Lombardic

Lombardic was the East Germaniclanguage of the Germanic-speaking people who invaded and settled in Italy in the sixth century C.E. It is said that Lombardic participated in the so-called second sound shift which is primarily attested in High German. Lombardic is extinct.

2. Historical sources of Germanic tribes and dialects.

Proto-Germ an i c.

§ 34. The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic (PG) language (also termed Common or Primitive Germanic, Primitive Teutonic and simply Ger­manic). PG is the linguistic ancestor or the parent-language of the Germanic group. It is supposed to have split from related IE tongues sometime between the 15th and 10th c. B.C. The would-be Germanic tribes belonged to the western division of the IE speech community.

As the Indo-Europeans extended over a larger territory, the ancient Germans or Teutons ^[2] moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. This place is regarded as the most probable original home of the Teutons. It is here that they developed their first specifically Germanic linguistic features which made them a separate group in the IE family.

PG is an entirely pre-historical language: it was never recorded in written form. In the 19th c. it was reconstructed by methods of compa­rative linguistics from written evidence in descendant languages. Hypo­thetical reconstructed PG forms will sometimes be quoted below, to explain the origin of English forms.

It is believed that at the earliest stages of history PG was funda­mentally one language, though dialectally coloured. In its later stages dialectal differences grew, so that towards the beginning of our era Ger­manic appears divided into dialectal groups and tribal dialects. Dialec­tal differentiation increased with the migrations and geographical ex­pansion of the Teutons caused by overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.

The external history of the ancient Teutons around the beginning of our era is known from classical writings. The first mention of Ger­manic tribes was made by Pitheas, a Greek historian and geographer of the 4th c. B.C., in an account of a sea voyage to the Baltic Sea. In the 1st c. B.C. in COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WAR (COM- MENTARI1 DE BELLO GALL ICO) Julius Caesar described some mi­litant Germanic tribes — the Suevians — who bordered on the Celts of Gaul in the North-East. The tribal names Germans and Teutons, at first applied to separate tribes, were later extended to the entire group. In the 1st c. A. D. Pliny the Elder, a prominent Roman scientist and writer, in NATURAL HISTORY (NATURALIS HISTOR1A) made a classified list of Germanic tribes grouping them under six headings. A few decades later the Roman historian Tacitus compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons DE SITU, MORIBUS ET POPULIS GERMANIAE; in this work he reproduced Pliny’s classification of the Germanic tribes. F. Engels made extensive use of these sources in the papers ON THE HISTORY OF THE AN­CIENT GERMANS and THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE. Having made a linguistic analysis of several Germanic dialects of later ages F. Engels came to the conclu­sion that Pliny’s classification of the Teutonic tribes accurately reflected the contemporary dialectal division. In his book on the ancient Teutons F. Engels descrihed the evolution of the economic and social structure of the Teutons from Caesar’s to Tacitus’s time.

§ 35. Towards the beginning of our era the common period of Ger­manic history came to an end. The Teutons had extended over a larger territory and the PG language broke into parts. The tri-partite division of the Germanic languages proposed by 19th c. philologists corresponds, with a few adjustments, to Pliny’s grouping of the Old Teutonic tribes. According to this division PG split into three branches: East Germanic (Vindili in Pliny’s classification), North Germanic (Ffilleviones) and West Germanic (which embraces Ingveones, Istxvones and Hermino- nes in Pliny’s list). In due course these branches split into separate Germanic languages.

The traditional tri-partite classification of the Germanic languages was reconsidered and corrected in some recent publications. The deve­lopment of the Germanic group was not confined to successive splits; it involved both linguistic divergence and convergence. It has also been discovered that originally PG split into two main branches and that the tri-partite division marks a later stage of its history.

The earliest migration of the Germanic tribes from the lower valley of the Elbe consisted in their movement north, to the Scandinavian pe­ninsula, a few hundred years before our era. This geographical segrega­tion must have led to linguistic differentiation and to the division of PG into' the northern and southern branches. At the beginning of our era some of the tribes returned to the mainland and settled closer to the Vistula basin, east of the other continental Germanic tribes. It is only from this stage of their history that the Germanic languages can be des­cribed under three headings: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic,

East Germanic

§ 36. The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most nu­merous and powerful of them were the Goths. They were among the first Teutons to leave the coast of the Baltic Sea and start on their great migrations. Around 200 A. D. they moved south-east and some time later reached the lower basin of the Danube, where they made attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, Their western branch, the Visi- gotas, invaded Roman territory, participated in the assaults on Rome under Alaric and moved on to southern Gaul, to found one of the first barbarian kingdoms of Medieval Europe, the Toulouse kingdom. The kingdom lasted until the 8th c. though linguistically the western Goths were soon absorbed by the native population, the Romanised Celts.^[3] The eastern Goths, Ostrogotse consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance in the lower basin of the Dniester, were subjugated by the Huns under Atilta, traversed'the Balkans and set up a kingdom in Northern Italy, with Ravenna as its capital. The short-lived flourishing of Ostrogothic culture in the oth—6th c. under Theodoric came to an end with the fall of the kingdom.

§ 37. The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records of the 4th—6th c. The Goths were the first of the Teutons to be­come Christian. In the 4th c. Ulfilas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Parts of (Jlfilas’ Gospels — a manuscript of about two hundred pages, probably made in the 5th or 6th c. — have been preserved and are kept now in Uppsala, Sweden. It is written on red parchment with silver and golden letters and is known as the SILVER CODEX (CODEX ARGENTEUS). Ulfilas’ Gospels were first published *n the I7th c. and have been thoroughly studied by 19th and 20th c. philologists. The SILVER CODEX is one of the earliest texts in the languages of the Germanic group; it represents a form of language very close to PG and therefore throws light on the pre-written stages of his­tory of all the languages of the Germanic group, including English.

The other East Germanic languages, all of which are now dead, have left no written traces. Some of their tribal names have survived in place- names, which reveal the directions of their migrations; Bornholm and Burgundy go back to the East Germanic tribe of Burgundians; Andalusia Ts 'derlved from the tribal name Vandals; Lombardy got its name from the Langobards, who made part of. the population of the Ostrogoth ic kingdom in North Italy.

North Germanic

§ 38. The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages. The North Germanic tribes lived on the southern coast of the Scandina­vian peninsula and in Northern Denmark (since the 4th c.). They did not participate in the migrations and were relatively isolated, though they may have come into closer contacts with the western tribes after the Goths left the coast of the Baltic Sea. The speech of the North Ger­manic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and is regarded as a sort of common North Germanic parent-language called Old Norse or Old Scandinavian. It has come down to us in runic inscrip­tions dated from the 3rd to the 9th c. Runic inscriptions were carved on objects made of hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic alphabet or the runes. The runes were used by North and West Germanic tribes.

The disintegration of Old Norse into separate dialects and languages began after the 9th c., when the Scandinavians started out on their sea voyages. The famous Viking Age, from about 800 to 1050 A.D., is the legendary age of Scandinavian raids and expansion overseas. At the same period, due to overpopulation in the fjord areas, they spread over inner Scandinavia.

§39. The principal linguistic differentiation in Scandinavia cor­responded to the political t¹’vision into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The three kingdoms constantly fought for dominance and the relative position of the three languages altered, as one or another of the powers prevailed over its neighbours. For several hundred years Denmark was the most powerful of the Scandinavian kingdoms; it embraced Southern Sweden, the greater part of the British Isles, the southern coast of the Baltic Sea up to the Gulf of Riga; by the 14th c. Norway fell under Da­nish rule too. Sweden regained its independence in the 16th c., while Norway remained a backward Danish colony up to the early 19th c. Con­sequently, both Swedish and Norwegian were influenced by Danish.

The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Swedish date from the 13th c. In the later Middle Ages, with the growth of capitalist relations and the unification of the countries, Danish, and then Swedish developed into national literary languages. Nowadays Swedish is spoken not only by the population of Sweden; the language has extended over Finnish tenilory and is the second state language in Finland.

Norwegian was the last to develop into an independent national lan­guage. During the period of Danish dominance Norwegian intermixed with Danish. As a result in the 19th c. there emerged two varieties of the Norwegian tongue: the state or bookish tongue riksmdl (later called bokmai) which is a blending of literary Danish with Norwegian town dia­lects and a rural variety, landsmai. Landsmai was sponsored by 19th c. writers and philologists as the real, pure Norwegian language. At the present time the two varieties tend to fuse into a single form of lan­guage nynorsk (“New Norwegian”).

§ 40. In addition to the three languages on the mainland, the North Germanic subgroup includes two more languages: Icelandic and Faroese, whose origin goes back to the Viking Age.

