English

Alternative forms

• Urgermanic
• Urgermanish

Proper noun

Ur-Germanic

1. (linguistics) Hypothetical prehistoric ancestor language of all Germanic languages, including English; Proto-Germanic.
   • 1896, Frank Hamilton Fowler, The negatives of the Indo-European languages:

     If now these prefixes are to be connected, as it seems they should be, they point to an urgermanic vowel sound differing but little, if any, in degree of openness from urgermanic e.

   • 1917, University of North Carolina (1793-1962). Philological Club, Studies in philology:

     In Germanic the distinction between perfectives and imperfectives is a survival of what was perhaps a vital distinction in Ur-germanic.

   • 1939, Niels Bøgholm, English speech from an historical point of view:

     OE. changes unstressed 'i' into 'e' and drops '-n' in Uroe.; the oblique cases in OE. are: micile throughout, the Urgermanic forms were: acc. [...]

   • 1941, Douglas Chrétien, Indo-European final-*s in Germanic:

     We are immediately confronted with a compound triple disjunction: 1) -*s and -*z fell together in Ur-Germanic as nondistinctive variants of a single phoneme ; or 2) they fell together in Ur-Germanic as a single sound [...]

   • 2005, Heath Pearson, Origins of Law and Economics:

     This practice of divided sovereignty over land, which survived into the twentieth century as the Almen of Upper Germany, seemed also to Biicher to respond to “an Ur-Germanic instinct,” [...]

   • 2010, John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature:

     They stood in relation to these various tribes as an Ur-Germanic people of remarkable size and prowess.

   • 2011, Alon Confino, Paul Betts, Dirk Schumann, Between Mass Death and Individual Loss:

     Before the early 1930s, pamphlets and journals hardly ever celebrated incineration as an ur-Germanic tradition.

Synonyms

• Common Germanic
• Germanic
• Proto-Germanic

See also

• The category of Proto-Germanic on Wiktionary

Translations