Indo-European Family Tree
(Fennel: 22)

Major Changes

Indo-European to Germanic

1. Major lexical changes

2. Tense-aspect system reduced to present and preterite.

3. Germanic developed a dental suffix for the preterite producing a bifurcated system of strong and weak verbs.

4. Germanic had two adjectival conjugations, weak (used to modify definite nouns when preceded by a determiner) and strong (used elsewhere).

5. Case simplified from eight cases to six: IE ablative, locative, and dative merged into dative.

6. Accent became rule-governed: initial except on verb prefixes. Accent shifted from pitch-accent to stress.

7. IE vowels changed, losing one short vowel.

8. Six IE diphthongs became three Germanic diphthongs: The loss of the short vowel resulted in the loss of two diphthongs and IE ei > i in Germanic.

9. IE obstruents restructured in the First Sound Shift/Grimm’s Law.

Except when preceded by s, voiceless stops become voiceless fricatives

Unaspirated voiced stops become voiceless stops

Aspirated voiced stops became voiced fricatives (and later in initial position unaspirated voiced stops)

10. IE stops restructured again in Germanic as accounted for in Verners law.

Voiceless fricatives become voiced unless they were initial, adjacent to a voiceless sound or had IE accent on the immediately preceding syllable

This occurred after the FSF but before the accent shift. The accent shift followed and then obscured blocking environment

Germanic to West Germanic

1. The nominative singular ending -az disappears in West Germanic.

2. The z that resulted from Verner’s Law rhotacized to r in West and North Germanic.

3. West and North Germanic developed vowel alternations called mutation.

4. The ð that resulted from Verner’s Law became d in West Germanic.