Beginning with the 8th c. the Scandinavian sea-rovers and merchants undertook distant sea voyages and set up their colonies in many terri­tories. The Scandinavian invaders, known as Northmen, overran Nor­thern France and settled in Normandy (named after them). Crossing the Baltic Sea they came to Russia — the “varyagi” of the Russian chronicles. Crossing the North Sea they made disastrous attacks on English coastal towns and eventually occupied a large part of England

— the Danes of the English chronicles. They founded numerous settle­ments in the islands around the North Sea: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, Ireland and the Faroe Islands; going still farther west they reached Iceland, Greenland and North America.

Linguistically, in most areas of their expansion, the Scandinavian settlers were assimilated by the native population: in France they adopt­ed the French language; in Northern England, in Ireland and other islands around the British Isles sooner or later the Scandinavian dialects were displaced by English. In the Faroe Islands the West Norwegian dialects brought by the Scandinavians developed into a separate lan­guage called Faroese. Faroese is spoken nowadays by about 30,000 peo­ple. For many centuries all writing was done in Danish; it was not until the 18th c. that the first Faroese records were made.

§41. Iceland was practically uninhabited at the time of the first Scandinavian settlements (9th c.). Their West Scandinavian dialects, at first identical with those of Norway, eventually grew into an inde­pendent language, Icelandic. It developed as a separate language in spite of the political dependence of Iceland upon Denmark and Ihe do­minance of Danish in official spheres. As compared with other North Germanic languages Icelandic has retained a more archaic vocabulary and grammatical system. Modern Icelandic is very much like Old Ice­landic and Old Norse, for it has not participated in the linguistic changes which took place in the other Scandinavian languages, probably because of its geographical isolation. At present Icelandic is spoken by over 2C0 000 people.

Old Icelandic written records date from the 12th and 13th c., an age of literary flourishing. The most important records are: the ELDER EDDA (also called the POETIC EDDA) — a collection of heroic songs _f the 12th c., the YOUNGER (PROSE) EDDA (a text-book for poets compiled by Snorri Sturluson in the early 13th c.) and the Old Icelandic sagas.

West Germanic

§ 42. Around the beginning of our era the would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe bordering on the Slavonian tribes in the East and the Celtic tribes in the South. They must have retreated further west under the pressure of the Goths, who had come from Scandinavia, but after their departure expanded in the eastern and southern directions. The dialectal differentiation of West Germanic was probably quite distinct even at the beginning of our era since Pliny and Tacitus described them under three tribal names (see §35). On the eve of their “great migrations” of the 4th and 5th c. the West Germans included several tribes. The Franconians (or Franks) occupied the lower basin of the Rhine; from there they spread up the Rhine and are accordingly subdivided into Low, Middle and High Fran­conians. The Angles and the Frisians (known as the Anglo-Frisian group), the Jutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of the modern Ne­therlands, the Federal Republic of Germany and the southern part of Den­mark. A group of tribes known as High Germans lived in the mountai­nous southern regions of the Federal Republic of Germany (hence the name High Germans as contrasted to Low Germans — a name applied to the West Germanic tribes in the low-lying northern areas. The High Germans included a number of tribes whose names are known since the early Middle Ages: the Alemanians, the Swabians, the Bavarians, the Thiiringians and others.

In the Early Middle Ages the Franks consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance. Towards the 8th c. their kingdom grew into one of the largest states in Western Europe. Under Charlemagne (768—814) the Holy Roman Empire of the Franks embraced France and half of Italy, and. stretched northwards up to the North and Baltic Sea. The empire lacked ethnic and economic unity and in the 9th c. broke up, into parts. Its western part eventually became the basis of France. Though the names France, French are derived from the tribal name of the Franks, the Fran­conian dialects were not spoken there. The population, the Romanised Celts of Gaul, spoke a local variety of Latin, which developed into one of the most extensive Romance languages, French.

The eastern part, the East Franconian Empire, comprised several kingdoms: Swabia or Alemania, Bavaria, East Franconia and Saxony; to these were soon added two more kingdoms — Lorraine and Friesland. As seen from the names of the kingdoms, the East Franconian state had a mixed population consisting of several West Germanic tribes.

§ 43. The Franconian dialects were spoken in the extreme North of the Empire; in the later Middle Ages they developed into Dutch

the language of the Low Countries (the Netherlands) and Flemish ~~ the language of Flanders. The earliest texts in Low Franconian date from the 10th c,; 12th c. records represent the earliest Old Dutch. The formation of the Dutch language stretches over a long period; it is linked up with the growth of the Netherlands into an independent bourgeois state after its liberation from Spain in the I6th c.

