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Latin:Romance::???:Germanic

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diplomaticus
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Studies: German

 
 Message 1 of 20
01 July 2015 at 1:51am | IP Logged 
There was not enough room in the Subject line. Latin is the mother of romance tongues.
What is the equivalent for the Germanic ones? Or is there not a language predecessor that
is well-defined for what came before all the modern Germanic tongues? I just never hear
about it if there is one.
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daegga
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 Message 2 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:06am | IP Logged 
Proto-Germanic ... it's a reconstructed language though, probably with quite some
variation (a dialect-continuum).
Gothic and Proto-Norse (which isn't really "proto") come close to how late versions
of Proto-Germanic might have looked like.

Edited by daegga on 01 July 2015 at 2:09am

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diplomaticus
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 Message 3 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:12am | IP Logged 
But there isn't really an equivalent that one would study to learn like they might do
with Latin?
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ScottScheule
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 Message 4 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:16am | IP Logged 
You could study Proto-Germanic, but as with any reconstructed language, what we can reconstruct of it is limited
and uncertain, and there's no corpus.

To each their own, but unless you really love the Germanic languages, I doubt it would be much fun.
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daegga
Tetraglot
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 Message 5 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:21am | IP Logged 
One would usually start with Old Norse, Gothic, Old English, Old German (High and
Low).
Old Norse is the only one you would want to learn for its original literature, it's
like the Latin of the North. All the other languages only get interesting in the
Middle X periods as far as content is concerned.

Edited by daegga on 01 July 2015 at 2:22am

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ScottScheule
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Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French

 
 Message 6 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:22am | IP Logged 
I should point out that the Latin that people study isn't really the mother of the Romance languages. They developed
from Vulgar Latin, which was a different dialect, that was not written down (except for a few examples). So it's sort
of like Proto-Germanic in a fashion.

Is there a reason you're asking about proto-Germanic?
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diplomaticus
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 Message 7 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:41am | IP Logged 
Just curiosity. Other than Latin or Ancient Greek, I never really hear of people studying
the antecedents to modern languages, really.
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AlexTG
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 Message 8 of 20
01 July 2015 at 2:42am | IP Logged 
My understanding is that the old Germanic languages (eg Old Saxon, Old Norse, Old English, Old High German) have a lot of mutual intelligibility between each
other. So you could study one of them and move outwards from there fairly easily.

I haven't studied any of them though and I'm interested to see if what I've said can be confirmed or corrected by someone with more knowledge.

EDIT: Re Old-Norse being the only one worth learning for its literature. Maybe the Modern-English translators have been playing a massive practical joke on us
by presenting their own original masterpieces as translations, but I think the more likely explanation is that Old-English is eminently worth learning :)

Edited by AlexTG on 01 July 2015 at 2:59am



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