Lecture 4 – Germanic languages and their peculiarities

1. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages.

2. Old Germanic languages and their development into Modern Germanic languages and their spread.

3. Peculiarities of Germanic languages.

1. When there are no documents of language to be traced, the pre-written history of any language is studied by methods of comparative linguistics. It is 200 years old. It all started with a publication of an article by Franz Bopp (1816). The article was about the so-called Indo-European (I-E) language. It is now well-supported with evidence from many languages that there was a language spoken by people in pre-historic times. It was given a name Proto-Indo-European (P-I-E). The time can hardly be accurately dated. It is dated far back 10000 B.C. – 4000 B.C. P-I-E developed in different ways in the various parts of the world to each its speakers traveled. At the beginning of historical times languages that derived from it were spoken from Europe in the west to India in the east. P-I-E was the ancestor language of most of the Europe languages and many of those in South Asia.

Historically, all the Germanic languages originated from one ancestor language. It is called Proto-Germanic (P-G). It developed from P-I-E. Indo-European tribes came to Europe in 3000-2500 B.C. (Northern part of Europe). Before that time the coasts of the Baltic and the North Seas were inhabited by a different group. I-E newcomers mixed with this group and formed the tribes that later became known as Germanic tribes.

At about first millennium B.C. the Germanic tribes separated from other west I-E tribes and P-G became a separate language between the 15^th – 10^th centuries B.C. P-G was distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, stress patterns and vocabulary. Southern Scandinavia including Jutland Peninsula is the probable homeland of P-G. It was only a spoken language. The Proto-Germanic Language has never been recorded in written form. In the 19^th c. it was reconstructed by means of comparative linguistics. The Germans didn’t lose touch with other I-E languages. They migrated and these migrations caused new contacts and it was reflected in the speech.

2. Later, when some tribes migrated to Scandinavian Peninsula and some returned to the mainland, the P-G language split into tree branches: East (those who returned and settled in the east), North (those who moved northwards, to the Scandinavian Peninsula, and stayed there); and West (those who never left the mainland).

The following table shows the classification of old and modern Germanic languages.

	East Germanic	North Germanic	West Germanic
Old Germanic languages (with dates of the earliest records)	Gothic (4^th c.) Vandalic Burgundian	Old Norse or Old Scandinavian (2^nd – 3^rd c.) Old Icelandic (12^th c.) Old Norwegian (13^th c.) Old Danish (13^th c.) Old Swedish (13^th c.)	Anglian, Frisian, Jutish, Saxon, Franconian, High German Old English (7^th c.) Old Saxon (9^th c.) Old High German (8^th c.) Old Dutch (12^th c.)
Modern Germanic languages	No living languages	Icelandic Norwegian Danish Swedish Faroese	English German Netherlandish Afrikaans Yiddish Frisian

Spread of Germanic languages:

- Icelandic (spoken in Iceland by 250 thou. people)

- Norwegian (spoken in Norway by 5 mill. people)

- Danish (spoken in Denmark by 5 mill. people)

- Swedish (spoken in Sweden and Finland by 9 mill. people)

- Faroese (spoken in the Faroe Islands (north-east Atlantic) by 40 thou. people)

- English (spoken by 300 mill. people as a mother tongue + millions speak it as a second language in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the South African Republic, and many other former British colonies)

- German (spoken by 100 mill. people in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Lichtenstein)

- Dutch/Netherlandish (spoken by 20 mill. people in the Netherlands and some parts of Belgium)

- Afrikaans (spoken by 3 mill. people in the South African Republic, combines English, Dutch and African elements)

- Yiddish (spoken by Jews in different countries in Europe and America)

- Frisian (spoken by 400 thou. people in some parts of the Netherlands and Germany and some islands in the North Sea)

3. All the Germanic languages of the past and present have common linguistic features; some of these features are shared by other groups in the IE family, others are specifically Germanic.

- Word Stress

It is known that in ancient IE language there existed two ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, which means that it could fall on any syllable of the word. Both these properties of the word accent were changed in PG language. There used force and expiratory stress. In Late PG language the stress was fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix; the other syllables – suffixes and endings – were unstressed.

Word Stress/Accent

Indo-European (Non-Germanic)	Proto-Germanic
1. free stress (movable, i.e. can appear in any part of a word (root, prefix, suffix);	1. fixed stress (can’t move either in form- or word-building and is usually placed on root or prefix);
2. pitch stress (musical)	2. dynamic stress (force, breath stress)

Examples:

Русский	German	English
б`елый белизн`а белов`атый бел`ить	`Liebe `lieben `lieberhaft ge`liebt	`white `whiteness `whitish `whitewash

As a result of the fact that the stress was fixed on the root and the syllables following the root were always unstressed and weak, many Germanic languages began to lose suffixes and grammatical endings and became analytical language.

- Changes in the system of consonants in the Germanic languages

The changes of consonants in PG language were first formulated in terms of a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19^th c. and are often called Grimm’s Law. It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic consonant shift.

Grimm’s Law had three acts:

1) IE aspirated voice stops [bh], [dh], [gh] became PG voiced stops [b], [d], [g] without aspiration.

