The Modern Germanic Languages.

The total number of people speaking Germanic languages is more than 300 mln people and some 200 mln of them are English speaking people. All Germanic dialects and languages are related through common origin and joint development at the early stages of their history. Before passing to their linguistic characteristics, we shall briefly outline the external history of the group to see when and where the Germanic languages could get their common and individual features. The modern Germanic languages are: 1. the English language is spoken in Great Britain, Australia, New Zeeland and USA. In these countries it is the national language, the language of the majority of the population. In Canada, English is one of the 2 state languages alongside with French. English speaking Canadians make up more than 40 % of the population. In the South African Republic, English is also one of the State Languages together with Afrikaans. So, English was introduced by force as language of colonial domination in the former colonies and dominions of Great Britain where existed local languages of the population of these countries as state languages. Obtaining freedom in these countries English loses the dominant status and gradually is replaced by the local languages. 2. German- is spread in Germany, Austria, North and South Switzerland, in Luxemburg and on the territory of France. It is also spread in different regions on the territory of Europe and USA. German is spoken by approximately 100 mln people. 3. Dutch- is the language of the population of the Netherlands and Flanders uniting the North provinces of Belgium; it is also spread in the USA and West India. Dutch is spoken by more than 19 mln people. 4. Afrikaans- it is also called Boer language. It is the language of the Dutch colonists. It is one of the 2 state languages of the South African Republic, the second is English. About 3.5 mln people spoke it. 5. Yiddish- is the modern Germanic language. It is spread in different countries among the Jewish population. 6. Frisian- is not an independent national language. It is spoken on the Frisian Islands, Northern Coast of the Netherlands and in a small region of the North-West of Germany. About 370 thousands of people speak this language. The North Germanic Scandinavian Subgroup. It includes the following languages: 1. Icelandic- is the language of Iceland and no where else the language is spoken. About 215 thousands speak it. 2. Norwegian- is the language of Norway with the population of nearly 4 mln people. 3. Faeroes- is the language of Faeroes Islands. Nearly 35 thousands people speak it. 4. Swedish-is the language of the population of Sweden and part of the population of Finland. 8 mln people speak it in Sweden and 400 thousand people speak it in Finland. 5. Danish- is the language of Denmark, with the population of more than 5 mln people. It is also spread in Groenland and on the Faeroese Islands. The Scandinavian languages Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are spread on some states of the USA and Canada, among the emigrants of the Scandinavian countries. The Common Germanic Period. The earliest period in the development of common group refers to the prewritten stages of human history. Historical and archeological facts proved that before Germanic group had formed a separate linguistic group, it had entered larger speech communities; it constituted a dialectal group of Indo-European, to be more exact, its western area. It was at that period that the Indo-European languages developed the common linguistic features, some of which can still be found in most modern Indo-European languages including Germanic. It is generally believed that the Germanic group of dialects developed the specific Germanic characteristics during the 1st millennium B.C. On these grounds one can assume that groups of tribes speaking there would be Germanic dialects split from other west Indo-European tribes at that time. It is this event that is the separation from other tribes that marks the beginning of the Germanic linguistic history. They must have lived on a small territory because their spoken dialects were very much alike. Unfortunately, these closely related dialects have not preserved the written form. The essential features have been reconstructed from later written sources and the language of this group is commonly known as the Common Germanic parent language or simply Common Germanic, also primitive language. Its earlier stages are often distinguished from later common Germanic because of pronounced dialectal variations. The Common Germanic period lasted approximately about till the beginning of our era. The spiting of the Germanic group from other Indo-European groups doesnt mean lose of contacts with them as in the

course of time and their migrations, the Germanic tribes got in touch with their former neighbors, consolidated into larger groups or separated again. These movements where reflected in their speech. If the tribes mixed again or came into closer contact, their dialects got linguistic features common to the newly formed group. Germanic at the beginning belonged to the western area of the Indo-European family. At the beginning of their separate history the Germanic tribes were close to some East-European tribes whose languages later formed the Baltic and Slavonic groups. Later, the Germanic tribes established closer ties with the Italic tribes living in Southern Europe. They were also closely connected with the Celtic tribes who populated vast territories in the Western Europe. At the end of Common Germanic period, the Ancient Germans again come into contact with the Italic group namely the Latin language. Thus, the separation of Germanic dialects from other Indo-European dialects was followed by new contacts with related languages. On the other hand, due to their movements, they come into contact with tribes speaking non-Indo-European languages and marged with them. The Germanic linguistic innovations are explained by the influence of the unknown Indo-European languages in the zones of the other Germanic