Abstract: Our reconstruction of a proto-language is theoretical and partial; but the language itself was necessarily real and whole. As a real language, it shared with all real languages the characteristic of non-uniformity. Some of its speakers spoke differently from others; they spoke differently from their linguistic predecessors and successors. And at any time, in any dialect, the phonemes of a real language display variations in different phonetic environments. In short, the language which our reconstructions adumbrate had linguistic change; it had isoglosses; and it had allophones. The normal purpose of reconstruction is to establish a single formula which can be regarded as a starting point for subsequent evolutions. This purpose involves necessarily an emphasis on maximum simplicity and an intentional neglect of non-uniformities. A reconstructed Proto-Germanic form, for example, is designed to display with a minimum of complication the relations of Gothic, Norse, Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German to each other, and to provide a plausible formula from which the historical forms in the historical languages can all be derived, by definite and consistent changes. A successful reconstruction transcends the several changes; it antedates dialect differences which appear in the sequel-languages; and it is a phonemic formula, not a phonetic description. The fruitfulness of such reconstruction is attested by a century of scholarship; the punctuation (*) is established, and the terms PROTO-, UR-, PRIMITIVE are firmly attached to formulae which are timeless, non-dialectal, and nonphonetic. This paper is an essay in a different type of reconstruction. Here an attempt is made to examine an unrecorded language as though it were real, to describe changes, isoglosses, and allophones in one portion of the structure of that unrecorded language. The language will be given the colorless and non-committal name of PREHISTORIC GERMANIC. The portion of the structure is that which can be called the short syllabics of stressed syllables, here written /i, e, a, o, u/.1 The earliest set of short syllabics which it is profitable to attribute to Prehistoric Germanic can be written thus: /i, e, a, u/. This system is a starting point for a specifically Germanic structural history. We can regard these
Publication Year: 1948
Publication Date: 1948-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 15
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot