Basic features of protogermanic language

The earliest period of Germanic history is protogermanic. The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of the protogermanic language. Protogermanic is the linguistic ancestor of the parent language of the Germanic group. It’s supposed to have split from related indo-european languages, sometimes between the 15th and 10th centuries before Christ.

As the indo-europeans extended over a larger territory, the ancient germans, or teutons, moved further North than other tribes and settled on the Southern Coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Alb. This place is regarded as the most probable original home of the teutons. Protogermanic is an entirely prehistorical language. It was never recorded in written form.

In the 19th century it was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidences in descent languages. It is believed that at the earliest stage of history protogermanic was fundamentally one language but dialectally covered.

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 greak historian and geographer of the 4th century before Christ.

Grammar of Middle English

 

In the course of ME the grammatical system of the language underwent profound alteration. English has been transformed from synthetic, or inflected, language with a well-developed morphology into a language of the analytical style. In ME grammatical forms could be built in the analytical way with the help of auxiliary words. In the synthetic forms of the ME the means of form-building were the same as before. They are inflections, sound interchanges & suppletion. The division of words into parts of speech has proved to be one of the most permanent characteristic of the language.

 

The noun.

The OE noun had the grammatical category of number and case. The most numerous OE morphological classes of nouns were r-stems or long-stems and n-stems. Even in late OE the endings used in these types were added by analogy to other kinds of nouns, especially if they belonged to the same gender. The decline of the OE declension system lasted over 300 years & revealed considerable dialectal differences. It started in the North of England & gradually spread South words. Simplification of noun morphology affected the grammatical categories of the noun in different ways.

The category of gender. In the 11th & the 12th c. the weakened & level endings of adj. & adj. pronouns seized to indicate gender of the noun. Semantically gender was associated with the differentiation of sex & therefore the formal grouping into genders was superseded by a semantic division into an animate & inanimate nouns with a further subdivision into males & females. In ME gender is a lexical category like in Modern English.

The category of case. The number of cases in the noun paradigm was reduced from 4 to 2 in late ME. The syncretism (неравномерное развитие системы, состоящей из нескольких частей) of cases was a slow process which went on step by step. Even in OE the forms of the nominative & accusative cases weren’t distinguished in the Pl & in some coincided also in the Sg. In EME they fell together in both numbers. Only the genitive case was kept separate from the other forms, which had more explicit formal distinctions in Sg than in the Pl.

In the 14th c. the ending –es of the genitive Sg had become almost universal but there were several exceptions, nouns which were used in the uninflected forms. In the Pl the genitive case had no special marker, it was not distinguished from the common case. The formal distinction between cases in the Pl was lost accept in the nouns which didn’t take –es in the Pl. several nouns with a weak Pl form in –en or with a vowel interchange such as oxen or men, added the marker of the genitive case –es to these forms (oxennes & mennes).

The reduction in the number of cases was linked up with a change in the meanings & functions in the surviving forms. The common case which resulted from the fusion of 3 OE cases assumed all the functions of the former nominative, accusative & dative and also some functions of the genitive case. The ME common case had a very general meaning which was made more specific by the context. These means are: preposition, the meaning of the word predicate & the word order. With the help of these means it could express various meanings formally belonging to different cases. The genitive case is used only attributively to modify a noun.

 

The category of number. This category proved to be the most stable. The Pl forms in ME show obvious traces of numerous OE noun declantions. In late ME the ending –es was the prevalent marker of nouns in the Pl (stone-stones). The ME Pl ending –en is used as a variant marker with some nouns lost its former productivity so in standard Modern English it’s found only in oxen & children. The adjective.

In the course of the ME period the adj. lost all its grammatical categories with the exception of the degrees of comparison. By the end of the OE period the agreement of the adj. with the noun had become looser & in the course of early ME it was practically lost. Though the grammatical category of the adj. reflected those of the noun, most of them disappeared even before the noun lost respective distinction.

The 1st category to disappear was gender which seized to be distinguished by the adj. in the 11th c.. the number of the cases shown in the adj. was reduced. The instrumental case had fused with the dative by the end of OE. Distinction of other cases of early ME was unsteady. As many variant forms of different cases which arose in early ME coincided. In the 13th c. case could be shown only by some variable adj. endings in the strong declantion. Towards the end of the century all case distinctions were lost. The strong & weak forms of adj. were often confused in early ME texts. The general tendency towards an uninflected form affected also the distinction of number though number was certainly the most stable nominal category in old period. In the 14th c. Pl forms were sometimes contrasted to the Sg forms with the help of the ending E in the strong declantion. A new Pl ending S appeared. The use of S is attributed either to the influence of French adj. or to the ending S of nouns. In the age of Chaucer the paradigm of the adj. consisted of 4 forms, distinguished by a single vocalic ending E.

 

Development of the gerund.

The new verbal known in modern grammars as the gerund appeared in ME. The gerund can be traced to 3 sources:

1. –unζ /-inζ

2. the present participle

3. the infinitive

 

In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs, took an object in the genitive case which corresponded to the direct object of the finite verb.

 

Verbs.

Many markers of the grammatical forms of the verb were reduced, leveled & lost in ME. Number distinctions were not only preserved in ME but even become more regular. But towards the end of the period they were neutralized in most positions. The differences in the forms of person were maintained in ME. The distinction of tenses was preserved in the verb paradigm through all historical period. As before past tense was shown with the help of the dental suffix in the weak verbs & with the help of the root vowel interchange in the strong verbs. The system of verbals consisted of the infinitive & 2 participles. The main trend of their evolution in ME can be defined as gradual loss of most nominal features & growth of verbal features. The infinitive lost its inflected form (so-called dative case) in early ME. The prep. tōr which was placed in OE before the inflected infinitive to show direction or purpose, lost its preposition force & changed into a formal sign of the infinitive. The distinctions between 2 participles were preserved in ME. Participle 1 had an active meaning & expressed a process or quality simultaneous with the events described by the predicate of the sentence. Participle 2 had an active or passive meaning depended on the transitivity of the verb and expressed a preceding action or its result in the substinate situation.

 

Degrees of comparison.

In ME the degrees of comparison could be built in the same way, only the suffixes had been weakened to -er, -est and the interchange of the root-vowel was less common than before. Since more adjectives with the sound alteration had parallel forms without it, the forms with an interchange soon fell into disuse (long, lenger, lengest and long, longer, longest).

The most important innovation in the adjective system in the ME period was the growth of analytical forms of the degrees of comparison. It's noteworthy that in ME, when the phrases with ME more and most became more and more common, they were used with all kinds of adj, regardless of the number of syllables and were even preferred with mono- and disyllabic words.

Thus Chaucer has more swete, better worthy. The two sets of forms, synthetic and analytic, were used in free variation until 17th and 18th c., when the morden standart usage was established.

 

 

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