3. Linguistic features of Germanic Languages

The Germanic group acquired their specific features after the separation of the ancient Germanic tribes from other IE tribes. These PG features inherited by the descendant languages represent the common features of the Germanic group. Many Germanic features have disguised, transformed and even lost in later history. As for phonetics, we should distinguish the word accentuation as one of the most important features of the group. In ancient IE there excised 2 ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of stress was free and movable, it could fall on any syllable of the word- a root-morpheme, an affix, an ending. Both these properties of the word accent were changed in PG. Force and expiratory stress (dynamic) became the only type of stress used. In early PG it was still movable, but in late PG its position in the word was stabilized. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes prefix; the other syllables- suffixes and endings- were unstressed. The heavy fixed word stress inherited from PG has played an important role in the development of the Germanic languages, especially in phonetic and morphological changes. The stressed and unstressed syllables underwent widely different changes: accent syllables were pronounced with great distinctness and precision; while unstressed became less distinct and were phonetically weakened. Vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations: qualitative and quantative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g. [o>a] or [p>f], quantative changes make long sounds short or short sounds long, e.g. [i>i:], [ΙΙ>Ι]; dependent changes are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for example, the sound may change under the influence of the neighboring sounds or in certain type of syllable; independent changes (spontaneous or regular)- take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, they affect a certain sound in all positions. 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 neutralized so that by the age of writing the long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. The short [o] changed in Germanic into more open vowel [a], and that ceased to be distinguished from the original IE [a]. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o:] and merged with [o:] (Табл. с 36). The specific peculiarities of consonants constitute the most remarkable distinctive feature of the Germanic linguistic group. We regularly find [f] in Germanic where other IE languages have [p] and in non-Germanic languages have [b]. The alterations of the consonants took place in PG, and the resulting sounds were inherited by the languages of the Germanic group. (Table p. 38). In the early periodsof history the grammatical forms were built in synthetic way: by means of inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion. The suppletive way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE, it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs. The principal means of form-building were inflections. Most of them were simpler and shorter, as they have been shortened and weakened in PG. The form-building (and word-building) device was inherited from IE and became very productive in Germanic. (page 45-48)