Lecture I

Theme: General information about the Germanic languages

List of principal questions:

1. The aim of the study of the subject
2. Inner and outer history of the language
3. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages
3.1. Phonetics
3.2. Grammar
3.3. Alphabet

Abbreviations for the names of the languages:

Gk - Greek OIcl - Old Icelandic
Goth - Gothic OSc - Old Scandinavian
Lat - Latin OSx - Old Saxon
OE - Old English Rus - Russian
OHG - Old High German Snsk - Sanskrit

It is well known that language, whether it is English, Russian, Karakalpak,

Uzbek or any other, is a historical phenomenon. As such it does not stay
unchanged for any considerable period of time, or for any time at all, but it
inconstantly changing throughout its history. The changes affect all the spheres of
the language: grammar and vocabulary, phonetics and spelling. The changes that
any language undergoes are gradual and very slow but pronounced enough if you
compare the stages of its development within a century or even half a century. You
can imagine that with the passage of time the difference between different stages of
the development of the language grows and you will easily deduce that if you
speak of such a language as English the history of which embraces over fifteen
centuries you will have to analyze and explain a great number of linguistic data
characterizing the language at different stages of its history.

1. The aim of the study of the subject

The aims set before a student of the history of the English language are as
follows:
1. to speak of the characteristics of the language at the earlier stages of its
development;
2. to trace the language from the Old English period up to modern times;
3. to explain the principal features in the development of modern language
historically.
To achieve those aims a student will have to know the theoretical basis of the
subject and to work with the text to apply the theoretical knowledge to the practical
analysis of English texts at different periods of the language development.
While speaking about the importance of theoretical courses we may quoting
Simeon Potter's words:
"We cannot know too much about the language we
 speak every day of our lives... knowledge is power. The
power of rightly chosen words is very great, whether
these words are intended to inform, to entertain or to
move."
Simeon Potter, Our language
Thus the main purpose of studying the history of the English language is to
account for the present-day stage of the language to enable a student of English to
read books and speak the language with understanding and due knowledge of the
intricate and complicates "mechanism" they use.
We said that the history of any language is an unbroken chain of changes
more or less rapid. Though the linguistic tradition is unbroken, it is impossible to
study the language of over 15 centuries long without subdividing it into smaller
periods. Thus the history of the English language is generally subdivided
conventionally into Old English (5th 11th century), Middle English (11th 15th
century) and New English (15th century until now).
2. Inner and outer history of the language
We are going to speak about the inner and the outer history of the English
language. The outer history of the language is the events in the life (history) of the
people speaking this language affecting the language, i.e. the history of the people
reflected in their language. The inner history .of the language is the description of
the changes in the language itself, its grammar, phonetics, vocabulary or spelling.
It is well known that the English language belongs to the Germanic
subdivision of the Indo-European family of languages. The direct and indirect
evidence that we have concerning old Germanic tribes and dialects is
approximately twenty centuries old. We know that at the beginning of AD
Germanic tribes occupied vast territories in western, central and northern Europe.
The tribes and the dialects they spoke at the time were generally very much
alike, but the degree of similarity varied. It is common to speak about:
The East Germanic group of dialects - mainly spoken in central Europe -
Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian;
North Germanic group of dialects - Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old
Swedish, Old Icelandic;
The West Germanic group of dialects - the dialects of Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Frisians and others, originally spoken in western Europe.
The first knowledge of these tribes comes from the Greek and Roman authors,
which, together with archeological data, allows to obtain information on the
structure of their society, habits, customs and languages.
The principal East Germanic language is Gothic. At the beginning of our era
the Goths lived on a territory from the Vistula to the shores of the Black Sea. The
knowledge of Gothic we have now is almost wholly due to a translation of the
Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by Ulfilas, a missionary who
christianized the Gothic tribes. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it
is the earliest record of a Germanic language we possess. For a time the Goths
played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy
and Spain.
 In these districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin, and even
elsewhere it seems not to have maintained a very tenacious existence. Gothic
survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the
sixteenth century.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark. Runic inscriptions
from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier
form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse.
From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. The
Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish
and Danish, and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Of the early
Scandinavian languages Old Icelandic is much the most important. Iceland was
colonized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and preserved a body of early
heroic literature unsurpassed among the Germanic peoples. Among the more
important monuments are the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that
probably date from the tenth or eleventh century, the Younger or Prose Edda
compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1178 - 1241), and about forty sagas, or prose epics,
in which the lives and exploits of various traditional figures are related.
West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English
belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation
of a Second (or High German) Sound - Shift analogous to that described below as
Grimm's Law. This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed
into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of
the Germanic area, but did not take place in the lowlands to the north. Accordingly
in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Low
Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and
constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup. Old Saxon has become the essential
constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with
some mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch in
Holland and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian survives in the Dutch
province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, in the islands along the coast,
etc. High German comprises a number of dialects and is divided chronologically
into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100 - 1500), and
Modern High German (since 1500). High German, especially as spoken in the
midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther's
translation of the Bible into it (1522—1532), and since the sixteenth century has
gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.
3. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages
The barbarian tribes - Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Frisians, Teutons,
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Scandinavians - lived on the fringes of the Roman
Empire. All these spoke Germanic languages, which had distinctive characteristics
of structure and pronunciation which are reflected in its descendants.
3.1. Phonetics
One of the most important common features of all Germanic languages is its
strong dynamic stress falling on the first root syllable. The fixed stress emphasised
the syllable bearing the most important semantic element and to a certain degree
later contributed to the reduction of unstressed syllables, changing the grammatical
system of the languages.
The most important feature of the system of Germanic vowels is the so-called
Ablaut, or gradation, which is a spontaneous, positionally independent alteration of
vowels inhabited by the Germanic languages from the Common Indo - European
period. This ancient phenomenon consisted in alteration of vowels in the root,
suffix or ending depending on the grammatical form or meaning of the word.
There are two types of Ablaut: quantitative and qualitative.
The qualitative Ablaut is the alteration of different vowels, mainly the vowels
[e] / [a] or [e] / [o]
Old Icelandic bera (to give birth) — barn (baby)
Old High German stelan (to steal) — stal (stole)
Cf.: Russian бреду (I stroll, I wade) — брОД (ford, wade)
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 classic example of the Indo-European
Ablaut is the declension of the Greek word "pater" (father):

