In other parts of speech The term was originally applied to any pair of etymologically-related words that had different accent placement, including also Proto-Indo-European athematic nouns. The alternations in nouns were largely eliminated early on in Germanic, but a few cases exist of parallel forms being still preserved in different Germanic languages (such as English glass and Icelandic gler, an example of the s-z alternation). No attested language, old or modern, shows any alternation in noun paradigms, however. Notes References Linguistic morphology Language histories Indo-European linguistics Germanic languages German words and phrases History of the German language