The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and its variant in Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treat­ed as a single language, Netherlandish. Netherlandish is spoken by almost 20 million people; its northern variety, used in the Netherlands, has a more standardised literary form.

About three hundred years ago the Dutch language was brought to South Africa by colonists from Southern Holland. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West Germanic language, Afri­kaans. Afrikaans has incorporated elements from the speech of English and German colonists in Africa and from the tongues of the natives. Writing in Afrikaans began as late as the end of the 19th c. Today Afri­kaans is the mother-tongue of over four million Afrikaners and coloured people and one of the state languages in the South African Republic (alongside English).

§ 44. The High German group of tribes did not go far in their migra­tions. Together with the Saxons (see below § 46 ff.) the Alemanians, Bava­rians, and Thuringians expanded east, driving the Slavonic tribes from places of*their early settlement.

The High German dialects consolidated into a common language known as Old High German (OHG). The first written records in OHG date from the 8th and 9th c. (glosses to Latin texts, translations from Latin and religious poems). Towards the 12th c. High German (known as Middle High German) had intermixed with neighbouring tongues, especially Middle and High Franconian, and eventually developed into the literary German language. The Written Standard of New High Ger­man was established after the Reformation (16th c.), though no Spoken Standard existed until the 19th c, as Germany remained politically di­vided into a number of kingdoms and dukedoms. To this day German is remarkable for great dialectal diversity of speech.

The High German language in a somewhat modified form is the national language of Austria, the language of Liechtenstein and one of the languages in Luxemburg and Switzerland, It is also spoken in Alsace and Lorraine in France. The total number of German-speaking people approaches 100 million.

§ 45. Another offshoot of High German is Yiddish. It grew from the High German dialects which were adopted by numerous Jewish communi­ties scattered over Germany in the 11th and 12th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew and Slavonic and developed into a separate West Germanic language with a spoken and literary form. Yiddish was exported from Germany to many other countries: Russia, Poland, the Baltic states and America.

§ 46. At the later stage of the great migration period — in the 5th c.

— a group of West Germanic tribes started out on their invasion of the British Isles. The invaders came from the lowlands near the North Sea: the Angles, part of the Saxons and Frisians, and, probably, the Jutes. Their dialects in the British Isles developed into the English language.

The territory of English was at first confined to what is now known as England proper. From the 13th to the 17th c. it extended to other parts of the British Isles. In the succeeding centuries English spread overseas to other continents. The first English written records have come down from the 7th c., which is the earliest date in the history of writing in the West Germanic subgroup (see relevant chapters below).

§ 47. The Frisians and the Saxons who did not take part in the in­vasion of Britain stayed on the continent. The area of Frisians, which at one time extended over the entire coast of the North Sea, was reduced under the pressure of other Low German tribes and the influence of their dialects, particularly Low Franconian (later Dutch). Frisian has sur­vived as a local dialect in Friesland (in the Netherlands) and Ostfries- land (the Federal Republic of Germany). It has both an oral and written form, the earliest records dating from the 13th c.

§ 46. In the Early Middle Ages the continental Saxons formed a powerful tribe in the lower basin of the Elbe. They were subjugated by the Franks and after the breakup of the Empire entered its eastern sub­division. Together with High German tribes they took part in the east­ward drive and the colonisation of the former Slavonic territories. Old Saxon known in written form from the records of the 9th c. has survived as one of the l.ow German dialects.

§ 49. The following table shows the classification of old and modern

3. Specific features of old Germanic consonant and vocalic systems.

Vowels

§ 53. Throughout history, beginning with PG, vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of altera­tions: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Quali' tative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g.: [o>a ] or (p>fl; quantitative changes make long sounds short or short sounds long, e.g.: [i>i:]₍ 1U>1 ] \ dependent changes (also positional or combinative) are re­stricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance, a sound may change under the influence of the neighbouring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable; independent changes — also spontaneous or regular — take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, i.e. they affect a certain sound in all positions.

From an early date the treatment of vowels was determined by the nature of word stress. 'In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and new distinctive features were introduced, so that the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened or lost; the distinction of short and long vowels was neutralised so that by the age of writing the long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. As for originally short vowels, they tended to be reduced to a neutral sound, losing their qualitative distinctions and were often dropped in unstressed final syllables (see the example *fiskaz in §52).

§ 54. Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is commonly regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. The contrast of short and long vowels is supported by the different directions of their changes. While long vowels generally tended to become closer and to diphthongise, short vowels, on the contrary, often changed into more open sounds. These tendencies can be seen in the earliest vowel changes which distinguished the PG vowel system from its PIE source.

