thinking we were talking about pears, and we said, “I’m not talking about pears. I’m talking about apples. Apples, damn you—apples!!!!” Note that especially on that final utterance of apples, you would begin the word not with the a vowel itself, but with a catch in the throat, just like you utter at the start of both syllables in “uh-oh!” The ʕ sound is just farther back in the throat, but for our purposes we can imagine the Biblical Hebrew word as “eƀεr” just as English has no “letter” for the catch in the throat before the two syllables in “uh-oh!”
And then, the ƀ sound in Hebrew was rather like blowing—the v-inflected b sound that you often learn in Spanish classes—which was quite similar to the f in ofer. German even maintains the connection between shore and over: shore is Ufer, while over is über.
Another one: normally, Indo-European languages’ word for seven has a t in it. French’s sept, Spanish’s siete, Greek’s heptá, Polish’s siedem (note that in your mouth d is a kind of t)—the Proto-Indo-European form was likely septṃ. But not in Germanic, where you get things like German’s sieben, Dutch’s zeven, Danish’s syv. Why? Well, Semitic languages have a seven word that sounds rather like Indo-European’s but lacks that t: Biblical Hebrew’s, for instance, was šéƀaʕ. Again, the ƀ sound was a blowing, close to the v in seven, or the f in the Old English form seofon. And in Old High German, it came out as a straight b (sibun).
Phinding the Phoenicians
Okay—maybe. But what we want now is evidence that speakers of a Semitic language from way down in the Middle East actually migrated to the northern shore of Europe, namely, what is now Denmark and the northern tip of Germany, or the southern tips of Sweden and Norway right nearby. Here, the evidence helps us only so much.
We can know which Semitic speakers are of interest: it would be the Phoenicians, whose homeland was in today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. Their language, now extinct, was especially similar to Hebrew. The Phoenicians were one of those peoples of ancient history who were seized with a desire to travel and colonize, and they did so with great diligence on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, taking advantage of their advanced sailing technology. This included major colonies in North Africa, at Carthage, as well as one as far west as Spain, in what is now called Cádiz.
The Phoenicians even rounded the bend northward up into Portugal a tad . . . but there, the record stops. Did they sail up past the British Isles and round past the Netherlands to hit the neck of land shared today by Denmark and Germany?
There is no record that they did so. Apparently they were very secretive about their ship routes. Also, many of the northern European coastal regions they would have occupied have since sunk under the sea. This leaves us having to make nimble surmises.
The time, at least, was right. The Phoenicians had reached Portugal by the seventh century B.C., and were vanquished by the Romans by about 200 B.C. This would mean that if they reached Northern Europe, it would have been around the middle of the final millennium B.C.—when we know Proto-Germanic was in place. We do know that technology of the time allowed people to travel from the Mediterranean all the way around to that Danish-German necklet of land, because a Greek named Pytheas recorded having done exactly that in the late fourth century B.C. We do know that the Phoenicians’ technology was up to the voyage, because the Vikings later sailed from Northern Europe down to Britain and France in ships much less sturdy. Then, remember that so many of the orphan Proto-Germanic words are about sailing . . . and fish.
The hints get ever more tantalizing. What’s up, for example, with the passing references to two gods, Phol and Balder, in a magic spell written in an ancient German ancestor, Old High German? The Phoenicians’ god of gods was Baal. About which we note three things.
First, as it happens, when Proto-Germanic’s sounds went weird, words that came into the language starting with b ended up starting with p instead. So, from Baal—if you can think where I’m going, “Paal,” anyone?
Second, one thing that happened to sounds after that, when Proto-Germanic turned into Old High German, was that p became a pf sound, written as ph. Not that I want to give it away, but, ahem: not Paal but Phaal.
Finally, another thing about sounds in Proto-Germanic was that
what came in from Proto-Indo-European as a long a (aa, written ā) ended up as a long o (ō). So Phaal became Phool.
Put all of that together, and if you wondered what the earlier form of a word Phol in Old High German was, then even if you had no intention of drawing a connection to Phoenician or anything else, you would trace it backward to—Baal, with a long a sound.
And then, the Phoenicians were also given to referring to Baal as Baal ‘Addīr (“God great”)—that is, Great God. Sometimes they would write it as one word, Baliddir, or even a shorter version, Baldir. And there in that Old High German document is a god called Balder.
Finally, get this: not long ago, an intrepid German renegade archaeologist trawling the shallows of the North Sea found artifacts from between 1500 and 500 B.C. They were from, for one, Ancient Greece and the Minoan civilization of Crete, and then there were also remains of a Phoenician cooking pot! These findings were on the shore of Germany’s northerly Schleswig-Holstein province: precisely one of the areas where Proto-Germanic is thought to have arisen.
Theo Vennemann of the University of Munich puts it that in light of all of the various indications pointing in one direction, “it would be amazing if the Phoenicians had excluded Germania from their frame of reference.” In modern times, Vennemann has been the proponent par excellence of the hypothesis that Phoenician reshaped Proto-Germanic. All of the evidence in the previous paragraphs, as well as most of the Semitic-Germanic etymologies I have presented, is his work,11 and I cotton to the lawyerly kind of argumentation from fragmentary evidence that he excels at.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue Page 14
