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2. CHIEF CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GERMANIC LANGUA...doc
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2. Chief characteristics of the germanic languages

Let’s go back to the I-E language tree. It presents the genealogical classification of languages. This classification groups languages in accordance with their origin from a common linguistic ancestor. Genetically English belongs to the Germanic group of languages which is one of the 12 groups of I-E linguistic family.

The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of the Proto-Germanic language. It is the linguistic ancestor, or the parent language, of the Germanic group. PG is supposed to have split from the related I-E languages between 15th – 10th cc. BC. The ancient Germans belonged to the Western division of the I-E speech community. Their original home was on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It is believed that at the earliest stages of history PG was fundamentally one language though dialectally coloured. With time differences between dialects grew wider due to constant migrations of the Germanic tribes. At the beginning of our era PG broke into parts: Northern, Eastern and Western.

It should be noted that PG is a postulated language. It was never recorded in written form, so we can’t say for sure what it was like. But we can reconstruct it by means of comparative linguistics from written evidence of descended languages. PG now helps us to explain the origin of some English forms.

At the beginning of AD the barbarian Germanic tribes — Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Frisians ['frɪzɪənz], Teutons['tjut(ə)nz], Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Scandinavians — occupied vast territories in western, central and northern Europe, living on the fringes of the Roman Empire. The tribes and the dialects they spoke at that time were generally very much alike, but the degree of similarity varied ['vɛərɪd]. It is common to speak about the East Germanic group of dialects — mainly spoken in central Europe — Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian [bɜː'gʌndɪən], Lombardian; the North Germanic group of dialects — Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Icelandic; and the West Germanic group of dialects — the dialects of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others, originally spoken in western Europe. The first knowledge of these tribes comes from the Greek and Roman authors. This knowledge, together with archeological data, allows us to obtain information on the structure of society, habits, customs and languages of these tribes.

The principal East Germanic language is Gothic, now dead. At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from the Vistula (Висла) to the shores of the Black Sea. The knowledge of Gothic we have now is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels (Евангелие) and other parts of the New Testament (Новый Завет) from Greek into Gothic made by Ulfilas, a missionary (['mɪʃ(ə)n(ə)rɪ] миссионер; проповедник) who christianized (['krɪstɪənaɪz] обращать в христианство) the Gothic tribes. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia, it is the earliest record of a Germanic language we possess (it is dated to the 4th century AD).

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark. Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is known as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish, and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Of the early Scandinavian languages Old Icelandic is the most important. Iceland was colonized by settlers from Norway about 874 A.D. and preserved a body of early heroic literature - a collection of heroic songs and about forty sagas (['sɑːgə] сага (древнескандинавское прозаическое сказание), or prose epics, in which the lives and exploits (['eksplɔɪt] деяние, подвиг) of various traditional figures are related.

West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is divided into High German (spoken in the southern or mountainous part of the Germanic area) and Low German (the lowlands to the north). Since the sixteenth century High German has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany. Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon (Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern Low German), Old Low Franconian (the basis of modern Dutch in Holland and Flemish in northern Belgium), Old Frisian (survives in the Dutch province of Friesland), and Old English.

All Germanic languages had distinctive characteristics of structure and pronunciation which are reflected in their descendants.

Phonetics

Stress

One of the most important common features of all Germanic languages is its strong dynamic stress falling on the first root syllable. The fixed stress emphasised the syllable bearing the most important semantic element and later contributed to the reduction of unstressed syllables, changing the grammatical system of the languages. In other words, due to the difference in the force of articulation the stressed and unstressed syllables underwent widely different changes: accented syllables were pronounced with great distinctness and precision, while unaccented syllables became less distinct and were phonetically weakened. The differences between the sounds in stressed position were preserved and emphasized, whereas the contrasts between the unaccented sounds were weakened and lost. Since the stress was fixed on the root, the weakening and loss of sounds mainly affected the suffixes and grammatical endings. Many endings were weakened and dropped. This feature was of great importance as gradually led to the reduction of inflections (endings) and to the transformation of synthetic English into analytical English.

Vowels

The most important feature of the system of Germanic vowels is Аblaut, inherited by the Germanic languages from the Indo-European period. “Ablaut” refers to the meaningful alteration or change of vowels in the root, suffix or ending of a word. “Ablaut” is a very complicated phenomenon, but it has its very simple descendent in all Germanic languages including English. That is the way in which certain kinds of verbs distinguish tense. In English these are called strong verbs, that is, they signal change in tense by a shift (a change) in the root vowel of the word: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung; bring, brought. Weak verbs in the Germanic languages simply take a suffix to indicate the past tense: walk, walked; talk, talked. In other words, this change is a living linguistic fossil, this is the descendent of this ancient Indo-European phenomenon.

There are two types of Аblaut: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative Ablaut is the alteration of different vowels, mainly the vowels [e] / [a] or [e] / [o]:

Old Icelandic: bera (to give birth) — barn (baby)

Russian: бреду (I stroll, I wade) — брод (ford, wade)

Latin: tego (to cover, to cloth) — toga (clothes)

Quantitative Ablaut means the change in the length of one and the same vowel: normal, lengthened and reduced. For example, the declension of the Greek word "pater" (father):

[e:] [e] [—]

patēr patěr patros

(nominative case, (vocative case, (genitive case,

lengthened stage) normal stage) reduced stage)

We can find cases with both the quantitative and qualitative ablaut. It should be also mentioned that in the reduced stage before sonorants an extra-short vowel [u] was added:

quantitative ablaut: Goth qiman (to come) — qums (the arrival)

qualitative ablaut: OHG stelan (to steal) — stal (stole)

quantitative + qualitative ablaut: OE findan (to find) — fand (found, past tense) — fundan (found, past part.)

Another phenomenon common for all Germanic languages was the tendency of phonetic assimilation of the root vowel to the vowel of the ending, the so-called Umlaut, or mutation (перегласовка).

There were several types of mutation, but the most important one was palatal mutation, or i-Umlaut, when under the influence of the sounds [i] or [j] in the suffix or ending the root vowels became more front and more closed. This process must have taken place in the 5th—6th centuries and can be illustrated by comparing words from the Gothic language (4th century) showing no palatal mutation with corresponding words in other Germanic languages of a later period:

Goth dōmjan -- OE dēman (deem); Goth kuni -- OE cynn (kin);

OE often signaled the plural of its nouns with a final “-s”, as we still do today. But OE also had mutated plurals – nouns whose root vowels changed between singular and plural: man - men; goose – geese; foot – feet; mouse – mice. These were nouns which descended from the older Germanic forms where the plural was signaled differently. The reconstructed Germanic words might have sounded man – manis; foot – footis. And this “i-s” ending somehow changed the root vowel. When the root vowel changed, the old ending dropped off, was redundant. Or, for example, OE dom (= doom [du:m] – рок, судьба - noun). Its verb form “to judge” was “domain” [də(ʊ)'meɪn] = судить. Over time, the “e” sound in the verb influenced the preceding “o”, changing the pronunciation of the word to “demean” [dɪ'mi:n] (поступать благородно) or “deem” [di:m] (полагать, считать справедливым).

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