290 GERMANIC LANGUAGES 



struction began with the vocabulary. For it is obvious that the 

 vocabulary of the Gothic language, consisting, as it does, almost 

 exclusively of words contained in our fragments of the translation of 

 the Gothic Bible, must contain more gaps than the Gothic grammar, 

 and cannot therefore be regarded as representative of the Early 

 Germanic period. In the third edition of Fick's Comparative Diction- 

 ary (in 1874), the Germanic vocabulary appeared in enlarged form as 

 a separate volume. The author this time availed himself of the assist- 

 ance of Adalbert Bezzenberger, who in an appendix to the volume 

 also contributed a discussion of some phonetic problems of the 

 "Germanische Grundsprache." Many other contributions towards 

 restoring this "Grundsprache" have since followed, of which it may 

 suffice to mention here the systematic works by Kluge (in Paul's 

 Grundriss), 1 Noreen, 2 Streitberg, 3 and Bethge (in Dieter's Laut-und 

 Formenlehre) .* 



While Jakob Grimm and his immediate successors were inclined to 

 judge the Early Germanic period almost exclusively by the standard 

 of Gothic, there has been during the last thirty years an increasing 

 tendency to discredit in this respect the reliability of Gothic and to 

 lay stress on alleged earlier features preserved in Old Norse, Anglo- 

 Saxon, Old High German, and other Old Germanic dialects. No 

 doubt formerly the authority of the Gothic language was in some 

 respects overrated. An obvious instance of this kind is found, 

 for example, in the phonetic changes which go under the name of 

 " Verner's Law." For it has been proved by Verner 5 that the so- 

 called " grammatical change " between spirant and media was found 

 in the Germanic parent speech and has been preserved in most of the 

 older Germanic dialects, while in Gothic its traces have been, at least 

 in the verb-system, almost entirely obliterated. In other cases, how- 

 ever, the testimony of the Gothic language has been, in my opinion, 

 rejected without sufficient reason. I am referring especially to two 

 phenomena; first, the alleged Early Germanic vowels e and o, in 

 whose place we find in Gothic (except before r and h) the vowels i and 

 u ; secondly, the instances in which Old Norse and the West Germanic 

 languages are supposed to have preserved final vowels which are not 

 found in Gothic. 



1 Vorgeschichte der altgermanischen Diakkte, von Friedrich Kluge. Sonderabdr. 

 aus der 2. Aufl. von Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie. Strassburg, 

 1897. The first edition had been published in 1889. 



J Utkast till Foreldsningar i Urgermansk Judldra, av Adolf Noreen. Upsala, 

 1890. A German translation (with additional material), entitled Abriss der 

 Urgermanischen Lautlehre, has appeared, Strassburg, 1894. 



* Urgermanische Grammatik, von W. Streitberg. Heidelberg, 1896. 



4 Laut- und Formenlehre der Altgermanischen Dialekte, herausgegeben von Ferd. 

 Dieter. Leipzig, 1900. (The first half volume, containing the phonology, was 

 issued in 1898.) 



' Zeitschr. f. vergl. Sprachf. vol. 23, p. 108 (reprinted in Karl Verner, Afhandlinger 

 og Breve, Copenhagen, 1903, p. 16). 



