Subtheme 3. First Germanic Attestations

A singular bronze helmet labeled "Negau B," dating to the last few centuries BC, bears an inscription written in the Etruscan alphabet: harikastiteiva. If, as many scholars believe, the first element stands for the name Harigastiz, this inscription would constitute the oldest attestation of a language that is identifiably Germanic. As such, it would further make a strong case for being a surviving example of Proto-Germanic. The Harigastiz element clearly shows that the inscription postdates Grimm's Law (PIE *k > *h) and other common Germanic changes (PIE *o > *a), but the second element teiva would seem to have it predate another development that occurred during the Proto-Germanic period (PIE *ei > *ī). All Germanic languages attested later reflect this change, making the harikastiteiva inscription uniquely primitive in the history of Germanic languages.

Traces of a Germanic tongue are next detected in certain toponyms and personal names recorded in Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico (1st century BC); but it is uncertain whether his description of the milk-and-meat eating Germani refers to an actual Germanic ethnicity, or to some Celtic tribe -- potentially making "German" a misnomer of ancient date. In any case the Roman author Tacitus likewise gives the name "Germans" to the subject of his ethnographic treatise Germania (ca. AD 98), which continues to shape our conceptions of the early Germanic peoples.

The Raetic (or Etruscan) alphabet that had been borrowed by early Germanic tribes was meanwhile morphing into a distinctly Germanic script. New letters were added to better reflect the Germanic sound system, while the alphabet assumed an angular look as the natural outgrowth of writing on beech bark, an early Germanic practice. Such were the origins of runic writing; whatever was beech-written has vanished along with the beech, but writings on stone, bone and ore have survived from the 2nd century AD, comprising the earliest records of Germanic sentences. As for the "language" of early runic, we may more freely characterize it as a linguistic continuum of the diverse samples that survive. This early runic is considered extremely archaic in light of traits such as verb-final word order; however, effects of linguistic drift from Proto-Germanic are evident even in the first of these records. Given that these inscriptions are essentially limited to Scandinavia, where use of runes thrived in later ages and persisted longest, scholars long assumed that the language reflected in them was solely ancestral to Scandinavian languages. In recent decades a revisionary consensus has emerged that early runic could equally have been ancestral to languages such as English, Dutch, and German; the language is now therefore termed Northwest Germanic, as the plausible common ancestor of the North Germanic and West Germanic languages respectively (see below).