On defining stages in Prehistoric Germanic

Abstract

In recent years there have been a number of interesting attempts to redefine the prehistoric stages of Germanic. The need for such a redefinition has long been evident, as van Coetsem, Makaev, and Lehmann have all pointed out. One of the reasons for this need is undoubtedly to be found in the prevailing view of a protolanguage as an entity which is ‘timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic’, and therefore unreal. Pulgram, for example, considers ‘Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European’ (in contrast to ‘Real Proto-Indo-European’) to be a ‘timeless structure which is diachronically heterogeneous, though synchronically uniform’ (425). This characterization of our reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European may be accurate, but it is questionable whether all protolanguages are equally ‘timeless’, at least in the relative sense. The younger protolanguages which we can reconstruct within the Indo-European family, such as Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance, cannot be placed in an identical frame of reference with Proto-Indo-European. The latter is re constructible only on the basis of internal evidence. The younger protolanguages, however, have the added advantage of disposing over comparative evidence from related languages outside their limited groups to provide them with additional depth. This is perhaps what Bloomfield had in mind when he made an exception of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance to his general rule that the comparative method ‘cannot claim to picture the historical process’ (318).

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