ABSTRACT
The history of the German language begins, strictly speaking, with the appearance of the first written documents in the eighth century a.d. But German does not exist in isolation; it has close connections with other languages. In particular it shares with most European languages and some Asiatic ones a common origin in a language usually known among German scholars as Indo-Germanic and outside Germany as Indo-European. This ancient prehistoric language is, of course, entirely undocumented, but by comparing the oldest extant forms of its more important descendants nineteenth-century scholars were able to reconstruct some of its essential features.