expansions. Their external history can be reconstructed with great accuracy from Roman and Greek sources. The Ancient Germans. During the last few centuries B.C. the Germanic tribes lived on the western coast of the Baltic Sea and in the Southern part of Scandinavia. The 1st mention of these tribes is found in a description of a voyage to the Baltic Sea made by Pithias, a great historian and geographer in 325 BC. At the beginning of our era, the greater part of modern France, Italy and Spain was populated by the Celts. The Romans tried to expand their territories North-West. They met strong resistance of Barbarian tribes whom they called Germanic tribes of Tutons, using the name of one tribe to the whole group. Julius Cesar in his history of the Gallic (French) War, described some Germanic tribes whose attacks he had to beat off. Some hundred years later, Pliny the elder- a great Roman scientist and writer described the Germans in his book Natural History. In the 1st century of our era, all the existing facts about them were included by Tacitus in his book Germany. He made a list of Old Germanic tribes and classified them in such a way that they show the concrete dialectal grouping. In those days, the Germans maintained close contact with the Romanized Celts and, though them or directly, with Romans. From the Romans, they learned among other things, the use of money, better agricultural techniques, food processing and others. The 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. marked a turning point in the history of the Germanic tribes, the period of the so called Great Migrations. In the 2nd-5th centuries their movements intensified. For some tribes this process lasted till the 9th century. These migrations marked the transition from the slave owing system to that of early feudalism. Differentiation of Common Germanic. The Common Germanic parent language was never a uniform language. It was made up of closely related spoken dialects which differed to a great degree by the beginning of our era. It was their migrations that led to the geographical separation of tribal groups and than to the development of their tongues or languages. Around the beginning of our era, Common Germanic languages differentiated into Old Germanic dialects. The initial stages of the history of Old Germanic dialects refer to the prewritten epoch. The earliest inscriptions in some Old Germanic dialects refer to the 3rd century whereas in other dialects there was no writing till the 12th or 14th century. Runic Alphabet was 1st Germanic alphabet. The Germanic languages of the earliest written works are known as Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Swedish, etc. The tribal languages of the migrating tribes changed into local dialects of the age of feudalism. The next stages of their history which was called Middle or New was as we have today in the history of English and German and other languages. The formation of the national languages, the consolidation of dialects was connected with the unification of people into states, under the capitalized system from the 15th century onward.

History of Germanic Languages.

East Germanic. Part of Tutonic tribes that lived on the Scandinavian Pen-la migrated south to Northern Germany, in the last centuries before our era. There they represented the Eastern subgroup of Germanic languages. The Goths were the most numerous and powerful of the East Germanic tribes; the names of the other tribes are the Vandals and the Burgundies. According to Tacistus the whole group was called Vindils. The Goths played an important role in the history of the early middle ages. They were the first of the Ancient Germans to leave the Coast of the Baltic Sea. In 200 AD they settled in the Plains, North of the Black Sea, thus, moving to the South-East. Those who stayed there later were absorbed by the native population. The western branch of the Goths traveled west from the Coast of the Black Sea and traversed the Balkans. In 410 AD they captured Rome, but they didnt stop there, moving on to the Southern part of France and Spain. They formed there their first powerful Barbarian Kingdom. Though they were soon linguistically absorbed by the native population, the Romanized Celts. The other Germanic tribes are believed to have left the Plains near the Baltic Sea and consolidated into kingdoms over the territory of France and Spain, but they disintegrated. The names of these tribes survived in the names of Burgundia and Andalusia. All the East Germanic languages are now dead. Yet, the Gothic language is even now studied by linguists because it is the earliest written language in the Germanic group. The Goths were the first of the Old Germanic tribes to be Christianized. In the 4th century, Ulfilas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospil from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Fragments of this Gospil reached us and are kept in Uppsala (Sweden). It is a manuscript of about 200 pages of red parchment with silver and gold letters and is called Silver Codex. It was first published in the late of the 17th century. The Gothic language used in the Gospil had suffered very few changes since the Common Germanic period. This gives the possibility to modern philologists to reconstruct the essential features of the parent language and to investigate the prewritten stages of other Old Germanic dialects. The Gothic language had a strong resemblance to the English language of the prewritten period, although it is not the ancestor of English. North Germanic. The Ancient Germans that populated Scandinavia were isolated for several hundred years as they remained there. Only a small group crossed the Baltic Sea and settled in Jutland. The differentiation of the dialects and dialectal groups of the tribes living in Scandinavia was very slow. Up to the 19th century, their speech had very small dialectal variation. Their tongue is known as Old Scandinavian or Old Norse and has survived in runic inscriptions dating from the 3rd to the 9th century of our Era. But in the 19th century when the Scandinavians