THE COMMON FEATURES OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Old German languages show differences in comparison with other European Lang on 3 main linguistic levels: grammatical, phonetic and lexical.

IN PHONETICS:

v accent (word stress) in IE was characterized by free and musical accent (fixed & unfixed) ; in PG accent became fixed on the root syllable and dynamic, strong (силовое); characteristics of musical accent disappeared in Gmc languages

The Proto-Germanic type of stress led to the formation of the following peculiarities of the Germanic languages as compared to non-Germanic Indo-European languages:

a. phonetic – as a result of the fixed position of the stress the unstressed syllables were becoming weaker and weaker, they got less distinct and neutral sounds (such as “schwa”) appeared;

b. morphological – 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 (all the vocalic endings) and became ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES.

v Grimm’s and Verner’s laws.

Grimm’s law: The first Germanic consonant shifts took place in the V-II cent. BC. Jacobs Grimm’s Law in 1822. According to Grimm, he classified consonant correspondences between indoeuropean and germanic stops (plosives).

There are 3 acts of this law:

1. IE voiceless plosives p, t, k correspond to Gmc voiceless fricatives f, Ө, h. Eg: пламя – flame, три – three, кардио – heart.

2. IE voiced plosives b, d, g, →Gmc voiceless fricatives p, t, k. Eg: болото - pool, kardia – heart, ego – ic (ik).

3. IE aspirated voiced plosives bh, dh, gh →to voiced plosives without aspiration b d g. Eg: bhrāta – brother, rudhira – red, ghostis – guest.

The second consonant shift was Carl Verner’s law (only in Old High German). According C.Verner all the common Gmc consonants became voiced in intervocalic position if the preceding vowel was unstressed (a change takes place in the course of time).

p-f > v septem

t-Ө > đ, d сто – hund (OE)

k-x > j, g

s-s > z/r auris – ēare

Devoicing took place in early common Gmc when the stress was not yet fixed on the root.

A variety of Verner’s law is rhotacism (greek letter rho). [s] →[z]→[r] we find traces of this phenomenon in form of the verb to be →was – were, is – are; ist – sind – war.

II consonant shift occurd in dialects of sothern Gmc. Eg: еда – eat – essen, вода – water – wasser, hope – hoffen, bed – bett.

Ch (G) → C (OE) : reich – ricostan.

v Palatal Mutation/i-Umlaut

Mutation –a change of one vowel to another one under the influence of a vowel in the following syllable.

Palatal mutation(or i-Umlaut) happened in the 6^th -7^th c.and was shared by all Old Germanic Languages, except Gothic. I-mutation is a change of root back vowels to front ones or root open vowels to closer ones under the influence of i/j in the next syllable.

Palatal mutation – fronting and raising of vowels under the influence of [i] and [j] in the following syllable (to approach the articulation of these two sounds). As a result of palatal mutation:

· [i] and [j] disappeared in the following syllable sometimes leading to the doubling of a consonant in this syllable;

· new vowels appeared in OE ([ie, y]) as a result of merging and splitting:

IN GRAMMAR:

A synthetic grammatical system (relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words). In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built by means of: sound interchanges, inflections and suppletion.

Suppletion (inherited from Indo-European) – the usage of 2 or more different roots as forms of one and the same word:

Inflections(inherited from Indo-European) – though in the Germanic languages inflections were simpler and shorter than in other Indo-European languages.

Let’s take the system of declensionsas an example.In PG it was well-developed but in the Old Germanic languages, due to the stress that was fixed on the root and the weakening of the end of a word as a result, the declensions started to disappear. While the nouns and adjectives still preserved stem-suffixes, they had declensions but once the stem suffixes started to weaken and disappear, the declensions were lost as well and the endings were simplified and got fewer:

Sound Interchange –the usage of interchange of vowels and consonants for the purpose of word- and form-building (e.g.: English: bear – birth, build – built, tooth – teeth; German: gebären – Geburt)

Ablaut/Vowel Gradation – an independent vowel interchange, unconnected with any phonetic conditions (phonetic environment/surrounding) used to differentiate between grammatical forms of one and the same word. The Germanic ablaut was consistently used in building the principle forms of strong verbs.

Jacob Grimm has subdivided all the verbs into two groups according to the way they build their principle forms:

The most important innovation in Gmc was the emergence of the new types of verbs – “weak”, past tense with the dental suffix d: open – opened, work – worked.

IN LEXIS: