ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I presented a family tree for the Germanic languages, indicating, however, that many problems attach to it. Below I repeat that tree, somewhat modified, as Figure 4. This particular tree has a long history, going back to 1860, when it was first proposed by the German linguist August Schleicher, and it is still found in many handbooks. Remarkably, it has enjoyed this longevity in the face of massive objections almost from the very beginning. The actual existence of a proto-language one could call “West Germanic” has always been doubtful, and the existence of troubling correspondences between, for example, the West Germanic languages and Old Norse on the one hand, and Old Norse and Gothic on the other, has called the initial tripartite split of Proto-Germanic into question. Furthermore, the implications of using any family-tree model (Stammbaum) at all have made some scholars seek a new way of representing the relationship.