began to migrate, Old Norse began to disintegrate. The so called Viking Age began when they made raids on the neighbor countries and overseas. Some Scandinavian known as Northman settled in France and formed Normandy. In the same century, they began raids on the British Isles and gradually occupied the greater part of Britain; they colonized Iceland and Greenland and from there reached North America. In Iceland the dialects brought by the Scandinavian tribes colonists developed into and independent NorthGermanic language-Iceland. The earliest texts in Old Icelandic date in the 12th century. This language has suffered few changes in the later ages due to its geographical isolation. In Scandinavia, the main dialectal division which became more pronounced began after the 9th century and they correspond to the political division into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The 3 kingdoms constantly struggled for dominance. The situation of the languages changed as one or another of the powers prevailed over its neighbors. Denmark was the most powerful kingdom for many hundred years. It annexed southern Sweden, the Southern Baltic Coast up to the Golf of Riga and most of the British Isles. Norway falls under Danish rule by the 14th century. Sweden regained its independence in the 16th century, while Norway was a backward province politically dependent on Denmark until the beginning of the 19th century. As a result both Swedish and Norwegian languages were influenced by Danish. In the late Middle Ages first Danish and then Swedish developed into national languages. The development of Norwegian was considerably hindered by the political dependence of Norway on Sweden and Denmark. The main modern North Germanic languages are: Norwegian and Icelandic in the West, Danish and Swedish in the East. They form a subgroup of Germanic languages and they are related to English which belongs to the West division of the Germanic group. West Germanic. Germanic.

This subgroup is of great interest to us as the English language belongs here. Before the migrations, the Germanic tribes populated the Lowlands/Plains between the Odder and the Elbe River. Under the pressure of the Goths they may have retreated west. Later they spread up to the Rein River to the Highlands of Germany and in other directions. Pliny and Tacitus described the subgroup of the West Germanic tribes under 3 names. There were 3 principal groups of tribes at the beginning of the migration period: I. the Franconians, II. the High Germans, III. the the Angles, the Saxons and the Frisians. I. In the early middle ages, the Franconians were the most numerous and powerful group of the all West Germans. After that, their tribal alliance transformed into one of the biggest feudal states of Medieval Europe. They extended eastwards and southwards into almost half of North Italy. It lacked economic and ethnic unity and in the 9th century it divided into 2: the Western part which was to become the basis of France and the Easter which disintegrated into several feudal kingdoms of Germany. On the territory of France. The West Germanic dialects were soon forgotten because the majority of the people, Celtic by origin, spoke dialects of the Romance group descending from Latin. In the lower basin of the Rain River, the Franconian dialects developed into Dutch, the national language of Holland, and Flemish-a dialect in Belgium. One more independent West Germanic language developed directly from Dutch and is the language of South African Republic called Afrikaans. II. High Germans. The High German group is called High because the tribes lived in the Highlands of Germany. Like the first group, the tribes speaking High German dialects did not go far in the migrations. They defended the Amount settlements and pushed East-driving Slavonic tribes from the places. The Old High German language is known from written works of the 8th century. It absorbed some features of High and Middle Franconian dialects too. The literary language developed after the reformation, thou no spoken standard existed until the 19th century, because Germany politically remained divided into a number of small kingdoms. High German is a little bit modified form spoken in Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland. The High German dialects of the Middle Ages become the basis of the language of the Jews who settled in Germany in the 10th and the 11th century. Numerous Jewish communities who settled in Germany adopted these dialects and gradually changed them so much that at present their language is a separate language of the West Germanic group called Yiddish or new Jewish. III. The 3rd group of Germanic tribes was made of Saxons, Anglos and Frisian dialects. The Saxons lived in the Lowland of Germany. The Low Frisian tribes occupied the coast of the North Sea between the Elbe and Rein Rivers. In the 5th century the Angles, some of the Saxons and the Jutes began the invasion of British Isles. They brought the West Germanic dialects with them which developed into the English language. English at first was spread to part of Great Britain, than it spread to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland because they were annexed to Britain. Later English was brought to North America, India, Australia and some parts of Africa. Until recently English was the only official and written language in many British colonies and dominion. Frisian tribes participated in the invasion of Britain, but the greater part stayed on the continent and their dialects survived as thee dialect of Frisianland. It has both an oral and written form. The Saxon dialects of the Saxon tribes who stayed on the continent formed an important dialectal group in Germany. They are called Low German dialects. So the modern languages of the West Germanic subgroup are: English with its American variant, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish and also the Frisian, Flemish and Low German dialects. From the very beginning English was closest to Frisian, but they developed differently and that is why now they differ very much.

History of Germanic Philology

In the 16th-17th century, during the period of formation of states and national languages, great interest arose to national languages in European countries. The first descriptive grammars of native languages including Germanic ones- English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, etc were made up. The grammarians discussed the problems of writing (spelling, orthography), pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary. The elaboration of the historical comparative method in the 19th century gave the possibility of explaining many similarities of Indo-European languages and followed the process of their development. The founders of this method were the German linguist-Franz Bop and a Danish scientist- Rasmus Rask. Franz Bop was the 1st to describe the system of conjugation of Older Indian language- Sanskrit in comparison with Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages. He convincingly showed thet the constant similarity in the conjugation of the verb in these languages could be explained only by one reason- their common origin. Rasmus Rask proved the community of Germanic Languages. Jacob Grimm another German linguist, in his book The German Grammar showed the great importance of working out the historical comparative method. In his book for describing the Germanic group of languages and for the elaboration of German grammar, he used this method in comparison with other Germanic languages. The founders of this method, not only put the basis of this concept on the relationships of languages, but also laid the base of scientific approaches of the comparative historical analysis of facts of related languages. The prerequisite of applying the comparative historical method is the possibility of dividing the languages and determining their origin. The common language from which related languages developed got the name of parent language. In some cases the parent language is known, as for example, Latin for Romance group, but more often the parent language is a restored language model obtained with the help of comparative historical method. On the basis of this method the following Indo-European languages and language-groups are distinguished: 1) Hety; 2) Tokharian; 3) Indian group; 4) Iranian group (Old Iranian); 5) Greek group; 6) Celtic group; 7) Italic group (the main member representative is Latin); 8) Romance group; 9) Germanic group; 10) Baltic group 11) Slavonic group; 12) Albanian language; 13) Armenian language. This classification of Indo-European languages is genetical as it is based on the principle of the origin from a common Indo-European parent language. In the 2nd half of the 19th century the philologistscomparatives concentrated their attention on the investigation of concrete phonetical, grammatical and lexical phenomena and considerably improved the method of comparative historical analysis. The young grammarians, young not by age, but by experience, proposed the idea that each phonetical change took place according to laws without any exceptions, but if there still appear deviations then they were caused by the function of some other laws. In search of explanations to exceptions in phonetical laws, the grammarians turned their attention to the influence of analogy in the development of languages as well as to the borrowings from other languages. One of the great contributions was made by Delbrook in his collection of materials. In 1879 the work of the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Memoirs) on the very first system of vowels in Indo-European languages appeared. In 1916 the work of Millet The main particularities of the Germanic group of languages appeared. He tried to restore the real dynamics of language development and show what the specificity of German languages consist in.

History of Germanic Writing. -Importance of Writing; - Types of writing One of the proofs on the existence of the Germanic languages in the prewritten period may serve the Common Germanic language giving the possibility to Germanic tribes to communicate and understand eachother, that is, use oral speech. Writing (orthography) is the most trustworthy evidence of the language, the most reliable and first-hand source of information about it. To have a clear imagination about the vocabulary or word-stock and grammatical system of a language in the prewritten period, the scientist-philologists apply different facts about the character of the investigated language or reconstruct the language material using their comparative historical analysis. It was so that the comparativists dealt with the reconstruction of the Germanic parent language in the 1st half of the 19th century. Runic Alphabet. The earliest Germanic written records were runic writing (alphabet). The first works are inscriptions on hard material made in a special alphabet known as the Runes (letters). The word rune originally meant secret mystery and was use to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. The runes were used by many Germanic tribes on the continent, especially in Scandinavia. They were used as letters in an alphabet, each to denote a separate sound. Besides, a rune could also denotes a word beginning with that sound and was called by that word. For example: the rune __ denoting sound __ and __ is known Old English thorn. The rune __ denoting __ is called by the Older English word ______ which means _____. This rune __ stood for the sound __ and was called _____ that means _______. In some inscriptions the runes were found, arranged in a fixed order which made up a sort of alphabetical order. After the first 6 letters this alphabet is commonly known as _______ _______ or _______ which mean Runic Alphabet. [____________ ] The Runic Alphabet is a specifically Germanic one not to be found in other languages. The letters are angular, straight, lines are preferred; curves lines avoided. This is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in stone, bone, metal and wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of the Ancient Greek or Latin alphabet, others have not been found in any known alphabet. The number of runes varied in different Germanic dialects. As compared to most continental runes, their number in England was greater; it increased as new sounds appeared. In Old English there were 28 runes in comparison with 16 or 24 on the continent, but in the 9th century, it reached a maximum of 33 runes. Neither on the continent nor in Britain were the runes ever used for everyday writing or for writing poetry or prose works. Their only function at all times was to make inscriptions on objects, tombstones ______, rings, coins and amulets. The oldest texts are an inscription on a box made of whale bone called Franks Casket and a short text on a stone cross known as Ruthwell Cross near the Village of Ruthwell. Franks Casket was discovered in the 19th century and was presented to the British museum by a British archeologist, Frank by name. The casket is a small box made of whole bone; there are pictures on its four sides with runic inscriptions. It is a 15 feet tall stone cross with inscriptions and ornamented on all sides. The runes went completely out of use by the end of Old English period (700AD1100 AD). Runology, as an independent scientific discipline appeared in the 17ths- the 19ths century. Its founder was the Danish scientist Ludwing Wimm Sufius ______. The origin of the runic alphabet is not quite clear, some runes having similarities with letters of the Latin alphabet, others with the Greek one. Thats why some scientists tried to show the origin of the Runic Alphabet as coming from Latin, others-from Greek. It was in the 19th century when the idea was advanced that runes come of one of the North-Italic alphabets. According to this hypothesis, the runs appeared in the North of Italy in the 2nd-3rd centuries. Then it was taken by the Germanic tribes and gradually they spread it to other tribes, from South to North. Durer the founder of Gothic Alphabet including 27 letters (look like fracture).Unlike Gothic alphabet, English one includes 26 letters (6 vowels). First time, gothic alphabet appeared in the Imperial Office (Germany, France), being preserved until 1945 in Germany. Gothic language came from Latin. {Accent or stress in Germanic languages; the system of phonemes- in Germanic languages}.

Main features of Germanic Languages- (phonetics)

All Germanic languages of the past and present have common linguistic features. Some of them are shared by other linguistic groups of the Indo-European family, others are specifically Germanic. The latter distinguish Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages. The Germanic languages got their common features before the disintegration of the Common Germanic into Old Germanic dialects. Later separate dialect, groups and languages preceded along different lines have lost some of their common features and developed now individual ones; however the common characteristics of the group are most manifested in the Common Germanic parent language. 1. WORD ACCENT (stress). The Germanic system with it characteristic word accent is one of the distinguishing features of the group. It was acquired as early as the Common Germanic period and served as the primary factor of many later Germanic tendencies of the development. It is known that word stress was free or movable; it could fall on different syllables of the word irrespective of weather they were rootmorphemes and affixes and could be shifted both in word-building and form-building. Both these properties of the Indo-European accent changed already at the Common Germanic stage. As to the place of the stress, it is believed that is was as free and movable as in other Indo-European languages. Sometime later, stress became fixed on the 1st syllable which was as a rule the root-syllable, its position became stable. The root-morpheme had the heaviest stress, other syllable, namely suffixes and endings, remained unstressed or weekly stressed. Stress was no longer shifted either in the form building or word-building. These features of Common Germanic stress were inherited by all the Old Germanic dialects and in spite of later changes their traces are still observed in the Modern German languages. All the German languages nowadays use a heavy stress which brings to a contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables and sounds. Even now, in polysyllabic words, the word-stress usually falls on the root-morpheme while the suffix and endings carry a weaker stress. One can conclude that the Germanic stress was a factor of historical development and the sound system was affected by it. Since it was the 1st syllable or the root-morpheme that had the stress, the suffixes and endings were gradually weakened, the morphological structure of the word was simplified and the grammatical endings weakened or lost. 2. VOWELS. 1. The history of Germanic languages from Common Germanic period to nowadays has shown that the vowels in Germanic languages where on the whole very unstable. They underwent different changes: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. At times a few vowels were changed, and other times, groups of vowels were modified. 2. The most important feature of Germanic vowel development at all periods was its dependence on the Germanic word stress. There was a pronounced contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables; the former pronounced distinctly, the latter tended to become the less distinct. The difference in the development of the 2 kinds of syllables is seen when analyzing the vowels. In stressed position the difference between vowels was strictly preserved and emphasized: the contrast of long and short vowels (opposition of quantity was kept as well as to quality), new qualitative differences developed in the number of vowels occurring in stressed syllables gradually increased. In unstressed position the original contrast between vowels were weakened and many of the previous distinctions lost: The opposition of long vowels to short ones was neutralized as both short and long vowels appeared as short. In final unstressed syllable some short vowels were completely dropped. The qualitative differences between vowels were reduced as most vowels developed in the direction of the neutral sound. The difference between the treatment of vowels in stressed and unstressed position, in relation to quality and quantity can be shown in the following way: STRESSED POSITION UNSTRESSED POSITION <---------> - Long vowels become short - longshort; shortzero - New qualitative differences - Qualitative distinctions are reduced or lost arises in each set 3. The changes of separate vowels in Germanic languages were so numerous and varied that only some of them can be interpreted as showing general tendencies of evolution. The division of vowels into long and short, in stressed syllables, was supported by some independent qualitative historical changes: short vowels generally tended to become more open, long vowels on the contrary were narrowed and closed.

4. The development of vowels in the Germanic groups was characterized by strong tendency of assimilative change caused by the influence of the following or preceding consonants and even more, by the succeeding vowels. COMMON GERMANIC VOWEL PHONEMES IE: Short Germanic IE: Long Germanic i i/e i i e e/I e e a a a a o o o u u u u We can see that the positional variants e/i did not developed into new phonemes, but soon fell together with the existing phonemes, the earlier e and i; o (from u) made a new phoneme in Common Germanic filling the vacant position of the former Indo-European o which had become a in Germanic. It is believed that every system of phonemes tends to become symmetrical and any vacuum in the balanced system tends to be filled. CONSONANTS The consonants in Germanic Languages are characterized by a number of specific features which constitute perhaps the most remarkable characteristics of the group being the most obvious (evident). Like other Indo-European languages, the Germanic consonants are: noise and sonorant, occlusive and fricatives, voiced and voiceless. Yet, comparison of Germanic and Non-Germanic words shows that Germanic consonants do not correspond to the same consonants on other languages. It has been found that during the Common Germanic period almost all Germanic consonants changed The most important and comprehensible of these changes are known as the 1st Germanic consonant shift (change). These changes were 1st formulated as a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm, a German linguist of the early 19th century and is known as Grimms Law. Three rows of Indo-European noise consonants were shifted in Common Germanic. Indo-European voiceless occlusive consonants appeared in Germanic as voiceless fricative consonants. 1. Indo-European p [ph], t[th], k[kh]; Germanic pf, ,x ; 2. Indo-European voiced non-aspirated occlusive consonants are shifted to voiceless occlusive consonants: Indo European b, d, g Germanic----- p, t, k 3. Indo-European voiced aspirated occlusive consonants are reflected in Germanic as voiced fricative consonants: Indo-European bh, dh, gh Germanic----- b, ,g English words borrowed from Non-Germanic languages show the original Indo-European consonants, while native English (Germanic) words coming from the same Common Indo-European roots exemplify the shifting [p][f]- paternal-father; [k][h]- kannin-hound; [g][k]- agriculture-acre; [d][t] dentist-tooth. According to the Common Germanic Consonant shift, one could find a voiceless fricative instead of a voiced one or a voiced occlusive. These exceptions to the shift were explained by a Danish scholar, Karl Werner, later in the 19th century. He suggested that in early Common Germanic, at the time of free wordstress fricative consonants became voiced depending on the position of the stress. Werners law can be formulated as follows: and All the Common Germanic fricative consonants become voiced between vowels (in intervocalic position) if the preceding vowel was unstressed and the immediately following vowel had the Indo-European and Early Common Germanic stress. In the absence of these conditions they remained unchanged, that is voiceless. Changes of voiceless and voiced consonants, due to Warners Law, can be found in grammatical forms of one and the same words or words derived from the same root.

Principal Peculiarities of Germanic Languages. Morphology 1. MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORD. To understand the grammatical and the lexical features of the Germanic group it is necessary to examine the morphological structure of the word in Common Germanic. In all periods of history, words in Germanic languages could be divided into 3 types according to the number and character of their components: simple, derivative and compound words. The root morpheme together with the word building affixes is termed (called) the stem. The stem may be equal to the root as in simple words, may contain word-building affixes as in derived words or may have a more complicated structure: it can contain more than one root morpheme and word building affixes in addition. When we analyze the words from the diachronical point of view (historian point of view), it is not easy to distinguish between the 3 main structures because derived words could change into simple by loosing the affixes, while compound words could develop into derived ones if the second root morpheme was transformed into a suffix or fused (joint) into a root. Consider the simplification in the Old English skip hired (herdsman of sheep); New EnglishSheppard. It has been discovered that the Early Germanic morphological structure words was more complicated than that of written periods. In Common Germanic the stem consisted of 2 basic components: the root morpheme and the stem forming suffix and to these two elements a 3rd morpheme, the grammatical ending, was added. In later Common Germanic and in Old Germanic dialects, the morphological structure of the word was considerably simplified. The stem suffix disappeared as a separate morpheme in the word-structure. In such a way the morphological structure of the word includes 2 elements: the root morpheme and the grammatical ending. 2. Sound Alternations in the Root Morpheme and Special Reference to ABLAUT. A characteristic feature of the Germanic group is the variability of the root-morpheme which is rather changeable as far as vowels are concerned, that is, vowels could be found in the same root morpheme at one and the same historical period. The differences between the variants of the root morpheme must be attributed to vowel alternations which differentiate between grammatical forms of the word. The earliest and the most vividly and systematically employed interchange preserved in the Germanic group from Ancient Indo-European was a vowel interchange called ablaut or vowel gradation/ mutation. It was a Common Indo-European, not a specific Germanic feature. It was found in other Indo-European languages too. The examples of the Russian language prove this: e-o --forming different forms of the verb. (-). This kind of gradation is called qualitative- because only the quality of the vowel is changed; the other kind of ablaut known as quantitative is a difference based on quantity, long vowels alternate with short ones and with the reduced or zero grades, meaning that the vowel is neutral or lost. 3. FORM BUILDING MEANS. All the Old Indo European languages were symphatic that is they showed the relations between words in the sentence by adding inflections and changing the stem rather than by word order or auxiliary words which are used in languages with a more analytical structure. Various means of form-building were used, all of them being symphatic means such as: a) sound alternation- at the beginning it was applied to verbs. Later it spread to other parts of speech. It stood second among other form building means in Old Germanic.; b). grammatical endings or suffixes- the formation of a grammatical ending was a very complicated process, the old ending fused with the stem suffix and both elements together were reduced. ; c). In contrast to endings, grammatical prefixes were hardly ever employed. They were confined to the verb system used to mark Participle II or to express a perfective meaning connected with the category of aspect.; d). Another means of form building supplitive forms was inherited by Germanic languages from Indo-European. In Germanic it was restricted to some personal pronounce, a few verbs and adjectives. NOTE: supplitivism means the formation of a form of one and the same word from different roots or stems, the differences are seen far beyond alternations. (I-me-my-mine; be-am, is, are-was, were; old-elder-eldest; late-later, latter-latest, the last). Later, a new kind of forms analytical developed in addition to symphatic ones. The tendency to analytical form building was very strong. It functioned in all the subgroups of Germanic languages and is an important distinguishing mark in the group. Nowadays, the proportion of symphatic and analytical form in the language of the group differs. Parts of Speech and their grammatical categories.