IE short [o] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a) and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE lal; in other words in PG they merged into [ol. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o: 1 and merged with lo: 1. The examples in Table 1 illustrate the resulting correspond­ences of vowels in parallels from Germanic and non-Germanic languages (more apparent in Old Germanic languages than in modern words, for the sounds have been modified in later history).

§ 56. After the changes, in Late PG, the vowel system contained the following sounds:

SHORT VOWELS i e a o u

LONG VOWELS i: e: a: o: u:^[4]

It is believed that in addition to these monophthongs PG had a set of diphthongs made up of more open nuclei and closer glides: [ei], [at ], leu], [au 1 and also [iul; nowadays, however, many scholars inter­pret them as sequences of two independent monophthongs.

CONSONANTS. PROTO-GERMANIC CONSONANT SHIFT

§ 57. The specific peculiarities of consonants constitute the most re­markable distinctive feature of the Germanic linguistic group. Compa­rison with other languages within the IE family reveals regular cor­respondences between Germanic and non-Germanic consonants. Thus we regularly find [f] in Germanic where other IE languages have Ip]; cf. e.g., E full, R noAHuit, Fr plein\ wherever Germanic has Ip 1, cognate words in non-Germanic languages have Lb 1 (cf. E pool, R 6o- Aomo). The consonants in Germanic look ‘shifted’ as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic languages. The alterations of the con­sonants took place in PG, and the resulting sounds were inherited by the languages of the Germanic group.

The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated in terms of a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19th c. and are often called Grimm's Law. It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic consonant shift (to be distinguished from the 2nd shift which took place in OHG in the 9th c.).

By the terms of Grimm's Law voiceless plosives developed in PG into voiceless fricatives (Act I); IE voiced plosives were shifted to voice­less plosives (Act II) and IE voiced aspirated plosives were reflected (See Note 1 to Table 3) either as voiced fricatives or as pure voiced plo­sives (Act III).

Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.^[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:

1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.

2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).

This chain shift can be abstractly represented as:

· bʰ > b > p > ɸ

· dʰ > d > t > θ

· gʰ > g > k > x

· gʷʰ > gʷ > kʷ > xʷ

Here each sound moves one position to the right to take on its new sound value. Note that within Proto-Germanic, the sounds denoted by 〈b〉, 〈d〉, 〈g〉 and 〈gw〉 were stops in some environments and fricatives in others, so bʰ > b should be understood here as bʰ > b/β, and likewise for the others. The voiceless fricatives are customarily spelled 〈f〉, 〈þ〉, 〈h〉 and 〈hw〉 in the context of Germanic.

The exact details of the shift are unknown, and it may have progressed in a variety of ways before arriving at the final situation. The three stages listed above show the progression of a "pull chain", in which each change leaves a "gap" in the phonological system that "pulls" other phonemes into it to fill the gap. But it is also conceivable that the shift happened as a push chain, where the changes happened in reverse order, with each change "pushing" the next forward to avoid merging the phonemes.

The steps could also have occurred somewhat differently. Another possible sequence of events could have been:

1. Voiceless stops are allophonically aspirated under most conditions.

2. Voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Aspirated stops become fricatives.

This sequence would lead to the same end result. This variety of Grimm's law is often suggested in the context of the glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European, which is followed by a minority of linguists. This theoretical framework assumes that "voiced stops" in PIE were actually voiceless to begin with, so that the second phase did not actually exist as such, or was not actually devoicing but a loss of some other articulatory feature such as glottalization. This alternative sequence also accounts for the phonetics of Verner's law (see below), which are easier to explain within the glottalic theory framework when Grimm's law is formulated in this manner.

§ 58. Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19th c, by a Danish scholar, Carl Vemer. They are known as Verner’s Law. Vemer*s Law explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm’s Law and were far a long time regarded as exceptions. According to Verner’s Law all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f, 0, xl which arose under Grimm’s Law, and also is] inherited from PIE, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless. The voicing occurred in early PG at the time when the stress was not yet fixed on the root-morpheme. The process of voicing can be shown as a step in a succession of consonant changes in prehistorica! reconstructed forms; consider, e.g. the changes of the second consonant in the word father: Vemer’s Law accounts for the appearance of voiced fricative or its later modifications Id] in place of the voiceless 10] which ought to be expected under Grimm’s Law. In late PG, the phonetic conditions that caused the voicing had disappeared: the stress had shifted to the first§

59. As a result of voicing uy Venter's Law there arose an interchange of consonants in the grammatical lorms of the word, termed grammatical interchange. Part of the forms retained a voiceless fricative, while other forms — with a diffe­rent position of stress in Early PG —acquired a voiced fricative. Both consonants could undergo later changes in the OG languages, but the original difference be­tween them goes back to the time of movable word stress and PG voicing. The interchanges can be seen in <he principal forms of some OG verbs, though even at that time most oi the interchanges were levelled out by analogy.