[e:] [e] [—]

pater pater patros
(nominative case, (vocative case, normal (genitive case, reduced
lengthened stage) stage) stage)

Ablaut in Germanic languages is a further development of Indo-European

alterations. Here we often find cases with both the quantitative and qualitative
ablaut. It should be also mentioned that in the zero stage before sonorants an extra-
short vowel [u] was added:
Quantitative ablaut
Goth qiman (to come) - qums (the arrival)
Qualitative ablaut
OHG stelan (to steal) - stal (stole)
quantitative+quautative ablaut
OE. findan (to find) - fand (found, past tense) - fundan (found, past part.)

Ablaut as a kind of an internal flexion functioned in Old Gemnanic languages both

in form- and word-building, but it was the most extensive and systematic in the
conjugation of strong verbs.
Another phenomenon common for all Germanic languages was the tendency
of phonetic assimilation of the root vowel to the vowel of the ending, the so -
called -Umlaut, or mutation. There were several types of mutation, but the most
important one was palatal mutation, or i - Umlaut, when under the influence of the
sounds [i] or [j] in the suffix or ending the root vowels became more front and
more closed. This process must have taken place in the 5th, - 6th centuries, and can
be illustrated by comparing words from the language of the Gothic bible (4th
century) showing no palatal mutation with corresponding words in other
 Germanic languages of a later period:
Goth harjis OE here (army),
Goth domjan OE deman (deem);
Goth kuni OE cynn (kin)
Traces of this tendency can be seen both in word-building and form-
building as a kind of an internal flexion:
OHG gast (guest) — gesti (guests)
man (man) — mennisco (human)
Speaking about Germanic consonants, we should first of all speak of the
correspondence between Indo-European and Germanic languages which
was,presented as- a system of interconnected facts by the German linguist Jacob
Grimm in 1822. This phenomenon is called the First Consonant Shift, or Grimm's
law.
The table below shows-a scheme of Grimm's law with the examples from
Germanic and other Indo-European languages.
However, there are-some, instances where Grimm's law seems not to apply.
These cases were explained by a Dutch linguist Karl Ver.ner, and the seeming
exceptions from Grimm's law have come to be known as Venter's law.
Grimm's law
Indo-European Germanic
voiceless stops voiceless fricatives
ptк fph
Lat pater OE fӕder (father)
Lat tres Goth preis (three)
Gk kardia OE herza (heart)
voiced stops voiceless stops
bdg ptк
Rus болото OE pol (pool)
Lat duo Goth twai (two)
Gk egon OIcl ek (I)
voiced aspirated stops' voiced non-aspirated stops
bh dh gh bdg
Snsk bhratar OE bro∂or
Lat frater, Rus брат
Snsk madhu OE medu (mead)
Rus мед
*Snsk songha Old syngva (sing)
Gk omphe (voice)
*Note that the correspondencies in the third group are less clear, for aspirated, stops can be
found only in Sanskrit, the other Indo-European languages either having voiceless fricatives or
voiced stops, and the [gh] sound in Sanskrit is only reconstructed.

