Germanic alphabet. The earliest writings. Grammatical peculiarities of Germanic languages.

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.

 

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 19th 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]

Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19th 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.

 

- Changes in the system of vowels in the Germanic languages

Proto-Germanic Vowel System:

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).