Interpretation of the Proto-Germanic Consonant Shift

§ 60. The causes and mechanism of the PG consonant shift have been a matter of discussion ever since the shift was discovered.

When Jacob Grimm first formulated the law of the shift he ascribed it to the allegedly daring spirit of the Germanic tribes which manifested itself both in their great migrations and in radical linguistic innovations. His theory has long been rejected as naive and romantic.

Some philologists attributed the shift to the physiological peculiarities of the Teutons, namely the shape of their glottis: it differed from that of other IB tribes, and the pronunciation of consonants was modified. Other scholars maintained that the consonant shift was caused by a more energetic articulation of sounds brought about by the specifically Germanic force word stress. Another theory suggested that the articulation of consonants in Germanic was, on the contrary, marked by lack of energy and tension.

The theory of “linguistic substratum” which was popular with many 20th c. linguists, attributes the PG consonant changes — as well as other_ Germanic inno­vations— to the influence of the speech habits of pre-Germanic population in the areas of Germanic settlement. The language of those unknown tribes served as a sort oi substratum (‘under-layer’) for the would-be Germanic tongues; it intermixed with the language of the Teutons and left certain traces in PG. This hypothesis can be neither confirmed nor disproved, since we possess no information about the language of pre-IE inhabitants of Western Europe.

According to recent theories the PG consonant shift could be caused by the internal requirements of the language system: the need for more precise phonemic distinction reliable in all phonetic conditions. Before the shift (according to J. Kurylowicz) the opposition of voiced and voiceless plosives was neutralised ((hat is, lost) in some positions, namely before the sound [s]; therefore new distinctive features arose in place of or in addition to sonority, [p, t, k) changed into (f, 0, x) and began to be contrasted to [b, d, g] not only through sonority but also through the manner ol articulation as fricatives to plosives. This change led to further changes: since [f, 0, x] were now opposed to Ib. d, g] through their frica­tive character, sonority became irrelevant lor phonemic distinction and Jb, d, gl were devoiced: they changed into [p, t, k), respectively. That is how the initial step stimulated further changes ana the entire system was shifted. It is essential that throughout, the shift the original pattern of the consonant system was preserved: three rows of noise consonants were distinguished, though instead of opposition through sonority consonants were opposed as fricatives to plosives. (For a critical review of various theories see tCpaBHnre/ibHati rpaMMa-niKa repMSHCKMx u3mxob», M., 1962, kh. II, I, rji. 1, 7.1—8.5.)

Another explanation based on the structural approach to language interprets the role of the language system from a different angle. Every subsystem in lan­guage tends to preserve a balanced, symmetrical arrangement: if the balance is bro­ken, it will soon be restored by means of new changes. After the replacement of IP, t, kj by |f, 3, k) the positions of the voiceless [p, t, k) in the consonant system were left vacant; to fill the vacuums and restore the equilibrium [b, d, g| were devoiced into [p, t, k). In their turn the vacant positions of [b, d, g] were filled again in the succeeding set of changes, when [bh, dh, gh| lost their aspirated character. This theory, showing the shift as a chain of successive steps, fails to account for the initial push.

§ 61. The chronology of the shift and the relative order of the changes includ­ed in Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, has also aroused much interest and specu­lation. H is believed that the consonant shift was realised as a series ot successive steps; it began first on part of Germanic territories and gradually spread over the whole area. The change of [p, t, k] into fricatives is unanimously regarded as the earliest step —the first act of Grimm’s Law; it was followed, or, perhaps, accom­panied by the voicing of fricatives (Verner’s Law). Linguists of the 19th c. were inclined to refeT the voicing of fricatives to a far later date than the first act of Grimm's Law. However, there are no grounds to think that the effect of word stress and intervocal position on sonority could have been much delayed. In all probability, the IE plosives split into voiced and voiceless sounds soon after they had acquired their fricative character or even during that process.

The order of the other two steps (or acts of Grimm's Law) varies in different descriptions of the shift.

4. The main features of old Germanic lexicon and morphology, their evolution.(на ксероксах есть ещё)