West Germanic Lengthening of Consonants

West Germanic languages show peculiar phenomenon in the sphere of consonants, which has been called West Germanic lengthening of consonants. Its essence is this: every consonant (with the single exception of r) is lengthened if it is preceded by a short vowel and followed by the consonant j.

e.g. OE sætian – settan (set)

stæpian – steppan (step)

tælian – tellan (tell) etc.

In writing the long consonants are represented by doubling the consonant letter, therefore the process is also sometimes called West-Germanic doubling of consonants.

 

The Second Consonant Shift. The Germanic consonant shift is called the first, to distinguish it from a second consonant shift, which occurred in High German Dialects (in Southern Germany).

The PG voiced d corresponds to HG voiceless t:

OE bedd (bed)          HG bett

OE don (do)             HG tun

The PG voiceless p corresponds to HG voiceless f:

OE pol (pool)           HG pfuhl

OE hopian (hope)               HG hoffen

The voiceless k corresponds to the voiceless fricative ch [x] after a vowel:

OE macian (make)   HG machen

OE storc (stork)        HG storch

However, all these changes penetrated into the literary German language. Most of the changes remained confined to the most Southern German dialects (Bavaria, Austria). The second consonant shift occurred between the 5th and 7th century A.D., spreading from South to North. A few hundred years later, between the 8th and 12th century one more change took place, which gave the German consonant system its present shape. As we see, the PG d developed into t in HG; as a result the German consonant system had no d - sound. Now a new d appeared, coming from the PG:

OE Þrie (three)         HG drei

OE Þu (thou)           HG du

OE broÞor (brother) HG bruder

OE muÞ (mouth)      HG mund

In this way the gap left in the HG consonant system by the change of d into t in the II consonant shift was filled. Modern literary German again has a complete system: p/b, t/d, k/g.

 

GRAMMATICAL SYSTEM

 

Throughout history the following parts of speech could be found in the Germanic group: the Noun, the Adjective, the Pronoun, the Numeral, the Verb, the Adverb, the Conjunction, and the Preposition. In Common Germanic the Noun, the Pronoun, the Adjective had the grammatical categories of gender, number, case.

Noun

The original structure of a noun in Germanic, as well as in other IE languages, presents itself as follows: a noun consists of 3 elements:

1. the root (the meaning of the root is clear: it is the lexical meaning of the noun);

2. a case inflexion (the meaning of the case inflexion is also clear: it expresses the relation between the thing denote by the substantive and other things or actions and also the category of number);

3. a stem-building suffix.

The meaning of the stem-building suffix is much more difficult to define. From the point of view of the period to which the texts of Old Germanic belong, this suffix no longer has any meaning at all. It would appear that originally stem-building suffixes were a means of classifying the nouns according to their meaning. What the principle of classification was, is hard to tell, there is only one type of noun in Gothic which is characterized by a distinct semantic feature. These are nouns denoting relationship and derived by means of the:

1. stem-forming suffix r e.g. faðar, broðar, swistar, etc.

2. vocalic stems (declension of these nouns – strong declension)

3. n-stems (this declension is called weak)

4. root-stems (a peculiar type – these nouns never had a stem-building suffix, so that their stem had always coincided with their root).

Later the stem-building suffix lost its own meaning and merged with the case inflexion. As a result the stem of the noun consisted of the root alone.

Adjective

Declension of Adjectives in Old Germanic languages is complicated in a way which finds no parallel in other IE languages. The adjectives could be declined according to the strong and weak declension. Weak declension forms are used when the adjective is preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the definite article; they are associated with the meaning of definiteness. In all other contexts forms of the strong declension are used.

Verb

The bulk of the verbs in PG and in OG languages fall into two large groups called strong and weak. These terms were proposed by J. Grimm. He called the verbs strong because they had preserved the richness of form since the age of the parent-language and in this sense could be contrasted to weak verbs lacking such variety of form. From the verbs the terms were extended to noun and adjective declensions. The main difference between these groups lies in the means of building the principal forms: the Present Tense, the Past Tense, and Participle II.

The strong verbs built their principal forms with the help of root vowel interchanges plus certain grammatical endings (made use of IE ablaut with certain modifications).

The weak verbs are a specifically Germanic innovation, for the device used in building their principal forms is not found outside the Germanic group. They built the Past Tense and Participle II by inserting a special suffix between the root and the ending: