Schleicher's pie fable rendered into Proto-Germanic
August Schleicher wrote a fable in the PIE language he had just reconstructed, which though it has been updated a few times by others still bears his name. Below is a rendering of this fable into Proto-Germanic:
Proto-Germanic
Awiz ehwaz-uh: awiz, hwesja wulno ne ist, spehet ehwanz, ainan krun wagan wegantun, ainan-uh mekon boran, ainan-uh gumonun ahu berontun. Awiz nu ehwamaz weuhet: hert agnutai meke witantei, ehwans akantun weran. Ehwaz weuhant: hludi, awi! kert aknutai uns wituntmaz: mannaz, foþiz, wulnon awjan hwurneuti sebi warman wistran. Awjan-uh wulno ne isti. þat hehluwaz awiz akran bukeþ.
English
The Sheep and the Horses: a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses”. The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool”. Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
Notes
Bloomfield, Leonard (1984). Language. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 298–299.
^ a b Comrie, Bernard (editor) (1987). The World's Major Languages. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 69–70. ISBN 0-19-506511-5.
^ Bell-Fialkoll (Editor), Andrew (2000). The Role of Migration in the History of the Eurasian Steppe: Sedentary Civilization v. "Barbarian" and Nomad. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 117. ISBN 0-312-21207-0. Note that the term "pre-Germanic" is equivocal, meaning, as here, either prior to the Indo-European ancestors or Indo-European but prior to Proto-Germanic.
^ a b c d e "Languages of the World: Germanic languages". The New Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago, IL, United States: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1993. ISBN 0-85229-571-5. This long-standing, well-known article on the languages can be found in almost any edition of Britannica.
^ Antonsen, Elmer H. (2002). Runes and Germanic Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 26–30. ISBN 3-11-017462-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=gvSi3JVNRFQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false. This presentation also summarizes Lehmann's view.
^ D.H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149–164.
^ Donald A. Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (Oxford: Oxford, 2006), 296.
^ This word gave: Old English pād, Old Saxon pēda, Old High German pfeit, Bavarian Pfoad, Gothic páida 'coat'.
^ Ibid, 297.
^ On eu and iu see Cercignani, Fausto, Indo-European eu in Germanic, in «Indogermanische Forschungen», 78, 1973, pp. 106-112.
^ McMahon, April M.S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. pp. 227. ISBN 0-521-44665-1.
^ Trask, Robert Lawrence (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 122. ISBN 1-57958-218-4.
Bennett, William Holmes (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Campbell, A. (1959). Old English Grammar. London: Oxford University Press.
Plotkin, Vulf (2008). The Evolution of Germanic Phonological Systems: Proto-Germanic, Gothic, West Germanic, and Scandinavian. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen.
Ramat, Anna Giacalone and Paolo Ramat (Eds.) (1998). The Indo-European Languages. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06449-X.
Ringe, Don (2008). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 0-19-955229-0.
Guus, Kroonen (Expected October 2010). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, 11. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 978-90-04-18340-7. http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=24855.
W.P. Lehmann & J. Slocum (eds.) A Grammar of Proto-Germanic (Online version)
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