Grammar Form-building Means

Like other old IE languages both PG and the OG languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words. In later history all the Germanic languages developed analytical forms and ways of word connection.

In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion.

The suppletive /sə'pli:tiv/ way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE, it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

Compare the following forms of pronouns in Germanic and non-Germanic languages:

L	Fr	R	Gt	ОIcel	OE	NE
ego mei mihi	je mon me, moi	я	ik	ek	ic	I
		меня	meina	min	min	my, mine
		мне	mis	mer	me	me

The principal means of form-building were inflections. The inflections found in OG written records correspond to the inflections used in non-Germanic languages, having descended from the same original IE prototypes. Most of them, however, were simpler and shorter, as they had been shortened and weakened in PG.

The wide use of sound interchanges has always been a characteristic feature of the Germanic group. This form-building (and word-building) device was inherited from IE and became very productive in Germanic. In various forms of the word and in words derived from one and the same root, the root-morpheme appeared as a set of variants. The consonants were relatively stable, the vowels were variable (Consonant interchanges were also possible but rare. They appeared in PG due to voicing of fricatives under Verner's Law but were soon levelled out).

Table 6 shows the variability of the root *ber- in different grammatical forms and words.

Table 6

Variants of the Root *bef-

	Old Germanic languages			Modern Germanic languages
	Gt	О Icel	OE	Sw	G	NE
forms of the verb bear	bairan bar berum baurans	bera bar barum borinn	beran b r b ron boren birp	bära bar buro buren	gebären gebar — geboren	bear bore (sg) (pl) born bears
other words from the same root	barn baur	barn burðr byrð	bearn ʒbyrd	barn	Geburt	barn (dial. 'child') birth