Summary
Highlights
Proto-Germanic, as found in dictionaries, represents the language spoken 2,000 years ago, being the last common ancestor to living Germanic languages. However, there was a long developmental period from Proto-Indo-European, where significant grammatical and phonological changes occurred. Proto-Germanic, like other languages, retained unproductive, fossilized, and frozen grammatical forms and vocabulary.
Gothic, the oldest recorded Germanic language, preserves archaisms such as an inflected passive and dual forms for verbs, which are largely lost in later Germanic languages. Old High German is considered the most morphologically conservative West Germanic language, retaining archaic verb forms, including the first person singular ending 'm' from Proto-Indo-European athematic forms, seen in the English 'I am'.
German linguist Vol Oiler points to remnants of the Indo-European aorist in Germanic, found in irregular forms in Old High German and Old English. These forms are not a full grammatical category but rather fossilized structures functioning as irregular indicative or imperative forms, indicating the aorist's presence in early Germanic development.
Indo-European n-stems, later weak nouns in Germanic, originally had complex shifting accents and ablaut within their paradigms. While n-stems became common, their inflectional system simplified. Remnants of complex alternations are seen in words like 'ox'. Ablaut is also observed in related roots of semantically similar words that were once inflectional forms of the same word. Hus Kronan suggests Proto-Germanic had complex consonant and ablaut alterations within paradigms, which were later split into separate words due to irregularity.
Although ablative and locative cases are not distinct in Germanic nouns, they left clear traces in adverbs. Some dative forms continue original locative endings, and these ablative and locative forms are visible in directional and place adverbs that persist in modern Germanic languages. A common Germanic adverb ending is often reconstructed as an old ablative.
The Proto-Indo-European first person pronoun shows both one and two-syllable forms in daughter languages, a variation still productive within Germanic, as seen in runic inscriptions and modern Swedish and Danish. While Verner's Law is well-known in verbs and comparatives, there are also traces in noun morphology, particularly in neuter nouns, indicating that Verner alterations were once present in nouns.
These examples suggest a much more conservative Proto-Germanic verb system and nouns that once exhibited ablaut and accent alternations similar to verbs. While dating these changes is challenging due to the long developmental period of Germanic, these holdovers from older stages provide interesting insights.