The phonetic and morphological systems of the ancient Germanic languages are characterized by a number of common features, which allows us to conclude that all absolutely ancient Germanic languages arose from one so-called proto-language - the common Germanic language. As for the phonetic system of the ancient Germanic languages, here historians and linguists distinguish four main phenomena:- fixing the stress on the first syllable;- the first movement of consonants or Grimm's law;- Verner's law;- prolapse of the posterior-slit [c] in front of the posterior-lingual slit [x].In the most ancient era in Indo-European languages the stress was free, that is, it fell on any syllable in a word. After fixing the stress on the first syllable, all final syllables (grammatical endings) were in an unstressed position. This contributed to their falling away in many Germanic languages, including English
