2. Vowels.

Throughout history, beginning with PG, vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g.: [o>a] or [p>f]; quantitative changes make long sounds short or short sounds long, e.g.: |i>i:]; dependent changes (also positional or combinative) are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance, a sound may change under the influence of the neighbouring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable; independent changes — also spontaneous or regular — take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, i.e. they affect a certain sounds in all positions.

From an early date the treatment of vowels was determined by the nature of word stress. In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and new distinctive features were introduced, so that the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened or lost; the distinction of short and long vowels was neutralised so that by the age of writing the long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. As for originally short vowels, they tended to be reduced to a neutral sound, losing their qualitative distinctions and were often dropped in unstressed final syllables.

Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is commonly regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. The contrast of short and long vowels is supported by the different directions of their changes. While long vowels generally tended to become closer and to diphthongise, short vowels, on the contrary, often changed into more open sounds. These tendencies can be seen in the earliest vowel changes which distinguished the PG vowel system from its IE source.

IE short [o] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a] and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE [a], in other words in PG they merged into [o]. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o:] and merged with [o:]. The examples in Table 1 illustrate the resulting correspondences of vowels in parallels from Germanic and non-Germanic languages (more apparent in Old Germanic languages than in modern words, for the sounds have been modified in later history):

Independent Vowel Changes in Proto-Germanic: Table 1

PIE PG

o > a

L nox Gt naht,

R ночь OE nátt, Mod SW natt

a: > o:

L mater OE mōdor

R мать NE mother

In later PG and in separate Germanic languages the vowels displayed a tendency to positional assimilative changes: the pronunciation of a vowel was modi­fied under the influence of the following or preceding consonant; sometimes a vowel was approximated more closely to the following vowel. The resulting sounds were phonetically conditioned allophones, which could eventually coincide with another phoneme or develop into a new phoneme.

The earliest instances of progressive assimilation were common Germanic mutations; they occurred in Late PG before its disintegration or a short time after. In certain phonetic conditions, namely before the nasal [n] and before [i] or [j] in the next syllable the short [e], [i] and [u] remained or became close (i.e. appeared as [i] and [u]), while in the absence of these conditions the more open allophones were used: [e] and [o], respectively.

After the changes, in Late PG, the vowel system contained the following short and long sounds:

SHORT VOWELS i e a o u

LONG VOWELS i: e: a: o: u:

Some linguists believe that in addition to these monophthongs, PG had a set of diphthongs : [ei], [ai], [eu], [au] and also [iu]. Nowadays, however, many scholars interpret them as sequences of two independent monophthongs.

c) Consonants.

The specific peculiarities of consonants constitute the most re­markable distinctive feature of the Germanic linguistic group. In compa­rison with other languages within the IE family reveals regular cor­respondences between Germanic and non-Germanic consonants. We regularly find [f] in Germanic where other IE languages have [p]; e.g., E full, Fr plein; wherever Germanic has [p], cognate words in non-Germanic languages have [b] (E pool, R болоmo)..

The consonants in Germanic look 'shifted' as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic languages. The alterations of the con­sonants took place in PG, and the resulting sounds were inherited by the languages of the Germanic group.

The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated as 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 Shift of Consonants.

Grimm's Law

Jacob Grimm classified all the correspondences of the consonants in PG with those of other languages of PIE languages into three groups, which he called Acts. Many scientists believe that the consonant shift took place as a series of successive steps; it took, most probably, on some part of Germanic territory and gradually spread over the whole area.

ACT I