The earliest beginnings of the Slavs are lost in the darkness of prehistory. We can only guess when they separated from the common trunk of the Indo-European peoples, and when, maybe thousands of years later, they formed a separate large group, one of three - and together with the Romance and Germanic peoples they created the civilizational and geopolitical Europe in which we live today. Like others, they did not have their own name for a long time; as others were later named by their closest neighbors, and only after a few centuries by themselves. The book covers the period from the second century to the sixth century of the new era. At that time, Slavs appear on the pages of history as already formed, active and separate European people. This requires presentation and analysis of processes and events that take place at that time. It is a period that is still poorly known, but very controversial.

This book is a comprehensive study of the Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic. It includes an investigation of all Germanic words that were borrowed into Proto-Slavic until its disintegration in the early ninth century. Research into the phonology, morphology and semantics of the loanwords serves as the basis of an investigation into the Germanic donor languages of the individual loanwords. The loanwords can be shown to be mainly of Gothic, High German and Low German origin. One of the aims of the present study is to clarify the accentuation of Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic and to explain how they were adapted to the Proto-Slavic accentual system. This volume is of special interest to scholars and students of Slavic and Germanic historical linguistics, contact linguistics and Slavic accentology. Saskia Pronk-Tiethoff’s research focuses on Slavic historical linguistics and language contact between Slavic and Germanic. She studied Slavic languages and cultures and Comparative Indo-European linguistics at Leiden University, where she also obtained her doctoral degree. She currently lives in Zagreb, where she contributed to the Croatian-Dutch dictionary (Institute for Croatian Language and Linguistics), and now contributes to the Croatian Church Slavic dictionary (Old Church Slavonic Institute).