2) IE voiced stops [b], [d], [g] became Germanic voiceless stops [p], [t], [k]

3) IE voiceless stops [p], [t], [k] became Germanic voiceless fricatives [f], [th], [x]

№	Consonant Correspondences	Examples
Old	Modern
IE	PG	Non-Ger (Latin)	Ger (OE)	Non-Ger (Italian, рус.)	German (Engl, Ger)
	[bh,dh,gh] à aspirated voiced stops	[b, d, g] non-aspirated voiced stops	bh rāta ru dh ira h ostis	b rōþor rēa d g iest	б рат - г ость	b rother, B ruder re d g uest, G ast
	[b, d, g] à voiced stops	[p, t, k] voiceless stops/plosives	la b are d ecem g enu	p ōl t īen c nēo	б олото d ieci, д есять g inocchio	p ool, P fuhl t en k nee, K nie
	[p, t, k] à voiceless stops/plosives	[f, q, h] voiceless fricatives	p edis t res c ordis	f ōt þ rēo h eort	p iedi t re, т ри c uore	f oot, F uß th ree h eart, H erz

Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19^th c. by a Danish scholar, Carl Verner. They are known as Verner’s Law. He explained the consonant correspondences as a gradual historical process.

According to Verner’s Law all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f, th, x] and also [s] became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless. The sound ‘z’: z→r. This process is known as Rhotacism.

Consonant Correspondences	Latin	OE	ModE
1. [p, t, k] à voiceless stops/plosives	[f, q, h] à voiceless fricatives	[v, ð/d, g] voiced fricatives	se p tem	seo f en	se v en
pa t er	f æ đ er	fa th er
so c rus	swai h o (Gothic)	Schwa g er (Germ)
2. Rhotacism	au s is (Lithuanian)	Au s o (Gothic)	ea r, Oh r (Germ)
[s] à	[z] à	[r]

- Changes in the system of vowels in the Germanic languages

Proto-Germanic Vowel System:

Short Vowels	i	e	a	o	u
Long Vowels	i:	e:	a:	o:	u:

In all IE languages there is a system of vowel change which is known as Ablaut. The term is introduced by J. Grimm. “ Ab ” means reducing, “ laut ” – sound. Ablaut can also be called vowel gradation. This phenomenon consisted in change of vowels mostly in the root.

There are two types of Ablaut: quantitative and qualitative.

The qualitative Ablaut is the alteration of different vowels, mainly [e]/[a], [e]/[o].

Examples: Old Icelandic: bera (to give birth) – barn (baby); Old High German: stelan (to steal) – stal (stole); Latin tego (to cover, to cloth) – toga (clothes).

Quantitative Ablaut means the change in length of qualitatively one and the same vowel: normal, lengthened and reduced. A short [e] could be replaced by a long [e:], a short [o] could be replaced by a long [o:], or it could be omitted.

Another phenomenon common for all Germanic languages was so-called Umlaut, or mutation. The most common mutation was under the influence of the sounds [i] and [j].

- Grammar characteristics common to the Germanic languages

PG languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words.

The Germanic nouns had a well-developed case system with four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) and two number forms (singular and plural). They also had a category of gender (feminine, masculine and neuter).

The Germanic verbs are divided into two groups: strong and weak verbs, depending on the way they formed their past tens form.

The past tense of strong verbs was formed with the help of Ablaut, qualitative or quantitative. Weak verbs expressed past tense with the help of suffix -d/-t. There was also a small group of verbs forming their forms from different roots (to be).

	Strong Verbs (irregular)	Weak Verbs (regular)
form-building	vowel interchange + gram. ending	suffix -d/-t
E.g.	OE	r ei san – r ai s – r i sum – r i sans	macian – maco d e - maco d
	cepan – cep t e - cep t
ModE	r i se – r o se - r i sen	make – ma d e – ma d e
	keep – kep t – kep t

Glossary:

To derive – [dɪ'raɪv] – получать, происходить

To split – [splɪt] – раскалываться, делиться на части

Glossary of Terms:

Analytical language – those languages, in which grammatical relations between words in a sentence are expressed by auxiliary words, word order, and intonation – аналитические языки

Expiratory stress — экспираторное, силовое, динамическое ударение

Inflection – [ɪn'flekʃ(ə)n] – окончание, флексия (изменяемая часть слова)

Pitch stress – тоновое, мелодическое ударение

Syllable – ['sɪləbl] – слог

Word stress – ударение в слове (syn. word accentuation – [əkˌsenʧu'eɪʃ(ə)n])

Questions for discussion:

1. What is Proto-Indo-European language?

2. What is the difference between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages?

3. When did Indo-European tribes come to Europe?

4. When did Proto-Germanic language become a separate language?

5. What is a probable homeland of Proto-Germanic language?

6. Did Proto-Germanic language have a written form?

7. What branch of linguistic helped to reconstruct Proto-Germanic language?

8. Why did Proto-Germanic language split into the parts?

9. What are the most spoken Germanic languages?

10. Word stress in Proto-Germanic languages.

11. Changes in system of consonants in the Germanic languages.

12. Changes in system of vowels in the Germanic languages.

13. Grammar characteristics of Germanic nouns.

14. Grammar characteristic of Germanic verbs.

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