Verner's law explains the changes in the Germanic voiceless fricatives f /ph
resulting from the first consonant shift and the voiceless fricatives depending upon
the position of the stress in the original Indo-European word, namely:
 Verner's law
Indo-European Germanic
ptкs b ∂/d g z/r
Gk hepta Goth sibun (seven)
Gk pater OSc fadir, OE faeder
Gk dekas Goth tigus (ten, a dozen)
Snsk ayas Goth aiz, OHG er (bronze)

According to Verner's law, the above change occurred if the consonant in question
was found after an unstressed vowel. It is especially evident in the forms of
Germanic strong verbs, except the Gothic ones, which allows to conclude that at
some time the stress in the first two verbal stems fell on the root, and in the last
two - on the suffix:
OE teon teah toʒon toʒen (to tug)
OSx tiohan toh tugun gitogan
Goth tiuhan tauh tauhum tauhans
OE ceosan ceas curon coren (to choose)
OIcl kiosa kaus k0rom kOrenn
Goth kiusan kaus kusum kusans

3.2. Grammar
One of the main processes in the development of the Germanic morphological
system was the change in the word structure. The common Indo-European notional
word consisted of three elements: the root, expressing the lexical meaning, the
inflexion or ending, showing the grammatical form, and the so-called stem-forming
suffix, a formal indicator of the stem type.
However, in Germanic languages the stem-forming suffix fuses with the
ending and is often no longer visible, thus making the word structure a two-
element one. Nevertheless, it should be taken into account when explaining the
differences in the
categorial forms of words originally having different stem forming suffixes.
It should also be mentioned that Germanic languages belonged to the
synthetic type of form building, which means that they expressed the grammatical
meanings by changing the forms of the word itself, not resorting to any 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 the category of gender (feminine, masculine and neuter).
The means of form building were the endings added to the root/stem of the noun.
The Germanic adjectives had two types of declension, conventionally called
strong and weak. Most adjectives could be declined both in accordance with the
strong and weak type. Agreeing with the noun in gender, case and noun, the
adjective by its type of declension expressed the idea of definiteness (weak
declension) or indefiniteness (strong declension), the meaning, which was later to
become expressed by a grammatical class of words unknown in Common
Germanic - the article.
The adjective also had degrees of comparison, the forms of which were in most
instances formed with the help of suffixes -iz/oz and -ist/-ost, but theirc эдеге also,
instances of suppletivism, i.e. use of different roots for different forms - a means
common for many Indo-European languages:
Goth leitils – minniza – minnists (little – less – least)
Rus хороший – лучше - лучший
The Germanic verbs are divided into two principal groups: strong and weak
verbs, depending on the way they formed their past tense forms.
The past tense (or preterite) of strong verbs was formed with the help of
Ablaut, qualitative or quantitative. Depending upon the phonetic root structure, the
exact manifestation of Ablaut could be somewhat different, and accordingly strong
verbs were further subdivided into classes.
Weak verbs expressed preterite with the help of the dental suffix -d/-t. They
also had stem-forming suffixes, depending on which they fell into separate classes.
There was also a small group of highly frequent suppletive verbs forming
their forms from different roots, the same as in other Indo-European languages:
Goth im (/I/am) Rus есть
was (/I/ was) был
The Germanic verb had a well-developed system of categories, including the
category of person (first, second, third), number (singular and plural), tense (past
and present, the latter also used for expressing future actions), mood (indicative,
imperative and optative) and voice (only in Gothic - active and medio-passive).
The categorial forms employed synthetic means of form-building.

