Parts of speech

The parts of speech in ancient languages were not as distinct as they are now. So traditionally they were divided into two classes: substantives and verbs. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns refer to the class of substantives. Adjectives combined the features of nouns and pronouns and developed some of their peculiar features.

NOUN: The morphological structure of a noun was the following: root, stem suffix, grammatical ending.

The meaning of the root is the lexical meaning of the noun.

The meaning of the stem suffix is difficult to define now. Probably it served as the means of word derivation. It was a means of distinguishing semantic classes of nouns.

Inflection was the marker of a grammatical form.

As stem suffixes lost their derivational function, they merged with the ending.

According to stem suffixes, nouns in Proto Germanic fell into the following classes:

1) Nouns with a-stems, i-stems, ō -stems, u-stems that belonged to the strong declension;

2) Nouns with n-stems formed the weak declension;

3) Nouns with s-stems and r-stems;

4) Root stems – nouns that didn’t have stem suffixes and inflections were added to the root.

There are correspondences between these types of declension in Germanic languages and the types of declension in other IE languages. Thus Germanic ō -stems correspond to the 1st declension in Latin and Russian; a-stems correspond to the 2nd declension in Latin and Russian.

The Noun is distinguished by the following categories: declension, gender and case.

OG nouns distinguished three genders – masculine, feminine and neuter. The gender was expressed by the stem and so it was connected with the type of declension. The noun had the category of case (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative) and the category of number (singular and plural).

ADJECTIVE had a very complicated system of declension, as each adjective could be declined according to two types of declension; strong and weak (the term was given by J. Grimm). In IE languages, adjectives were declined in the same way as nouns. In Proto-Germanic the strong declension had the features of nominal ō / a-stems, but it also used some inflections of pronouns. For this reason, the strong declension is also called pronominal declension. The weak or nominal declension almost fully coincided with nominal n-stem declension, which is a Germanic feature. The adjective was declined according to the weak pattern when it was preceded by a demonstrative pronoun. The meaning of definiteness was connected with these forms.

Adjectives had the categories of gender, number and case. These categories were not independent, but rather depended on the noun which the adjective modified, meaning that the adjective agreed with the noun in gender, number and case.

The adjective also expressed degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, superlative. The comparative degree was built by means of the suffixes –iza, -oza; the superlative degree was built with the suffixes –ist, -ost. In most IE languages we can find some adjectives whose degrees of comparison are built in a suppletive way from different roots. These adjectives are the same in different languages: gōd – bettra – betst.

PRONOUNS. There were not so many classes of pronouns as we have now. The oldest classes are personal, demonstrative and interrogative pronouns. In OIE languages the personal pronoun had only two persons; the 3rd person developed later from the demonstrative pronouns which had been used to denote people spoken about. The same happened in the Germanic languages. Another ancient feature was the dual number of personal pronouns (ic – wit – wē; þu – ʒit –  ʒē). This dual feature was present until Late Old English, but by Middle English began to fall out of use.

OG demonstrative pronouns developed from those of OIE, but they fully retained their demonstrative meaning only in Gothic and Old Icelandic. In other languages they were often used with weakened demonstrative meaning which later led to their splitting into definite articles and demonstrative pronouns .

Indefinite, defining and negative pronouns developed in the Germanic languages mostly by means of word composition. 

VERBS. There were two large groups of verbs – strong verbs and weak verbs. Strong verbs preserved a rich system of forms they got from the parent language. They had four principal forms - Infinitive, Past singular, Past plural and Participle II. These forms were built by means of vowel gradation and inflections. There were seven classes of strong verbs. The vowel gradation of the first 5 classes was i / a / zero from the IE e / o / zero. The gradation series of the 6th class was a /ō /ō /a from the IE o / ō /ō / a:

faran - fōr - fōrum – farans ( ехать )

The verbs of the 7th class used doubling, meaning the repetition of the root morpheme:

haitan – haihait – haihaitum – haitans ( звать )

letan – lailot – lailotum – letans ( оставлять )

Weak verbs, as briefly discussed above, are a specific feature of the Germanic languages. They are called weak because they lacked the variety of forms typical of the strong verbs. The forms of the Past Tense and Past participle of the weak verbs were built by inserting a special suffix between the root and the ending, the dental suffix ð / d. Some scholars hold the opinion that the suffix originated from the verb ‘dou’. Weak verbs formed 4 classes in the Gothic language and 3 classes in other Germanic languages. Here you can see the examples of the forms of the Gothic weak verbs:

class	infinitive	past sing.	past plural	Participle II	translation
I	hausjan	hausida	hausidēdum	hausiþs	слышать
II	salbōn	salbōda	salbōdēdum	salbōþs	мазать
III	haban	habaida	habaidēdum	habaiþs	иметь
IV	fullnan	fulnōda	fullnōdēdum	-	наполнять

These classes of weak verbs had different stem suffixes. They are in bold in the examples above. It is difficult to denote the semantic meaning of each class now, however we know that the verbs of the 1st and 2nd classes are derivatives from nouns, adjectives and other weak verbs and there are only three verbs in the 3rd class. Only the meaning of the 4th class is rather distinct: the verbs of this class expressed a change of state. The correspondent English suffix ‘-en-’ is found in such verbs as ‘weaken’, ‘redden’.

Within Old Germanic languages there was also a group of Preterite-Present verbs . These formed the Present Tense according to the pattern of the Past Tense of the strong verbs, while the past forms were built by adding a dental suffix to the stem. Within this category are modal verbs, verbs denoting possession and verbs denoting estimation. Their common feature is that they don’t denote an action, but rather they denote a certain state as a result of a fulfilled action.

The verb in the OG languages had the categories of person, number, tense and mood. The verb expressed two tenses – Present and Past. The first difference lay in aspect. There were 3 aspects: durative, momentary and perfective. The tenses developed from these aspects. Durative aspect gave origin to the present tense, momentary aspect – to the past tense, perfective aspect combined two elements – the completion of the action in the past while the result of the action refers to the present. There were no specific forms to express future actions. This meaning was expressed lexically by means of modal verbs, adverbs and the present tense of the verb. There were three moods: indicative, imperative and subjunctive. The forms were synthetic. Additionally, the verb agreed with the subject in person and number.