Vowel Gradation with Special Reference to Verbs

Vowel interchanges found in Old and Modern Germanic lan­guages originated at different historical periods. The earliest set of vowel interchanges, which dates from PG and PIE, is called vowel grada­tion or ablaut /'æblaut/. Ablaut is an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions; different vowels appear in the same en­vironment, surrounded by the same sounds (all the words in Table 6 are examples of ablaut with the exception of the forms containing [i] and [y] which arose from positional changes.

Vowel gradation did not reflect any phonetic changes but was used as a special independent device to differentiate between words and grammatical forms built from the same root.

Ablaut was inherited by Germanic from ancient IE. The principal gradation series used in the IE languages – [e~o] – can be shown in Russian examples: нести~ноша. This kind of ablaut is called qual­itative, as the vowels differ only in quality. Alternation of short and long vowels, and also alternation with a "zero" (i.e. lack of vowel) represent quantitative ablaut:

Prolonged grade Normal or full grade Reduced grade (zero grade)

(long vowel) (short vowel) (neutral vowel or loss of vowel)

ē e

L lēgi 'elected' lego 'elect'

R – e~o

беру – сбор брал

The Germanic languages employed both types of ablaut – quali­tative and quantitative, – and their combinations. In accordance with vowel changes which distinguished Germanic from non-Germanic the gradation series were modified: IE [e~o] was changed to [e/i~a]; likewise, quantitative ablaut [a~a:] was reflected in Germanic as a quantitative-qualitative series [a~o:]. Quantitative ablaut gave rise to a variety of gradation series in Germanic owing to different treatment of the zero-grade in various phonetic conditions.

Of all its spheres of application in Germanic ablaut was most consistently used in building the principal forms of the verbs called strong. Each form was characterised by a certain grade; each set of principal forms of the verb employed a gradation series. Gradation vowels were combined with other sounds in different classes of verbs and thus yielded several new gradation series. The use of ablaut in the principal forms of 'bear' was shown in Table 6. The Gothic verbs in Table 6 give the closest possible approximation to PG gradation series, which were inherited by all the OG languages and were modified in ac­cordance with later phonetic changes.

Table 7

Examples of Vowel Gradation in Gothic Strong Verbs

IE	e	о	zero	Zero
PG	e/i	A	zero	Zero
Principal forms	Infinitive	Past sg	Past pl	Participle II
Class 1 Class 2 Class 3	reisan kiusan bindan	rais kaus band	risum kusum bundum	risans NE rise kusans choose bundans bind

The use of ablaut in the sphere of grammar was not confined to the root-vowels of strong verbs. The gradation series [e/i~a] ac­counts for the interchange of vowels in some grammatical endings in the noun and verb paradigms. This gradation series is found, e.g. in the following noun-endings: PG Nom. sg - *-az, Gen. sg -*eso/-iso (the vowels represent different grades of ablaut of the suffix -a) The same series [e/i~a] is found in the endings of many verbs (called thematic in contrast to athematic verbs, which did not contain any vo­calic element), e.g. Present Tense —

2nd p. sg Gt -is – OE -est

3rd p. sg Gt-ip - OE-(i)p

pl Gt -and – OE -að