English as a Germanic Language

Indo-European Family of languages

LECTURE 1.

Outline

1. Theoretical background
2. Branches of IE family
3. Germanic group, its branches
4. Features of early Germanic society (classification of tribes, social background, alphabets)
5. PG Morphology
6. PG Phonology:

6a. peculiarities of stress

6b. system of consonants (1. Consonant Shifts, 2. Gemination, 3. Rhotacism)

6c. system of vowels (1. Germanic Vowel Shift, 2. Ablaut, 3. Umlaut).

I. Theoretical background

The present theoretical course deals with the history of English from the settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes in the 5^th century A.D. down to the present day.

What is the most characteristic feature of any language? The basic feature of a language is its constant change, which may occur at any period of its development. These changes are very slow, but in some areas, and under some circumstances the changes of a language structure may be faster, though they are not catastrophic.

Why does a language change? What are the reasons for linguistic change? Linguists have singled out such principle factors for language change as: the principle of least effort, imperfect language learning, process of analogy, process of borrowing, and the tendency to preserve symmetry in the language system.

Thus, the subject matter of the history of English is the account of all the changes in the structure of the language in a wider context of historical, political, and social events over the last 15 hundred years.

II. Branches of IE family

In order to better understand the evolution of English we must first see what position it occupies within the family of related languages. In fact, English belongs to a very extensive language family with many branches. This family includes most of the languages of Europe and India, so it is called Indo-European.

Branches of IE:

1. Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, which includes Indian and Iranian. (Indic(Indian) includes a number of l-ges spoken in India. The most ancient is Sanskrit. The modern l-ges are Hindi (official l-ge of India), Urdu (spoken in Pakistan), Romany is related to them (the l-ge of Gypsies)).

2. Greek (from the 7^th c. B.C.) includes various ancient Greek dialects, and from one of these – Attic – Modern Greek is descended.

3. Italic: ancient dialects of Italy, including Latin (3 c. B.C.). Includes: Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, Rumanian, dialects of Provencal, Catalan, Sardinian< Romance dialects of Switzerland

4. Celtic (3 groups): Gaulish, Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish), and Gaelic (Irish, Scotch, Manx).

5. Baltic descends from Old Prussian. The modern l-ges are Lettish and Lithuanian.

6. Slavonic (Slavic) are divided geographically. The southern: Macedonian, Slovene, Serbian, Croatian; the western: Polish, Check, Slovakian, Wendish; the eastern: Ukrainian, Russian, Belorussian.

7. Germanic (old 3 branches).

8. Albanian.

9. Armenian descends from Old Armenian, and divides into eastern and western branches.

10. Tocharian.

11. Anatolian (Hittite).

Altogether, a thousand million people speak an IE language as their mother tongue, and of these over 3 hundred million speak a Germanic language.

The Indo-European family of languages has developed out of some single language, which must have been spoken thousands of years ago by a comparatively small group of people in a relatively restricted area. This original language was called Proto-Indo-European, and people who spoke that language we call (Proto-)-Indo-Europeans. The questions here are: where did they live? How did they spread all over the world? (самост. опрацювання).

III. Germanic group, its branches

The Germanic branch of languages includes English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and some more which descended from one parent language - a dialect of IE, which we call Proto-Germanic. Round about the Christian era the speakers of PG formed a homogeneous cultural and linguistic group, living in the north of Europe. There is some information about these people thanks to Roman authors, who described their society, and called them Germani.

Historical linguistics distinguishes Modern and Old classification of Germanic languages. The Old one presupposes 3 branches: North, West, and East (where Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian belonged). Today the East languages are not spoken (they are dead l-ges), so the Modern classification includes 2 branches: West: English, German, Flemish, Frisian, Yiddish, Africaans, Dutch.

North: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese, Gutnish.

IV. Features of early Germanic society

Tacitus described the Germans as a tribal society living in the scattered settlements in the woody and marshy land of the North-West Europe. They grew grain crops, but their agriculture was not advanced. They changed their ploughlands yearly, and distributed the land in order of rank.

The family played a big part in their social organization, and the more relatives a man had the greater was his influences in his old age.

They had kings chosen for their birth, and chiefs chosen for their valour. But in major affairs the whole community consulted together.

The Germans were the most famous warriors in those times. They disliked peace, because there was no fame and booty in it.

They worshipped Mercury (Woden), and sacrified animals to Hercules and Mars (Thor and Tiw).

Before 300 B.C. they had been confined between Elbe and Oder, but later they began to expand in all directions, perhaps, because of the overpopulation and the poverty of natural resources.

V. Proto-Germanic Morphology

PIE was a highly inflected language, that is it made great use of endings. Not much of IE system of inflections is left in ModE, which prefers other grammatical devices like prepositions and word order. If we compare PG and Latin, for example, we’ll see, that Latin inherited PIE system of gase inflections and a similar system was inherited by PG (5 cases: Nom., Gen., Dat., Acc., Instr.).

Also in PG there were some declensions of nouns. All nouns had grammatical gender, that is every noun had to be either masculine, or feminine, or neuter. This grammatical gender had no necessary connection with sex or with animacy, which means that the names of inanimate objects could be masculine or feminine, and the names of sexed creatures could be neuter.

Similar considerations apply to adjectives. In PG they developed 2 declensions, which has not survived in ModE, but can be found in some other Germanic languages (for ex. in Swedish the weak form is used after the definite article, or after words like this, that, my, your, in other cases the strong adjective is used. In OE gōd mann – strong, sē gōda mann – weak).

PG had only two tense forms of the verb – present and past, plus different endings for different persons and numbers.

From PIE it inherited a set of verbs which showed change of tense by the change of the root-vowel (in ModE sing-sang-sung). These were Strong Verbs. The gradation of vowels for grammatical purpose was highly characteristic of the IE languages. Accordingly, in PG there was a large number of strong verbs. But, alongside, PG developed a new type, called Weak Verbs.

VI. Proto-Germanic Phonology

6a. The accent on a syllable depended partly on stress (acoustic loudness), partly on intonation (musical pitch), but some languages relied more on stress than on intonation.

PIE probably made great use of free (i.e. could fall either on the root syllable, or on the suffix, or on the inflexion) accent, but in PG the stress accent starts to become predominant. At the same time, there was a strong tendency in PG to adopt a uniform position for the stress on a word by putting it on the 1^st syllable, except verbs (at the time when the stress became fixed a syntactic combination of prepositional adverb with the verb was not yet a single word, so such combination developed into compound words with the second element stressed). The role of the dynamic stress grew. It meant that in PG there existed more stressed and less stressed syllables.

The tendency to stabilize the accent on the first syllable together with the adoption of a stress type of accent had profound consequences: it all led to a weakening and loss of unstressed syllables, especially at the end of the word. This trend continued in Germanic languages throughout their history (ex. OE beran > ME bere, ber > ModE bear).

6b. 1. The phoneme system was reconstructed by some 19^th century scholars, who claimed that in PIE there was a rich amount of stop consonants. In PG this system underwent great changes. The most important series of changes is called “the 1^st consonant shift” or “Grimm’s law ” (after Jacob Grimm, 19^th cent. philologist).

The consonant shift is meant by the complex of phonetic processes, the essence of which is the change of the type of articulation of IE voiced stops (with the simultaneous retaining of the place of articulation). The shift is considered to have started some centuries B.C and finished (approx.) in the 5^th-6^th cent. A.D.

Modern Germanic linguistics states that the 1^st Consonant Shift includes several changes within a definite group of consonants.

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