Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic

Like most books, this collection of essays began with an idea. Germanists in the United States have long been aware of the shortcomings of the only Germanic handbook written in English which we could recommend to our students: Eduard Prokosch's 'Comparative Germanic Grammar' (1939). Even when it was published, this work was in some respects already out of date. It was essentially a product - and one of the finest - of the neogrammarian approach to language that had been developed toward the end of the 19th century; whereas by the 1930's the most active linguists in the United States were enthusiastically working out a new approach that soon came to be known as 'structuralism.' During the following decades this structural approach was applied increasingly to Germanic, and many of the pioneering articles were written by American scholars. Yet this new view, building upon the work of the Neogrammarians and attempting to advance beyond it, was not easily accessible to our students, since it was presented in a scattering of articles published in a host of different journals. We noted above that, when Prokosch's 'Comparative Germanic Grammar' was published in 1939, it was already partly out of date: it offered a neogrammarian approach to Proto-Germanic at a time when structuralism was coming to dominate the field. Perhaps, by the time our present volume is published, it will also be partly out of date: it will offer by and large a structural approach to Proto-Germanic at a time when transformational-generative grammar is coming to dominate the field. For this we do not apologize. Any writer who tries to summarize a generation of scholarship must inevitably appear as a kind of epigone.