Its a reconstructed language. This means is only theoretical. And that means you need to read historical linguistics and etymologies. Its not like a modern language spoken by real people. But if you can handle reading very technical books about Proto Germanic, its a lot of fun :D
"[Proto-Germanic] was spoken between 2000 BC and the first few centuries of the first millenium (sic) AD." I find it very odd that a language would have existed, essentially unchanged, for 2400 years. Are you sure you have that date range correct? I mean, not even modern English, with the advantages of print and audio recording, is that stable.
Proto-Germanic wasn't unchanged during that whole period. The term "Proto-Germanic" merely refers to a theoretical reconstruction used to understand sound changes. The actual language would have been different as it changed from 2000 BC to its split up in the first centuries of the first millenium. In the beginning it would have been more like a dialect of Proto Indo European and it would have slowly changed into a distinct language.
@@stevevagabond - When Anglo-Saxon morphed into Old English is a matter of debate. The switch from Old English to Middle English seems to have taken place in barely a generation, as the English-speaking natives created a creole language to communicate with their new French-speaking overlords. Over the next three centuries, Middle English dropped most of its cases and inflections, heavily adopted the use of auxiliary verbs (a feature of Norman), and underwent a massive shift in how vowels are pronounced, eventually settling to Modern English. And even there, the early Modern English used by Shakespeare has significant differences in grammar and vocabulary that it has to be translated into contemporary Modern English for today's audience to understand. So no, you could not say that English has been spoken since 800 AD. A modern speaker would be barely able to understand English as it was spoken 450 years ago, much less English that was spoken 1200 years ago.
@@TechBearSeattle I understand that English changed a lot. But we still place all those different periods under "English". For Proto Germanic, there was the late PIE where it started being more of a dialect of PIE, then the early Proto Germanic era, late Proto Germanic which finally came to an end with the rise of the independent Germanic languages. My time range might be a bit wide I admit, but important changes and developments relevant to Germanic started in the second millenium BC and the last common ancestor of Germanic languages can be said to have been the Proto Germanic of early first millenium AD. This is why I chose the time range. I didn't mean to imply the language never changed
'Proto-Germanic' has two distinct uses, though these are often confused even in the scholarly literature. One is to refer to a long phase of development, the other to the language directly reconstructible from the attested Germanic languages. Only the latter can actually be reconstructed, and that's what this video is trying clearly trying to show. Reconstructed Proto-Germanic is hard to date, but probably was something in the vicinity of 500-200 BC. The dates for the 'phase' of Proto-Germanic are more arbitrary, but definitely would _not_ extend into the first centuries AD -- by this point, we already have actual records of North Germanic (2nd century), and Gothic is known from translations made in the 4th century. Proto-Germanic had clearly broken up into subbranches (first East vs. Northwest, then Northwest into North and West) already at least by the last couple of centuries BC. There is no change from 'Anglo-Saxon' to 'Old English' -- these are two terms for the same thing. The former is obsolete, having been mostly abandoned as a linguistic term about a century ago (though lingering on in the titles of some classic books). The switch to 'Middle English' was also no sudden thing -- if you actually look at texts from, say, the twelfth century (e.g. Laȝamon's Brut, the Ormulum), you'll find both very little in terms of French influence, and a picture of linguistic change that does not match the myth of rapid transformation. The East Midlands Ormulum is, to be sure, morphologically 'simpler' than classical Old English, but it's also the first reasonable example of East Midlands English we've got, so the differences are probably more dialectal than chronological (and insofar as contact played a role, Norse influence, not French, is clearly vastly more significant). In the West Midlands, Laȝamon, writing around 1200, still inflects the definite article for case, number, and gender, and in general shows a kind of language that is entirely expected in terms of how much (or little) it's changed. The French influence, which again probably had virtually no impact on the morphology, is there but fairly light in the 13th century. It's only in the 14th century that French loans really come flooding in, and begin to be attested in really significant numbers. This was happening not under the influence of 'French-speaking overlords', but in a context of widespread bilingualism among the moderately educated. Ultimately a legacy of the Normans, but only after a couple of centuries of having Anglo-Norman become entrenched and changed.
