2. Germanic Alphabets

Germanic tribes used three different alphabets for their writings.

1. The most ancient alphabet was Runic, in which each separate letter was called a Rune. Written records in runes can be found in Germany, England and especially in Scandinavia. Runes were not written but carved or cut on wood, metal, stones, so they were not round but angular. Their angular shape is due to the material those inscriptions were made on – wood, stone, bone – and the technique of “writing”, as the letters were not written but carved on those hard materials. The word “rune” meant “mystery”, and those letters were originally considered to be magic signs known to very few people, mainly monks, and not understood by the vast majority of the illiterate population.

The Runic alphabet was used by different Germanic tribes: Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. Eventually the Runic alphabet underwent changes with different Germanic tribes: new letters were added, some of the original ones were dropped.

2. The Gothic alphabet is believed to have been invented by the Gothic bishop Ulfila, so it is often referred to as the Ulfilian alphabet. It was based chiefly on the Greek alphabet, with a number of Latin and Runic letters added, and was only used by the Goths. That alphabet was used in the translation of the Bible made by Ulfila for the Goths who lived in the lower reaches of the Danube.

3. The latest alphabet to be used by Germanic tribes is the Latin alphabet. It superseded both the Runic and the Gothic alphabets when a new technique of writing was introduced, namely that of spreading some colour or paint on a surface instead of cutting or engraving the letters. Introduction of the Latin alphabet accompanied the spread of Christianity.

The Latin alphabet was not suitable to represent all sounds of Germanic languages, so it had to be adapted to the peculiar needs of the languages. The Latin alphabet could not denote, for example, the sounds [w], [θ] in Old English. For that purpose some runes were preserved — w, þ, h, or some Latin letters were slightly altered, e.g. ð to denote the sounds [θ], [ð] together with the rune þ.

3. Phonetic Features of Germanic Languages

3.1. Word Stress

One of the most important common features of all Germanic languages is strong dynamic stress falling on the first root syllable.

In Proto-Germanic (PG) force or expiratory stress (also called dynamic and breath stress) was the only type of stress used. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix; the other syllables (suffixes and endings) were unstressed.

These features of word accent were inherited by the Germanic languages, and are observable today. In Modern English there is a sharp contrast between accented and unaccented syllables due to the force of the stress. The main accent commonly falls on the root-morpheme, and is never shifted in building grammatical forms.