Para-Germanic
Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of English, German, Dutch, the Nordic languages and Gothic, spoken some two and a half thousand years ago and never written down. Linguists rebuild it from its daughters, and they disagree on details. Para-Germanic is a version you can speak: one reconstruction, with every open question answered by one stated choice that is kept everywhere. That makes it a para-language, a variety that could have been spoken alongside the real one, not a record of it. It runs entirely in your browser.
How to read it
Para-Germanic writes reconstructed Proto-Germanic with plain letters only: no thorn, no macrons, no hooks under vowels. Every sound has its own spelling and every spelling one sound.
| Sound | Written |
|---|---|
| long vowels | doubled: aa ee ii oo uu |
| overlong o, an o held longer still | ou |
| nasal vowels, said through the nose (as in French bon) | the vowel + hn at the end of a word: bookuhn, geboohn |
| θ, as in "thin" | th |
| j, as in "yes" | y |
| kw | q, as Gothic writes it |
| hw, a breathy w | hw |
| a buzzing s | z |
Between vowels b d g are soft, said with the lips or tongue not quite closed (like Spanish haba, nada, lago).
At the start of a word, after m or n and when doubled they are hard. The stress always falls on the first syllable, so no accent is written.
It borrows only what Proto-Germanic really borrowed: wine, the paved road and the cat came from Latin along the frontier. Modern words are built from old ones instead:
| telephone | ferrastebnoo | "far-voice" |
| car | selbawagnaz | "self-wagon" |
| school | liznahuusa | "learning-house" |
The verb comes last and there are no articles. The verb ending says who acts. There is no future tense: the present covers it. The preterite covers "did", "has done" and "was doing", and the optative says "should, may, would". There are four cases. An adjective has two sets of endings: strong when it stands alone, weak after a demonstrative ("that old man").
Every choice between rival reconstructions is written down, with the main alternative, on the positions page.