3.3. Alphabet
Although the people of the Germanic tribes were mostly illiterate, some of the
Germanic nations had their own mode of writing, with a distinctive alphabet called
runic, each letter of which was called a rune. We know that runes were used to
record early stages of Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Frisian,
Frankish and various tribal tongues of central Germania, and they may also have
supplied other Germanic languages without leaving any evidence surviving till
today. "On archaeological grounds the earliest estant runes are dated to the second
century AD. The script continued in use in some regions throughout the Middle
Ages and into early modern times.
The early runes were not written, but incised - runic script was designed for
inscribing, at first on wood, which explains many of its characteristics. Since runes
were designed for incising in wood, the letter forms, in their earliest stage, eschew
curves, which are hard to cut in such a grainy material. Letters were made up of
vertical strokes, cut at right angles to the grain, and of slanting strokes which stood
distinct from it. Horizontal strokes, which would mingle with the grain and be hard
to distinguish, were avoided.
 Even the earliest examples of the script show there were variations in some
letter forms, so it is not possible to give a standard pattern for the Germanic runic
alphabet. The rune-row below is one of the most generally accepted variants:

The earliest known runic alphabet had twenty-four letters arranged in a

peculiar order, which, from the values of its first letters, is known as the futhark. In
early times texts could be written not only from left to right, but from right to left
equally well. Some texts could even be written with alternate lines in opposite
directions. Even in left-to-right texts an individual letter could be reversed at
whim, and occasionally a letter might be inverted. There was no distinction
between capital and lowercase letters.
The Roman equivalents for the Germanic runes given above are only
approximate, for the sounds of Early Germanic did not coincide with those of
Modern English.
We do not know where and when runes were invented. The obvious
similarities with the Roman alphabet brought early scholars to the belief that the
script first appeared among Germanic peoples living close to the Roman empire,
and that the runes were an adaptation of the more prestigeous alphabet. Early finds
of rune-inscribed objects in eastern Europe (Pietroassa in Rumania, Dahmsdorf in
central Germany and Kowel in the Ukraine) suggest that runes may have been
invented by Goths on the Danube or beside the Vistula. This is further supported
by the similarity of occasional runes to letters of one or other of the Greek
alphabets. However, continued discovery of early runic texts in various regions of
Europe do not allow to consider the matter of the origin of runes conclusively
proven.
Be it as it may, wherever and whenever they were created, runes soon spread
over the Germanic world, and by 500 AD they are found not only in Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, England, but also in Poland, Russia and Hungary, recording
different Germanic languages and being cut, stamped, inlaid or impressed on
metal, bone, wood and stone.
Runes were used for many centuries and in many lands, gradually changing in
their passage through time and space. In England the script died out, superseded by
Roman, somewhere in the eleventh century; in Germany and the Low Countries -
rather sooner. In Scandinavia and its colonies, however, runes continued well into
the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the later runic inscriptions are of comparatively
little interest, for there is plenty of other evidence for the state of the language they
record, whereas the early inscriptions are of great importance to the linguist, for
they record material for which there is otherwise little or no evidence.
Thus we may summarize the above discussion stating that the principal
features common to all the languages of the Germanic language area were: (i)
fixation of the main stress on the initial syllable of the word; (ii) the first, or
Germanic sound shift affecting the Indo-European voiceless and voiced stops and
the spirant [s]; (iii) certain vowel changes; (iv) reduction in the number of cases as
compared to Common Indo-European; (v) full development of the weak declension
of the adjective with a particular categorial meaning; (vi) development of a dental
preterite and appearance of the strong/weak verb distinction; (vii) a peculiar
alphabet.