The Germanic languages, a group of Indo-European family had approximately the same division of words into parts of speech as other groups. The following parts of speech could be found throughout the history: the NOUN, the ADJECTIVE, the PRONOUN, the NUMERAL (these are declinable parts of speech or nomina = number, gender, case); the VERB, the ADVERB, the COUNJUNCTION and the PREPOSITION (indeclinable). The VERB was and is conjugated. All the inflected parts of speech were characterized by certain grammatical categories. a). The noun and the adjective. In Common Germanic, the noun, pronoun and adjective had the grammatical categories of gender, number and case. The Germanic languages have 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter which sometimes, thou not always, corresponded to the natural gender or sex. The Old Germanic dialects of the early written records (works) preserved that distinction, some of them, for instance English have lost or transformed them to a considerable degree. As to the category of number it should be said that some Old Germanic dialects had 3 numbers: singular, plural and dual, others-two. Thus, Gothic, Old English, Old Icelandic has some dual forms of personal pronouns, The Gothic language had dual verb forms that agreed with these pronounce. Perhaps, the dual number existed in Common Germanic, but it was not preserved for a long time. Germanic had lost a number of cases which as it is assumed was equal to 7 or 8 in Ancient Indo-European. Common Germanic must have kept the original number of 4 cases; other dialects increased the number to 5 (adding Vocative or Instrumental case to Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative). The peculiar characteristics of the adjective in Germanic differed from Indo-European languages by having two-fold declinations: they were inflected for case, number and gender and could be declained according to the weak and strong declination. In the 1st case (weak), they have the same endings as n-stems nouns, the 2nd (strong) had a great variety of endings. The adjective had in additionthe grammatical category of degrees of comparison. b). The grammatical categories of the verb. The verb expresses an action or state. The verb has finite forms (that could and can fulfill the function of the predicate), agrees with the subject through the categories of number and person. They (the finite forms) could and can show the relation of the action to reality through the contrast of indicative, imperative and conjunctive forms making in such a way the category of mood. Reference of the action to time within the indicative and conjunctive moods by present and past forms made up the category of tense. In the Common Germanic period and in the Old English period there were only 2 tense forms: present and past. There was no future tense form. Aspect distinctions (such as continuous, perfect, perfect continuous) were shown irregularly, more by lexical than grammatical means, that is why aspect could not be considered as at a grammatical category of that period of time. Referring to voice it did not exist in Common Germanic in the meaning and form as it is today, that is (i.e.) opposition active/passive. In Old Germanic dialects voice distinction preceded in different directions: Gothic developed forms of Medio-Passive, showing that the subject was not the active doer of the action. Ex: I dress/ I was dressed; the North Germanic South group developed reflexive forms; in most dialects of the western subgroups regular distinction developed much later with the help of analytical forms. In the way other non-finite forms (forms which couldnt and cant individually fulfill the function of the predicate) The difference between Part. I and Part. II could be determined and interpreted as that of voice. Part. I express active meaning, Part. II was active only for the forms build from intransitive verbs, for transitive verbs it was passive. There existed only 2 forms of the non-finite: the INFINITIVE- a kind of verbal noun, and PARTICIPLE I and II where verbal adjectives agreed with the noun which they modified in case, number and gender. Later the number of grammatical categories of the verb group increased and became more complicated. One of the most distinctive features of Germanic languages was the division of the verbs according to the means of form building. All the forms of the verbs were built from principle forms or stems: -the present tense stem, -the past tense stem and Participle II. They were divided into 2 principle groups: strong verbs which built their principal forms by means of vowel gradation or vowel alternation, sometimes of consonants in the rootmorpheme as well. There were 7 classes of strong verbs in Common Germanic and in Old Germanic dialects; in each of them a number of certain gradation was applied. Weak verbs form the past tense stem and Participle II by the addition of the dental suffix to the stem of the present tense, almost without any modification of the rootmorpheme.