Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu Centrul pentru Învăţământul la Distanţă

Dan-Şerban Sava

AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF THE

GERMANIC LANGUAGES

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 2 UNIT ONE -- General Considerations on the History and Methods of Comparative Grammar 3 UNIT TWO – The Indo-European Language Family and Its Characteristics 16 UNIT THREE – The Germanic Peoples and Their Languages: A Brief Survey of the History of the Old Germanic Tribes 43 UNIT FOUR – Linguistic Characteristics of the Germanic Languages:

A. The Family Tree B. The main Phonetic Features 75

UNIT FIVE – The Main Morphological Features 96 A List of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Old Germanic Languages 128 Bibliography 134 Key to the Assessment Tests 136

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INTRODUCTION

Without making a claim to exhaust the problems that

sometimes a contradictory and fragmentary etymology of

the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic parent

languages, or the lack of exhaustive and consistent

linguistic evidence – phonological mainly – pose before

the scholar engaged in the systematic work of tracing and

charting the Comparative Grammar of Germanic

Languages, the present course book is, as the title reads, a

mere introduction to these problems, a selection of certain

fundamental items of phonology and morphology.

In doing so, we have tried to make things a bit more

appealing, in other words, more “palatable” to the student,

by always presenting linguistic elements against their

historical background.

We truly hope this course book to become an incentive

for the dedicated student of English to further explore the

secrets of this language.

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UNIT ONE: General Considerations on the History and Methods of Comparative Grammar OBJECTIVES: • to familiarize the students with the research methods employed by

Comparative Linguistics; • to give the student a brief survey of the history of Comparative

Linguistics; TEXT: It is a matter of common knowledge that languages are like human beings. They are “born,” then they grow and live, before they die and become extinct. Languages live as long as there are people who speak and use them as their native tongues. On the other hand, a language is important because the people who speak it are important from a political, economic, commercial, social, and cultural point of view. However, in practice, not all languages can boast similar importance. Compared to Serbian, Romanian or Hungarian, which are seldom learned by any except for the native populations and, consequently, are largely neglected by the outside world, English, Spanish, French, and German, for example, have grown into important languages, because the peoples who use them have gradually become important in time; for this reason these languages are widely studied outside the country of their use.

Yet, the importance of a particular language is not to be reduced solely to the number of its speakers and the geographic area in which it is used (either as native tongue or as lingua franca, i.e. in the former colonies where the colonial languages have remained indispensable for communication between diverse populations even after independence was obtained). As mentioned supra, the importance of a language is associated with the political role played by the nations using it, by their influence in international affairs and world trade, as well as by their contribution to the material and spiritual progress of the world.

In this respect, the case of English is highly illustrative. Four hundred years ago, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, English was spoken almost exclusively by the English in England, and by some speakers in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and this had been so for hundreds of years since the language was first brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon peoples in the 5th century. Today, English is a worldwide international language spoken

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as a mother tongue by over 400 million people in the British Isles, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Moreover, it is a second language for many others in, for example, India and Pakistan, as well as in some African and Asian states, where it is used as an official language in government and education (Tanzania, Nigeria, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Singapore etc.). As a result, many different national and regional varieties – “new Englishes” – have gradually developed, with their own characteristics of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and they will continue to do so.1

But before going to the “heart of the matter/things” – i.e. answer important questions like: Where did the English language come from? How did it evolve within the group of Germanic languages? –, we believe that a closer look at the methods of Comparative Grammar, along with a brief historic outline of the activity of comparing languages, are all but indispensable.

Comparison, as a principle of logical thinking, is applied to every science and, consequently, to linguistics (grammar and language history), too. The object of Comparative Linguistics is, first, a better understanding of the relationship between one language and the other languages of the same group/family of languages (i.e. the relationship between English and the other Germanic languages) and, secondly, to explain the development of that particular language (i.e. grammatical structure, vocabulary and pronunciation) in time.

Created at the beginning of the 19th century, the comparative method has so far survived as the main direction of investigation applied in the study of languages from a historical point of view. In historical linguistics, this method is concerned with the reconstruction of an earlier language or earlier state of a language on the basis of a comparison of related words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived from it. The comparative method was developed for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and was subsequently applied to the study of other language families. It depends upon the principle of regular sound change – a principle that, as explained above, met with violent opposition when it was introduced into linguistics by the Neogrammarians in the 1870s but by the end of the century had become part of what might be fairly described as the orthodox approach to historical linguistics.2 1 See Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language (Third Edition). (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 3-6, and Dennis Freeborn, From Old English to Standard English, (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 1-2. 2 See Encyclopædia Britannica `98, Advance Search Disc, Comparative Linguistics and related articles.

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Its application has marked the birth of scientific linguistics. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Ferdinand de Saussure, the famous Swiss linguist, contended that language must be considered as a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed synchronically (as it exists at any particular time) and diachronically (as it changes in the course of time). He thus formalized the basic approaches to language study and asserted that the principles and methodology of each approach are distinct and mutually exclusive. In his view, Comparative Linguistics focuses on a two-fold goal:

• to study the history of all observable rules of language and reconstruct as far a possible the parent language of each language, i.e. to create an archetype, and

• to determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages and to deduce the general laws, the evolution of each language considered individually.

In other words, Saussure was the first linguist to make a clear-cut terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, i.e. the descriptive method and the historical method. The former, synchronic linguistics or descriptive method, refers to the study of a language at a given point in time, describing the linguistic phenomena as they appear in a given period; the time studied may be either the present or a particular point in the past; synchronic analyses can also be made of dead languages, such as Latin.

Dealing with the evolution of a language from the earliest stage until the level reached at the moment of investigation, the latter, i.e. diachronic linguistics or historical method, is the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of phonological, grammatical, and semantic changes, the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages, and the discovery and application of the methods by which genetic relationships among languages can be demonstrated. Historical linguistics had its roots in the etymological speculations of classical and medieval times, in the comparative study of Greek and Latin developed during the Renaissance and in the speculations of scholars as to the language from which the other languages of the world were descended.

Ferdinand de Saussure was followed by the French linguist Antoine Meillet who, after 1900 makes a decisive step forward, establishing the fundamental tendencies of the evolution of all languages. Using a comparative method of utmost precision, he clearly explained the early Indo-European linguistic system and traced its history. Moreover, he steadily

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emphasized that any attempt to account for linguistic change must recognize that language is a social phenomenon.

In what is generally considered his most important contribution to the development of modern linguistics, Introduction to the Comparative Study of the Indo-European Languages (Paris, 1937), Antoine Meillet explains the relationships of these languages to one another and to the parent Indo-European tongue. Furthermore, stating that Comparative Linguistics is interested in three different things – phonetic laws, analogy and borrowings – he advances the theory of linguistic differentiation, suggesting that languages that developed farther away from a centre of common origin are less disturbed by changes initiated at the point of origin and, thus, may retain archaic characteristics in common.

Consequently, the historical-comparative method turns out to be a rigorous method which compares the evolution of related languages in every stage of their development, showing at the same time the oldest forms (roots, stems), from which the respective words have developed, i.e. leading to the common origin or ancestor (e.g. the Romance languages that have developed from Latin).

The material form of relationship is similarity, the greater the later the languages detached from the basic language. Reference isn’t made to a general similarity, a structural one, which may be found within languages with no historical connection, but to a detailed similarity in sounds and the meaning of roots and affixes. Lexical similarity and that of grammatical forms are hints for a common descent of many languages, owing to a specific characteristic of language, i.e. the absence of motivation for the fact that a certain combination of sounds expresses a certain concept or the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign.3

Although rejected by certain modern linguistic schools (i.e. neo-linguistics), which contest even the notion of language relationship, or neglected by certain schools engaged in language description (i.e. structuralist schools), the same method also gives a death blow to those theories which stated that all languages consist in combination of some definite sounds pre-established by their nature to designate certain definite objects and phenomena.

According to logical reasoning, we may say that, if in a group of languages there are words resembling one another and having the same meaning, this is generally not casual and there must be a common source: 3 Gertrud Schmidt, Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages, (Timişoara: Tipografia Universităţii, 1974), p.11.

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e.g. - (Sanskrit) matr/mātár, (Persian) mādar, (Tocharian) mācar (Latin) mater, (Greek) mitir, (Russian) mat`, (German) Mutter, (English) mother, (Old Irish) māthir (Spanish) madre, (French) mère, (Romanian) mamă; all are traced back to the (reconstructed) Indo-European * māter - (Sanskrit) bhratr, (Persian) biradar, (Zend) brata, (Latin) frater, (Greek) fratir = member of a brotherhood, (Gothic) broþar, (Old Slavic) brati, (Old Irish) brathir, (English) brother, (German) Bruder, (Romanian) frate, (French) frère; we can reconstruct the prehistoric Indo-European *bhrater;

In related languages the number of similar elements is generally great; even a surface comparison of certain languages shows us words comprising the same or similar sounds having the same or similar meanings:

e.g. (English) to stand, (German) stehen, (Old High German) stēn, (Russian) stoyat`, (Czech) stati, (Lithuanian) stoti, (Latin) stare, (Romanian) sta, (Old Indian) tísthati (stand) and asthma (stood), (Tocharian) stäm (stand);

These examples show us that the above languages must have a common origin and by means of the historical-comparative method a common Indo-European root *st/h/a has been reconstructed. In consequence, the existence of a common source explains why the vocabulary of a group of languages has a unitary character and does not find any parallel in the vocabulary of other numberless languages outside that group. On the other hand, the mere existence of lexical coincidences is sometimes not sufficient enough to prove the common origin; exceptions may be found, mainly brought about by impacts or borrowings coming from the neighboring languages, and which may have a casual character only:

e.g. (English) coat, (French) côte = “coast,” (Russian) kot = “tomcat,” (German) Kot = “mud.”

In other cases, however, similarity may be simply the result of onomatopoeia:

e.g. (English) cuckoo, (German) Kuckuck, (Romanian) cuc, (Hungarian) kakuk, (Turkish) guguk, (French) coucou, (Russian) kukushka.

The same is valid for grammatical changes, except for the fact that the latter occur much slower than lexical ones. Moreover, if lexical coincidences are further supported by grammatical resemblances and approximately similar

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patterns of word-building, then we may indeed speak about factual relationship in the case of those languages.4

Hence, the axiom of the comparative-historical method is: a group of words belonging to different languages but having similar sound-complexes and identical or related meanings can have only a common origin.5

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We believe that a brief review of the highlights of Comparative

Linguistics (a short historical survey) will throw further light on the importance of this method of investigation.

It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19th century was the development of the comparative method, which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and shown to be “genealogically” related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European is now customarily applied. That all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one “family” had been known for centuries; but the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists.

However, the very first scholar to work at categorizing languages, according to their relationship was the German scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the last “universal genius” who suggested that all ancient and modern languages diverged from a single protolanguage.6 4 Ibid., pp.11-13. 5 See Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages, second edition, (Bucureşti: Universitatea din Bucureşti, 1977), pp. 28-29. 6 This idea is referred to as monogenesis. Most scholars believe that such a language can, at best, be posited only as a set of hypothetical formulas from which one can derive the world’s languages, and according to which they can be related to one another; it is unlikely that such a reconstruction reflects a real first language as it was actually spoken. Although many modern languages do derive from a single ancestor, it is also possible that human language arose simultaneously at many different places on Earth and that today’s languages do not have a single common ancestor. The theory that present language families derive from many original languages is called polygenesis. Whether human language was ultimately monogenetic or polygenetic, the differences among languages are believed to be relatively superficial and are not nearly so

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He was followed by the Russian scientist Mikhail Vassilyevich Lomonosov who discovered some common features between Slavic and Germanic languages.

The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have “sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” By this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had evolved from the same “common source.” In his presidential address to the Bengal Asiatic Society, Jones said that Sanskrit bore to both Greek and Latin:

a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e. Germanic] and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family . . . . 7

The discovery of Sanskrit, considered the oldest Indo-European

language, and of its relationship with Old Indian culture triggered the publication in 1808 of the study Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (About the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) by Friedrich Schlegel, which became the first attempt at comparative Indo-Germanic linguistics and the starting point of the study of Indian languages and comparative philology.

In 1811 an anonymous report is presented to the Academy of Science at St. Petersburg, exploring the relationship between Sanskrit and Russian.

The next important moment in the history of Comparative Linguistics is Franz Bopp, a German linguist who established the importance of

great as the similarities among them. See Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. 7 See Encyclopædia Britannica `98, Advance Search Disc; Languages of the World: Indo-European Languages; Overview of the Language Family: Establishment of the Family.

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Sanskrit in the comparative study of Indo-European languages and developed a valuable technique of language analysis. In his 1816 study entitled Über das Conjugationsystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (About the System of Conjugation of Old Indian, Latin, Greek, Persian and Germanic) he sought to trace the common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German, a task never before attempted. Concentrating on a historical analysis of the verb, he assembled the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared, proving that inflection is the same in all Indo-European languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the preparation of his great work in six parts, Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gothischen und Deutschen (1833-52; “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German”). In it he attempted to describe the original grammatical structure of these languages, trace their phonetic laws, and investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.

In 1818, Kristian Rasmus Rask (1787-1832; a Danish language scholar and a principal founder of the science of Comparative Linguistics) first showed that, in their consonant sounds, words in the Germanic languages vary with a certain regularity from their equivalents in the other Indo-European languages, e.g., the English father, acre, and the Latin pater, ager. What Rask observed proved to be the basis of a fundamental law of comparative linguistics (Grimm’s Law), enunciated in 1822 by Jacob Grimm. During a stay in Iceland that he spent in mastering the language and studying the literature, manners, and customs (1813-15), he wrote the work on which his fame rests, Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language (1818); it was primarily an examination and comparison of the Scandinavian languages with Latin and Greek. Thus, Rasmus Rask was the first to indicate that the Celtic languages, which include Breton, Welsh, and Irish, belong to the Indo-European family and to also state that Basque and Finno-Ugric do not. He established the relationship of Old Norse to Gothic and of Lithuanian to Slavic, Greek, and Latin.

Within the same year appears Observation sur la langue et la litérature provençale (Observations on the Language of the Provence), by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845; German scholar and critic, one of the most influential disseminators of the ideas of the German Romantic movement, translator and Orientalist), which contains the first division of languages, as follows:

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1. Languages without any grammatical structure, which do not modify word forms, but change only word order, e.g. Chinese;

2. Languages which use only affixation (prefixes and suffixes), e.g. Hungarian;

3. Languages which use both affixation and inflection, e.g. the Indo-European languages.8

In his work Über den Ursprung der grammatischen Formen und ihren

Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Ideen (1822) (About the Origin of Grammatical Forms and Their Influence upon the Evolution of the Ideas), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) suggests another classification of languages9 into:

a) isolating languages (isolierende/amorphe Sprachen) = are languages in which each word form consists typically of a single morpheme (one-syllable roots or stems, without endings, such as Classical Chinese (to a far greater extent than the modern Chinese languages) and Vietnamese. The real meaning of the utterance is rendered by its topic and by its intonation.

e.g. “ma” (horse), “shang” (on); ma shang = on horseback (mounted on a horse) vs. shang ma = to mount a horse;

b) agglutinating languages (agglutinierende/anklebende Sprachen

= are languages in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes, i.e. words are composed of roots, or basic parts, and one or more affixes (prefixes at the beginning, infixes in the middle, and suffixes at the end of words) with distinct meanings, each representing not more than a single grammatical category. Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are among the languages that form words by agglutination.

8 Richard Lang, Gramatica comparată a limbilor germanice, (Cluj: Universitatea „Babeş-Bolyai,” 1974), pp.1-2. 9 His division of languages is very close to the modern classification of languages. Beginning with the 19th century, linguists attempted to group the world’s languages into four morphological, or typological, categories, according to the form of their grammar (i.e. categories based on how words are formed): analytic (isolated languages included), agglutinating, inflectional (or synthetic), and incorporating (or polysynthetic). [Polysynthetic languages have very long, complex words that reveal a mixture of agglutinating and synthetic features; the whole sentence is included in one, long word. Examples include Eskimo languages, all Native American languages, Bantu languages, etc. For example, in Wishram, a dialect of Chinook (a North American Indian language), the word acimluda (“He will give it to you”) is composed of the elements a- “future,” -c- “he,” -i- “him,” -m- “thee,” -1- “to,” -ud- “give,” and -a “future.”]

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e.g. The Turkish term ev-ler-den “from the houses” is an example of a word containing a stem and two word elements; the stem is ev- “house,” the element -ler- carries the meaning of plural, and -den indicates “from.”

c) Inflecting languages (flektierende/beugende Sprachen) = are

languages that make use of affixation and inflection and in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages (Germanic, Slavic, Romance languages, etc.) tend to be inflecting in this sense.

e.g. the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and “genitive.” Or, for instance, in German: Mann (Nom. Sing.) Männer (Nom/Acc. Plur.) Männern (Dat. Plur.)

d) interposing languages = are languages that introduce objects and adverbials into the verb.10

To round off the issue of language division after 1850, worth

mentioning is Haymann Steinthal (1823-1899) who suggests another grouping of languages into form languages (Formsprachen) and formless languages (formlose Sprachen), each category further subdivided into adding words by words (nebensetzend) and inflecting (abwandelnd).

10 More original was Wilhelm von Humboldt's theory of “inner” and “outer” form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material (the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this raw material and differentiated one language from another. This “structural” conception of language was to become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major centers of linguistics by the middle of the 20th century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something dynamic, rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product of activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to produce such utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann Steinthal and, what is more important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus influenced late 19th - and early 20th -century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of the distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure. But its full implications were probably not perceived and made precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative grammar. See, Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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However, for the comparative grammar of Germanic languages, Jacob Grimm’s 1816 Deutsche Grammatik11 (A German Grammar) turned out to be perhaps the most valuable contribution so far. In it, he represented the natural laws of sound change (both vowels and consonants) in various languages and thus created bases for a method of scientific etymology. In what was to become known as Grimm’s Law, Jacob demonstrated the principle of the regularity of correspondence among consonants in genetically related languages, i.e. that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words.12

Other decisive moments in the history of Comparative Linguistics are as follows:

• 1820, which marks the appearance in Russia of the first historical-comparative grammar about the Slavic languages, written by A. Ch. Vostokov;

• 1836, when Friedrich Dietz (1794-1876) publishes his Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (A Grammar of Romance Languages), a basic work in the study of Romance languages.

• 1861, when August Schleicher publishes the Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (partial trans., A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages, 1874-77), in which he studied the common characteristics of the languages and attempted to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European parent language, or Ursprache. Schleicher believed that language is an organism exhibiting periods of development, maturity, and decline. As such, it could be studied by the methods of natural science. Developing a system of language classification resembling a botanical taxonomy, he traced groups of related languages and arranged them into a genealogical tree. His model came to be known as the Stammbaumtheorie, or family-tree theory, and was a major

11 The word “deutsch” in the title does not mean strictly “German,” but it refers rather to the etymological meaning of “common,” thus being used to apply to all of the Germanic languages. 12 Grimm was by no means the first scholar to call attention to such discrepancies. Previously, they had been observed and commented upon by a series of students of Gothic ranging from Franciscus Iunius (17th century) to Johannes ab Ihre (a Swedish scholar of the 18th century) to the Dane Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars) and the Scottish scholar James Jamieson (early 19th century). Jacob's work on grammar exercised an enormous influence on the contemporary study of linguistics, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic, and it remains of value and in use even now. [Apud, Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction . . . , op. cit., p. 35.]

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development in the history of Indo-European studies or, more generally, in historical linguistic theory.13

• In the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker (“young grammarians,” or Neogrammarians: Hermann Paul, Karl Brugmann, Eduard Sievers, Karl Verner, Fortunatov, the founder of the Moscow linguistic school, William Dwight Whitney, etc.) put forward the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation (unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct “ancestral” common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages could be derived.

• Friedrich Karl Brugmann, a German linguist who gained a position of preeminence in comparative Indo-European linguistics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His comprehensive and still-authoritative research in this field, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 5 vol. (1886-93; Outline of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages) is, probably, the most authoritative grammar ever written and also stands as one of the great schemes of knowledge concerning the Indo-European languages.

• In 1875, the Danish linguist Karl Verner explained the apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law; his formulation of the principle governing those exceptions is known as Verner’s Law. Subsequently, many other important sound laws were discovered and formulated to account for other apparent exceptions and, by the end of the 19th century, the hypothesis of the regularity of sound change, as explained by Grimm and Verner, had been generally accepted.

• Nevertheless, this brief survey on the history of Comparative Linguistics cannot overlook the first complete comparative grammar of Germanic languages (5 volumes), published in Moscow in 1962/63, elaborated by a team of Russian linguists led by Jirmunsky, Guchman and Yartseva and focusing on: the formation and development of Germanic languages and their relationship to the

13 See, Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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other European languages, as well as on their phonetics, morphology and syntax.

HIGHLIGHTS:

• lingua franca: (originally Italian for “Frankish language”) is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons’ mother tongues.

• comparison: a principle of logical thinking based on the consideration or estimate of the similarities or dissimilarities between two things or people. (NODE)

• axiom: a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true. (NODE)

ASSESSMENT TEST ONE – upon reading unit one, answer the following questions or comment briefly on the following issues.

1. Define and explain the function of a lingua franca.

2. What is the goal of Comparative Linguistics the way Ferdinand de Saussure defined it?

3. What are the methods employed by modern linguistics?

4. Define and explain the goal of the comparative-historical method.

5. What is the axiom of the comparative-historical method?

6. Which division of language is the closest to the modern classification of Languages?

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UNIT TWO: The Indo-European Language Family and Its Characteristics OBJECTIVES:

• to make the students understand properly the relationships established between the languages forming the Indo-European Language Family; • to make the student understand the descent from a common parent

language and the progressive differentiation of these languages;

TEXT: A family of languages comprises the languages brought into relationship by descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech.

Linguists believe that several thousand years (about 5000) BC, on the steppes of Southern Russia or on the forested plains of Central Europe, there existed a language of which no written records survived but which, traditionally, they call Indo-European. It may have been spoken by a numerous and powerful group of traveling merchants, who may have used it as a lingua franca for their trading activities, or it may have been spoken by a dominant race.

Regardless of the number and the content of the suggested hypotheses with respect to the parent tongue, i.e. Proto-Indo-European,14 the fact is that, before the dawn of history, many different languages had sprung from Indo- 14 Scholars have long hypothesized an underlying relationship among ancient Western languages. In 1786, in his presidential address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, the British Orientalist Sir William Jones postulated the common ancestry of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. The first linguist to undertake the study of this relationship was the German Franz Bopp in the 19th century. Thomas Young, the 19th-century physician and Egyptologist who helped decipher the Rosetta Stone, in 1814 coined the term “Indo-European” to encompass the ancient languages Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Hittite, Greek, and Latin, together with the Slavic, Romance, Germanic, and Celtic language groups of modern Europe. In 1819, the German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel adopted the word “Aryan” (which properly is the name of a people who in prehistoric times settled in what is now Iran and northern India) to designate the newly discovered “race”; four years later the German Orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth invented the term “Indo-German,” which is no more legitimate than “Indo-Slav” or “Indo-Roman,” but which was adopted out of national pride. Although 19th-century philologists took quite seriously the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language—which was supposed to be the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages—to the point that they conducted correspondence with one another in this artificial idiom, it has remained debatable whether or not actual linguistic unity ever existed among Indo-European peoples. (See, Encyclopædia Britannica `98; Ancient European Religions.)

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European, scattering over wide geographic areas. Proof that these highly diverse languages are members of a single family was largely accumulated during a 50-year period around the turn of the 19th century. For example, the extensive Sanskrit and Ancient Greek literatures (older than those of any other Indo-European language except the then-undeciphered Hittite) preserved characteristics of the basic Indo-European forms and pointed to the existence of this common parent language.

By 1800, the close relationship between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin had been demonstrated. Hindu grammarians had systematically classified the formative elements of their ancient language. To their studies were added extensive grammatical and phonetic comparisons of European languages. Further studies led to specific conclusions about the sounds and grammar of the assumed parent language, the reconstruction of that hypothetical language, and estimates about when it began to break up into separate languages. (By 2000 BC, for example, Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit were distinct languages, but the differences between them are such that the original tongue must have been fairly unified about a millennium earlier, or in about 3000 BC.) The decipherment of Hittite texts (identified as Indo-European in 1915) and the discovery of Tocharian in the 1890s (spoken in medieval Chinese Empire, or Eastern Turkistan, and identified as Indo-European in 1908) added new insights into the development of the family and the probable character of Proto-Indo-European.

The original meanings of only a limited number of hypothetical Proto-Indo-European words can be stated with much certainty; derivatives of these words occur with consistent meanings in most Indo-European languages. This small vocabulary suggests a New Stone Age or perhaps an early metal-using culture with farmers and domestic animals. The identity and the location of this culture have been the object of much speculation. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s, however, suggest the prehistoric Kurgan culture. Located in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains (lower Volga River basin) between 5000 and 3000 BC, this culture had diffused as far as Eastern Europe (the Danube River basin, the Balkan Peninsula and the northern coast of the Black Sea) and northern Iran by about 2000 BC. 15

15 See, Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 ©, 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation; Indo-European Languages

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By 1000 BC, many languages, descended from Proto-Indo-European,

were spoken over most of Europe and in much of Southwest and South Asia. Moreover, since the second half of the 15th century, Indo-European languages have spread to most other inhabited parts of the world. Consequently, these languages are the most widely spoken family of languages in the world (although not the largest language family).

On the one hand, the surviving languages show, indeed, various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. But, on the other hand, the very great differences (i.e. the mutual incomprehensibility) between these languages call for explanation. Whether Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken by a group of traveling merchants, by farmers or by a dominant race, it was probably not used by native speakers exclusively. Firstly, as a lingua franca, it may have been spoken by people of different races and languages whose pronunciation must have retained some of the features of their native language. Secondly, as long as these of Indo-

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European remained in touch with the original speakers, they would have to conform to the standard in order to be understood. But once, the tribes, obviously nomadic, went their own way, this contact was lost. So, the use of the standard language gradually disappeared and all that mattered was that the members of that tribe could understand one another. Under the influence of different native languages of the nomadic tribes, the resulting variations in pronunciation were gradually exaggerated, as the tribes went off in different directions: southeast to produce speakers of Indian and Iranian, to the northern shores of the Mediterranean to produce speakers of Hellenic, Italic, or Celtic, west and northwest to produce speakers of Germanic or Balto-Slavic; and so on.

As the Indo-Europeans became more settled, their language seems to have split into two dialects before branching into the various languages which developed later. According to the most generally accepted hypothesis, there were in Proto-Indo-European at least two distinct series of velar (or “guttural”) consonants: simple velars (or palatals), symbolized as *k, *g, and *gh, and labiovelars, symbolized as *kw, *gw, and *gwh. The labiovelars may be thought of as velar stops articulated with simultaneous lip-rounding. In one group of languages, the labial component is assumed to have been lost, in another group the velar component; and it is only in the Latin reflex of the voiceless *kw that both labiality and velarity are retained (cf. Latin quis from *kwi-). In other words, in some Indo-European subfamilies, certain presumed k sounds of Proto-Indo-European became sibilants such as s and ś (a sh sound). Consequently, the old “któm” (syllabic, stressed “m”) got shifted to the Avestan (ancient Iranian) word “satem” (“100”), as opposed to the Latin word “centum” (“100,” pronounced “kentum”). These two words exemplify, with their initial consonant, the two different treatments of the Proto-Indo-European simple velars.16

Earlier scholars attached great significance to this fact and thought that it represented a fundamental division of the Indo-European family into a western and an eastern group, i.e. centum languages and satem languages. Among other languages, the former group includes: Latin (Italic) “centum,” Greek “(he)katón,” Welsh (Celtic) “cant,” Gothic and Old English “hund” (Germanic “h” corresponds to Into-European “k,” i.e. “k” shifted to “h” in the First Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law) [Although Romanian is a centum language, the word “sută” is a Slavic borrowing.]17 In the latter group we 16 See Encyclopædia Britan.nica `98 and Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation; Indo-European Languages. 17 Linguistic history is sometimes cyclic, repeating itself. Thus, the shift of the velar “k” in the satem languages to “s” or “ś (sh-sound)” was the same thing that took place later (about the 3rd century A.D.) in

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find, for example: Indian “šatám,” Avestan “satem,” Old Slavic “sŭto,” Russian “sto.”

Nowadays, however, less importance is attached to the centum-satem distinction. Geographically, the centum languages are North, West and South European languages (i.e. the Italic group, the Greek group, thee Celtic group, the Germanic group, and the Tocharian group, the most easterly of known Indo-European languages) and the satem languages are East European and Asiatic languages (the Indo-Iranian group, the Slavic group, the Baltic group, the Anatolian group, the Armenian language and the Albanian language).

It is quite difficult to provide the exact number of language groups that make up the Indo-European tree, because the sources that we have consulted do, indeed, class these languages in principal and secondary groups, in living and extinct languages, but, unfortunately, the figures they suggest vary. Thus, Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, in their History of the English Language, and Bruce Mitchell in An Invitation to Old English & Anglo-Saxon England (reproducing the Indo-European tree from Pyles and Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language) speak about 11 principal groups; Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti mentions 10 major groups; Gertrud Schmidt 12 major groups plus a 13th miscellaneous group; Richard Lang – 13 groups; Encyclopædia Britannica `98 – 10 branches; Year 2000 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia – 9 surviving branches and Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard 2005—we believe it is the most detailed classification—9 extant and 5 extinct subfamilies: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek (Hellenic), Indo-Iranian, Italic (including the Romance languages), Slavic; and five extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite), Phrygian, Thracian, Tocharian, and an Unclassified group. Let us have a closer look at them.

the Latin “centum,” and in all other words in which the k-sound, spelled with “c,” occurred before the palatal “e” and “i” vowels. This explains the occurrence of a sibilant in all the languages derived from Latin; e.g. the “č” in Italian “cento” and the “s” in French “cent,” Portuguese “cento,” and Latin American Spanish “ciento.” The same is valid for Romanian words like “cine,” “ce,” etc. See Gertrud Schmidt, Comparative…, op. cit. p. 19.

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I. Albanian derives from the language of the Illyrians, the transition from Illyrian to Albanian apparently occurring between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. (Some scholars, however, dispute such theses, arguing that Illyrians were not autochthonous and that Albanian derives from a dialect of the now-extinct Thracian language.) Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known from the 15th century AD. Yet, its origin is still an open problem. Moreover, modern Albanian is so mixed with Latin, Greek, Turkish and Slavonic elements, owing to conquests and other various causes, that it is somewhat difficult to isolate the original Albanian. For this reason its position among the branches of the Indo-European language

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family was slow to be recognized, being formerly classed with the Hellenic group.18

II. Armenian, like Greek, is a single language forming a separate branch of the western group of Indo-European languages. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century BC, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century AD. Armenian was introduced into the mountainous Transcaucasian region (called Greater Armenia by the Greek historians) by invaders coming from the northern Balkans, probably in the latter part of the 2nd millennium BC. These invaders occupied the region on the shores of Lake Van (Eastern Turkey) that had previously been the site of the ancient Urartian Empire. By the 7th century BC the Armenian language seems to have replaced the tongues of the native population. After the introduction of Christianity to Armenia about AD 400, the language began to be written down; an alphabet of 36 letters was invented, according to tradition, by Mesrop Mashtots (Saint Mashtots).

18 See Albert C Baugh & Thomas Cable A History of …, op. cit., p.25.

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In the 1800s, a national revival occurred from which a new literary language emerged that was much closer to the spoken language. This is known in two varieties. East Armenian, now the official language of Armenia, is based on the dialect of the Ararat valley and the city of Yerevan; West Armenian has its foundation in the dialect of Istanbul. East Armenian is also spoken in other parts of Transcaucasia, whereas the western variety dominates in the Armenian colonies in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Europe, and America. The differences between these two written forms of Modern Armenian are slight, constituting no barrier to mutual intelligibility. In addition to the two literary languages, there are a great number of dialects, some of which are so different that the speakers cannot understand each other. It is estimated that before World War I some 50 distinct dialects were spoken. These dialects, however, have lost ground in Transcaucasia, under the pressure of the standard written language.

When the scientific study of Armenian started in the 19th century, the language was considered an Iranian dialect, a mistake easily explained by the vast number of Iranian loanwords in the vocabulary. Subsequent studies, however, have convincingly shown Armenian to be an independent member of the Indo-European language family, but with many borrowings from Greek, Arabic, Turkish and Syrian. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Armenian was a variety of Phrygian, a tongue presumed to be Indo-European. The very little information we have of the latter is insufficient to support or confirm such a claim.

Nowadays, Armenian is the mother tongue of the Turkish Armenians and of the Armenians in Armenia, where it is spoken by 2,850,000 people. In other parts of the former Soviet Union, especially in the neighboring republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan, it is used by some 1,300,000. Armenian emigrants and refugees have taken their language with them all over Asia Minor and the Middle East and from there to many European countries, especially Romania, Poland, and France, and to America, particularly the United States. In all, Armenian is probably spoken by about 5,500,000 people around the world.19

III. The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively shared features outweigh the divergences. At the beginning of the Christian Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes occupied a large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of the Iranians, including much of present-day Poland and what was formerly the

19 See, Encyclopædia Britannica `98, Advance Search Disc, Armenian language.

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western Soviet Union—namely, Belarus, the Ukraine, and westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centered in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century AD, the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th century, the Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of Eastern Europe and northern Asia. The Baltic-speaking area, however, contracted, and by the end of the 20th century, Baltic languages were confined to Lithuania and Latvia.

Baltic languages are more closely related to Slavic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian (in that order) than to the other branches of the family. They comprise modern Lithuanian and Latvian (Lettish), the languages of the Balts inhabiting the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, as well as the now extinct Old Prussian language (displaced by German since the 17th century), Yotvingian (also spelled Yatvingian, Jotvingian, Jatvingian), Curonian (Kurish), Semigallian, and Selonian (Selian); the speakers of this group are here referred to as the B-Balts. There also existed languages and dialects of the Balts (D-Balts) who lived east of the above-mentioned groups in the areas of the upper reaches of the Dnepr River.

The Slavic, or Slavonic languages, are closer to the Baltic languages than to any other Indo-European subgroup, but they share certain linguistic innovations with the other eastern Indo-European language groups (such as Indo-Iranian and Armenian) as well. From their homeland in east-central Europe (Poland or Ukraine), the Slavic languages have spread to the territory of the Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian), Central Europe (Czech and Slovak), Eastern Europe (Belarusian, Ukrainian,

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Russian), and the northern parts of Asia (Russian). In addition, Russian is used as a second language by most inhabitants of the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Some of the Slavic languages have been used by writers of worldwide significance (e.g., Russian, Polish, Czech), and the Church Slavonic language remains in use in the services in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Slavic language group is classified into three branches: the South Slavic

n Slavic dialects (as opposed to the sharply differentiated literar

IV. The Celtic languages formed in the last centuries before the Christian

ck to Common Celtic, which

branch, with three subgroups: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian-Macedonian20; the West Slavic branch, with three principal subgroups: Czech, Slovak, and Lekhitic (Polish and related tongues, such as Sorbian),21 and the East Slavic branch, comprising Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.

In the spokey languages) the linguistic frontiers are not always apparent. There are

transitional dialects that connect the different languages, with the exception of the area where the South Slavs are separated from the other Slavs by the non-Slavic Romanians, Hungarians, and German-speaking Austrians. Even in this latter domain, some vestiges of the old dialectal continuity (between Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian, on the one hand, and Czech and Slovak, on the other) can be traced; similar remnants of the old links are seen in comparing Bulgarian and Russian dialects.

era one of the most extensive groups in the Indo-European family of languages. They were spoken over a wide area of Europe, ranging from Spain and Britain, over western Germany and northern Italy to the Balkans, with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor.

All Celtic languages are tentatively traced ba was the parent language. Old Irish, the most archaic Celtic language

of which substantial records exist and, thus, the closest in structure to Common Celtic, suggests that Common Celtic retained features of its ancestral language, Indo-European, both in its consonantal and vowel systems and in grammar, or structure. On both geographic and chronological

20 Macedonian is a South Slavic language that is most closely related to Bulgarian and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Macedonian is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia, where it is spoken by more than 1.3 million people. It is also spoken in adjacent areas of Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia and in Australia, Serbia, and Albania. 21 Also called Wendish, it is the traditional language of the Sorbs, a Slavic language related to Polish and Czech. It has been revived from near extinction and has around 100,000 speakers in Germany, in a district a little northeast of Dresden (i.e. the area of Cottbus).

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grounds, the languages fall into two divisions, usually known as Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic.

Continental Celtic is the generic name for the languages spoken by the people known to classical writers as Keltoi and Galatae; at various times during a period of roughly 1,000 years (approximately 500 BC-AD 500), they occupied an area that stretched from Gaul to Iberia in the south and Galatia in the east. Generally divided into Lepontic, Celto-Iberian, and Gaulish, Continental Celtic declined under the influence of Latin. Nonetheless, these dialects have left some traces in the Romance languages, especially French and Spanish. The great bulk of evidence for Continental Celtic consists of the names of persons, tribes, and places recorded by Greek and Latin writers. Only in Gaul and in northern Italy are inscriptions found, and the interpretation of these is in most cases doubtful. Given the nature of the evidence, knowledge of these languages is confined largely to the sound system and a small part of the vocabulary and no certain conclusions can be reached as to their historical development or the differences between them. Whereas the vernacular speech of the Continental Celtic peoples disappeared under the Roman Empire, representatives of the insular group have survived to the present day.

On linguistic grounds the Insular Celtic dialects fall into two groups: the Brythonic (or British), comprising Breton, Cornish, and Welsh; and the Goidelic (or Gaelic), comprising Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.

British (often called Brythonic, from Welsh Brython “Briton”) had almost the same degree of influence on the island of Britain and the Isle of Man. Inscriptions and personal names surviving from Scotland show clearly that there was a non-Indo-European language spoken there, usually called Pictish, which was later replaced by British. A British dialect, now labeled , lingered on in the western borderlands between England and Scotland until perhaps the 10th century, but almost nothing is known about it.

Welsh (Cymraeg) is the native language of Wales, and the most flourishing of the modern Celtic languages. It co-exists with English in most parts of Wales and has done so for centuries in some parts, especially in northeastern and southeastern Wales. It is strongest in rural parts of northwestern and southwestern Wales, though even here few Welsh-speaking monoglots exist today. The 1991 census reported just over half a million Welsh speakers, or over 18% of the population of Wales. The 2001 census showed an increase in Welsh speakers to a little more than 20%, with around 28% of the population being able to understand Welsh. However, while Welsh speakers are on the increase in urban settings, in some rural areas of the north and west they are declining.

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Cornish (Kernewek), a pocket of British speech, survived as the vernacular language in Cornwall until the end of the 18th century. In the 20th century, Cornish was revived by enthusiasts, who reconstructed it on the basis of medieval Cornish grammar and syntax, the sound system of modern Cornish English, and reconstructed vocabulary based on comparable Welsh and Breton forms. In November 2002, the UK government officially recognized Cornish as a language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages. Official recognition means that the language is protected and that measures will be taken to promote its preservation.

It was from this area of southwestern England that emigrants in the 5th and 6th centuries AD had brought Celtic once more to the European mainland by establishing a colony in northwestern France, still called Brittany. Breton (Brezhoneg) became the native language of Brittany. Contact between Brittany and Cornwall continued through the Middle Ages, and Breton is perceptibly more similar to Cornish than to Welsh. Since the 19th century, political pressure has favored French over Breton, and latterly this has caused a serious decline in the number of Breton speakers. However, Breton was recognized as a school subject in 1951, and the Diwan organization supports Breton-medium education on a voluntary basis. While numbers of traditional speakers continue to decline, there is now an intellectual revival movement and literature.

Irish (often called Goidelic, from Old Irish Goídel “Irishman,” or Gaelic, from Gael, the modern form of the same word) was the only language spoken in Ireland in the 5th century, the time when historical knowledge of that island begins. Whereas the British Celts of Britain came under the rule of Rome, the Gaels of Ireland did not. The only ancient evidence for their language is in the form of place names and tribal names in classical geographical texts. Their own record begins with short inscriptions in the so-called ogham alphabet,22 found on standing stones dating apparently from the 3rd to the 5th century AD. The two other members of this group, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, arose from Irish colonizations that began about that time.

Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) seems to have been taken to the West Highlands of Scotland by colonists from Ireland as part of a movement that also gave rise to Irish colonial activity in Cornwall, Wales, the Isle of Man, and southwestern Scotland, in the late Roman period (4th - 6th centuries AD). The language of these Gaelic speakers (known as Scotti by their neighbors

22 It is an ancient British and Irish alphabet, consisting of twenty characters formed by parallel strokes on either side of or across a continuous line.

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the Picts, the Britons, and the Angles) predominated throughout Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line by the 9th century, and, when their kings asserted their power in southern Scotland, Gaelic became briefly the prestige language of the whole of Scotland (11th century). The Normanization of the Scottish court (12th century) put Gaelic into decline, and by the late Middle Ages it could be regarded as the language of the Highlands. Highland support for the Jacobite cause led to anti-Gaelic measures in the 18th century, and emigration emptied the Highlands in the 19th century.

As a result of this retreat, Gaelic is today the native language of the indigenous population of the Western Isles and north-western seaboard of the Scottish Highlands, and of Gaelic communities in the cities and overseas (for example in Nova Scotia). The total number of speakers had declined by the time of the 1991 census to around 80,000. Ten years later the census figures showed a worrying 11% drop in speakers, to 58,650. However, this decline is most likely to be caused by the deaths of older speakers. The language is officially supported (though not legally entrenched), and Gaelic-medium and bilingual schooling is provided by the education system, with the aim of creating a secure place for Gaelic within a stable bilingual system.

Manx Gaelic (Gailck) was spoken as a traditional native language in the agricultural and fishing communities of the Isle of Man down to the times of modern recording, and has been kept alive in recent decades by enthusiasts. The needs of religious instruction gave rise to a Manx Bible, Prayer Book, Catechism, and so on, in the 18th century. This stabilized the orthography and led to the publication of a certain amount of traditional material, translation literature and fresh literary creation.

Manx appears to share some features with Irish, but more with Scottish Gaelic. The geographical position of the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, helps to explain this in general, but the details are obscure. The reasons for the affilia tions of Manx are probably to be sought in or before the 14th century, in a period when Scottish, Irish, and Norse-Hebridean elements were involved in the history of the island.23

V. Greek (or rather the subgroup of Hellenic languages) is an Indo-European language whose history can be followed from the 14th century BC to the present day. Its documents cover 34 centuries, a longer period of time than that of any other Indo-European language. Prehistoric peoples, who migrated from Central and northern Asia to the more fertile lands to the

23 Contributed by William Gillies (Professor of Celtic, University of Edinburgh) to Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation; Celtic Languages.

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south, settled in various sections of Greece, in each of which a distinct dialect arose; the four main dialects were Arcado-Cyprian (Mycenaean), Doric, Aeolic, and Attic-Ionic.

Arcado-Cyprian is the descendant of a form spoken in Mycenaean times in at least the Peloponnese and some of the southern islands. Mycenaean is generally believed to be the most ancient form of the Greek language that has been discovered. It was a chancellery language, used mainly for perishable records and inventories of royal palaces and commercial establishments.

The deciphering in1952 of the so-called Linear B script by the British architect Michael Ventris and the British classicist and linguist John Chadwick, examples of which were found on tablets during the excavations made in Crete and on the mainland of Greece after 1900, revealed Mycenaean as an ancestor (1500-1400 BC) of Arcado-Cyprian. The major source of Linear B inscriptions are some 4,500 unbaked clay tablets, found at Knossos in Crete (1400-1350 BC—this date has been questioned) and at Thebes, Tiryns, Mycenae, Pylos, and Chania (1250-1200 BC). These researches indicate that the Greeks were a literate people many hundreds of years before the period of the first Greek poet, Homer (probably the 9th century BC).

The Doric dialect, originally spoken in northern Greece, largely replaced the Arcado-Cyprian dialect in the Peloponnese and came to be spoken also in the southern Cyclades, on the island of Crete, and in the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy. Most of the poems of Theocritus in the 3rd century BC were written in this dialect, and the language of Pindar has many traits found in Doric.

Aeolic was spoken mainly in the districts of Aeolis, Thessaly, and Boeotia. It was the language of the poets Alcaeus and Sappho and of three of the idylls of Theocritus.

The Attic-Ionic dialect was spoken on many of the islands of the Aegean and on most of the western shore of Asia Minor. It was employed in various literary works of the 5th century BC, notably the writings of the doctor Hippocrates and of the historian Herodotus.

From the Ionic dialect developed the Attic, the language of Athens and the surrounding district of Attica, which became the standard form of classical Greek. Because of the political supremacy of Athens during and after the 5th century BC and the dominant role of Athenian art, philosophy, and drama, the Attic dialect superseded all others and became the chief literary language. During the Hellenistic period, the Attic dialect, spoken by

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the educated classes as well as by the merchants and many emigrants, became the language common to all the Middle East.

As the Greeks mixed with other peoples, linguistic changes took place and the Attic dialect became the foundation of a new form of Greek, Koine, which spread throughout all areas of Greek influence. Koine soon became differentiated into two groups, literary Koine and the vernacular, or popular tongue. While the literary language was spoken and used by the educated upper classes, the vernacular tongue was less influenced by classical reminiscences and by the new developments of Hellenistic thought. It borrowed more freely from the vocabularies of Middle Eastern languages and suffered more severely from breakdown of the traditional grammar. The literary Koine, which was confined to the great cultural centers, remained static, but the vernacular Koine broke up into many local dialects, developing further into Modern Greek, as it was gradually and constantly influenced by the migrating peoples in the Middle East: the Venetians, the Turks, the Bulgarians, and the Albanians, among others.24

VI. The Indo-Iranian languages are a group of related languages, spoken by more than 500 million people in a region extending from eastern Turkey to Bangladesh and including most of India. The Indo-Iranian languages form the largest subfamily (296 languages) of the Indo-European languages and they comprise two main sub-branches: Indo-Aryan (Indic)—spoken primarily in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal and other areas of the Himalayan region, Iranian—spoken primarily in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. To these two principal sub-branches, linguists also add a third, Unclassified group of minor languages, such as Kafiri, or Nuristani, of the Hindu Kush region25

24 See articles on Hellenic languages in Encyclopædia Britannica `98 and Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. 25 The identification of Kafiri as a third branch of IndoIranian is somewhat uncertain. Kafiri was once grouped with Kashmiri, Shina, Indus Kohistani, and Khowar as a Dardic language, descended from Paisaci, the Prakrit dialect of northwestern India. Despite many lexical similarities, it is now realized that Kafiri maintains certain archaic phonological features no longer found in either Indic or Iranian. (Apud Ramaswami Radhakrishna, in 1999 Grolier Interactive Inc.)

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The Indo-Aryan branch, consisting of 210 languages spoken by some

500 million people in the northern and central parts of the Indian subcontinent since before 1000 BC, includes the ancient Sanskrit language, Indian medieval languages that developed from Sanskrit, called Prakrits (including Pali), and modern languages, such as: Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Marathi, and other Indian languages, Nepali (official in Nepal and Sikkim), Sinhalese (official in Sri Lanka), and the many dialects of Romany—the language of the Gypsies (Rom). Also considered to be an Indo-Aryan sub-group are the Dardic languages, which include Kashmiri and Shina.

Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium BC, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda (Rgveda), the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 BC such as the Vedas

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or sacred books of India, forming the basis if Brahman philosophy. As these books were for a long time preserved by oral transmission, before being committed to writing, it is therefore quite difficult to date them; however, the oldest apparently go back to approximately 1500 BC. One of the most distinctive features of Vedic Sanskrit is its accentual system, in which vowels have low, high, or circumflex pitch. As the Vedic language developed, vowel accent and other features fell into disuse, and the language became somewhat simpler. Classical Sanskrit is the result of such development. Approximately in the 6th century BC, the grammarian Panini composed a treatise that became the standard for correct usage of Classical Sanskrit.

Major Iranian languages include ancient Avestan and Old Persian, various medieval languages, modern Persian (Farsi), Pashto or Afghan, Kurdish languages, and Balochi languages (spoken in Baluchistan, the historic region in the south of Central Asia, on the Arabian Sea, i.e. in the southwest of modern-day Pakistan, and neighbouring parts of southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan). Iranian languages are spoken by more than 60 million people. Also of Iranian stock are the languages of the ancient Scythians (groups of nomads that originated in Iran and inhabited the Eurasian steppes in the 1st millennium BC) and Sarmatians (ancient nomadic and pastoral people, speaking an Indo-Iranian language, who in the 5th century BC lived between the Caspian Sea, the Don River, and the Sea of Azov) and a modern remnant, Ossetic, or Osetin, spoken in the Caucasus.

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VII. Italic languages are a subdivision of the Indo-European languages, including around 48 languages. In its broadest sense, they are considered to be a subfamily that includes Latin, the Romance languages—its modern descendants

26 —, and certain other tongues spoken in ancient Italy. (Some writers reserve the term Italic languages for the ancient languages only.) The ancient Italic languages fall into two branches that are closely related in their sound systems but more diverse in their grammar. Some linguists consider them independent Indo-European subfamilies that share traits setting them off from other Indo-European subfamilies, but another widely accepted older view is that they are branches of a single subfamily.

The two branches are Latinian or Latin-Faliscan, which contains both the Latin language (originally spoken in Latium, the region surrounding Rome and the Tiber River in west-central Italy); and Faliscan (closely related to Latin and documented in a few inscriptions from a small area between Latium and Etruscan territory) and Osco-Umbrian (with South Picene27), an extinct group once spoken over a wide region in ancient Italy, and including two principal members, Oscan and Umbrian.

A third branch, Venetic, is sometimes cited as belonging to the Italic languages but authorities are undecided as to whether it is related to the Italic languages, such as Latin, or is an independent branch of Indo-European. For this reason they prefer to usually place it in an Unclassified Indo-European branch, along with seven other languages. Venetic was a northeastern language spoken in northeastern Italy before the Christian era. It is known to modern scholars from some 200 short funerary and votive inscriptions, dating from the 5th through the 1st century BC, from words cited by the Classical writers, and from onomastic and toponomastic data from the area between the River Po and Istria. Venetic is written either in Latin characters or in a native alphabet derived from Etruscan28, the Etruscans having established settlements in the Po Valley in the 6th century BC. 26 The designation Romance is derived from the Latin phrase romanica loqui, “to speak in Roman fashion,” which attests to the popular, rather than literary, origins of the languages. 27 Approximately two dozen short inscriptions from the southern part of ancient Picenum (most of them found near Ascoli Piceno and Teramo) preserve extremely early remains (6th and 5th centuries BC) of this Italic language. Formerly referred to as Old Sabellian or Central Adriatic, South Picene shows close affinities to Oscan and Umbrian. 28 The Etruscans lived in Italy in the region of modern Tuscany, in an area bounded by the Arno River on the north, the Tiber River on the southeast, and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the west, as close neighbors of the ancient Romans. The Romans called them Etrusci or Tusci; in Greek they were called Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi. Despite many attempts at decipherment and some claims of success, the Etruscan records (some 10,000 inscriptions) still defy translation. While the possibility always remains that an imaginative conjecture or a brilliant inference will suddenly provide the key to the mystery, this now seems remote. The etymological method of investigation, which ultimately depends upon the recognition of presumed cognates from related languages, seems to have failed because no clear and certain relationship between

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The Italic languages must have been brought from the original area of the Indo-European languages, perhaps in eastern parts of central Europe, when their speakers crossed the Alps. This is attested to by a stratum of very old place-names of non-Indo-European origin, e.g. Tarracina, Capua, which covers not only the Apennine Peninsula but also Greece and Anatolia. This stratum is ascribed to a “Mediterranean” language believed to have dominated large parts of the ancient world before the arrival of the Indo-European peoples. Nothing is known about the date, the path, and the circumstances of the above-mentioned immigration, and none of the many attempts to combine archaeological evidence with linguistic prehistory has led to convincing results. Thus, the only resources available for studying the Italic languages are exclusively linguistic methods of comparative philology.

Latin is the language of Latium and of Rome; its earliest known documents date to the 6th century BC. Rich epigraphic evidence and an extensive literature began at the end of the 3rd century BC, at the time when Roman Latin was emerging as the predominant language of Italy. By AD 100 at the latest, Latin had effaced all the other dialects between Sicily and the Alps, with the exception of Greek in the colonies of Magna Graecia. From the evidence of Latin grammarians, popular playwrights, and inscriptions, apparently in Republican Rome the spoken language of the lower classes was undergoing modifications in pronunciation and grammar that ultimately were to differentiate it from the written language and the language of the privileged. During the period of empire and Roman expansion, it was this Latin of the people—the so-called Vulgar Latin— that was carried to the far-flung provinces by soldiers, merchants, and colonists.

But not all provinces were romanized at the same time, however. Sicily and Sardinia were colonized as early as 238 BC, while Dacia (modern Romania) did not come under Roman occupation before 105 AD. In the provinces, Vulgar Latin underwent further modification by the subjugated peoples, who brought to it their own speech habits and pronunciation influenced by their own indigenous languages. The Iberians, for example, pronounced Latin one way, whereas the Gauls pronounced it another.

The collapse of the empire’s frontiers during the 5th century under the thrust of Germanic tribes left Rome cut off from the provinces, and the outer regions drifted apart, as each modified its form of spoken Latin in unique ways. This separation from Latin became evident in the 5th to 9th centuries, resulting in a large group of 47 modern languages, the Romance languages. Etruscan and any other language has ever been established. Hence, Etruscan, written in an alphabet derived from Greek, is generally considered a language isolate because, so far, it has not been genetically related to any language or language family existing in an area remote from the Mediterranean.

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Linguists subdivide the group in various ways, using geographical as much as linguistic criteria. The most recently accepted classification is into the following three sub-groups:

(1) Southern: two subsets consisting of Corsican, spoken in France on the island of Corsica, and Sardo, spoken on the island of Sardinia (with its four dialects: Logudorian, spoken in central Sardinia; Campidanian, spoken in the south; Sassarian, spoken in the northwest; and Gallurian, spoken in the northeast).

(2) Eastern: the four Romanian languages, which evolved from Romanian between AD 500 and 1000) spoken primarily in Romania, Croatia, and Greece. Romanian proper is spoken by about 20.5 million people in Romania, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, Ukraine, and Serbia and Montenegro. Macedo-Romanian, or Aromanian, has several hundred thousand speakers in various Balkan countries, primarily Greece. Only around 12,000 people still speak Megleno-Romanian, or Meglenitic, in Greece northwest of Salonica (Thessaloníki), and Istro-Romanian, has no more than 1,500 speakers on the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia. These varieties (that are not always mutually intelligible and have further dialects of their own) cause debate among linguists, some of whom classify them as independent languages.

(3) Italo-Western: the largest sub-group, containing 38 languages in 2 further subsets: • Italo-Dalmatian—6 languages including Sicilian and the now extinct Dalmatian of Croatia. • Western—32 languages with 2 further subsets.

(a) The Gallo-Iberian group includes Spanish, Ladino (or Judaeo-Spanish, i.e. the language of some Sephardic Jews, especially formerly in Mediterranean countries), Portuguese, French, Provençal/Occitan (in southern France) and other regional French languages, Catalan (in Catalonia and Valencia in Spain; official language of Andorra), Italian (and its dialects), and the Rhaeto-Romanic group (Romansch, in Switzerland; Ladin, spoken in northern Italy, in the Alto Adige region and to the east in the Dolomites and Friulian, spoken east of the Alps and in some parts of Slovenia).

(b) The other subset, Pyranean-Mozarabic, consists of two languages in two separate branches: Aragonese is a Spanish language with official status in the region where it is spoken; Mozarabic is an extinct Spanish language still used liturgically by a few churches.

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VIII. The Germanic languages,29 consisting of around 58 languages, are spoken by more than 480 million people in Northern and Western Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia. They are a branch of the Indo-European language family and include a number of extinct languages, as well as the earlier and present forms of German, Netherlandic, Afrikaans, English, Frisian, the Scandinavian languages, Yiddish, and their many dialects. To these figures may be added those for persons with another native language who have learned one of the Germanic languages for commercial, scientific, literary, or other purposes. English is unquestionably the world’s most widely used second language.

The Germanic languages are grouped together because of strong similarities in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and all are thought to have derived from one ancient language—Proto-Germanic. Though there are no records of this language, its structure can be surmised by comparing the several Germanic languages.

About the year 500 BC, Proto-Germanic split into branches: (1) The East Germanic languages were spoken in the region centered on what is now Poland. All are extinct, though fragments remain of Gothic. (2) The West Germanic languages developed around the North Sea and in overseas areas colonized by inhabitants of the area. This division includes six modern languages: English, Frisian, Netherlandic, Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish.

In numbers of native speakers, English, with 450 million, clearly ranks 4th among the languages of the world (after Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish).

Frisian, which shares many of the sound shifts that distinguish English from the other Germanic languages, is spoken today in the northern Netherlands and northwestern Germany.

Netherlandic is the name given to the Dutch spoken in The Netherlands and the Flemish spoken in Belgium, which are in fact the same standard language, though dialectical differences are more prominent in Belgium. The derivative of Netherlandic spoken in South Africa, Afrikaans, is a partially creolized language.

German is the national language of Germany and Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland. After English, German is one of the world’s most widely used second languages. With some 98 million, it 29 “German” is a word of Celtic origin and means “neighbor,” i.e. the Celtic tribes living in Gaul called their neighbors “Germans.” The German term “deutsch” is derived from the Old High German “diutisc” (in Old High German “deot” means “people”), designating the vernacular, as opposed to Latin, the language of the church.

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probably ranks 10th (after Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese).

Yiddish was for centuries the language of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Though Germanic, it includes elements from Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavic languages, too. There were about 11 million speakers of Yiddish before World War II, but large numbers were killed during the Nazi Holocaust, and the language is now almost dead in Western Europe. (3) The third main branch of the Germanic languages is the North Germanic, or Scandinavian languages, which extended as far west as Greenland and as far east as Russia during the Viking expansion of the early Middle Ages. The establishment of the Christian church in the region in the 11th and 12th centuries brought the introduction of Latin letters to replace the old runic alphabet. The continental Scandinavian languages were strongly influenced by Low German during the late Middle Ages, but Icelandic and Faroese were not.

Danish was the first modern Scandinavian language to emerge. After Sweden separated from Denmark in the 16th century, Swedish was standardized and spread with the country’s expansion in the next century. Today Swedish is also one of the official languages of Finland.

Norway has two official languages: Nynorsk, or New Norwegian, which was standardized in the mid-19th century by the linguist Ivar Aasen; and Bokmål, or Dano-Norwegian, which is more widely used and represents a compromise between standard Danish and southeast Norwegian dialects.

Icelandic and Faroese form a distinct, insular branch of Scandinavian, preserving Old Scandinavian grammar to a considerable degree. Icelandic has also been highly resistant to the adoption of foreign words. Faroese, the language of the Faroe Islands, was established as a written language in the mid-19th century on the basis of the spoken dialects and with a strongly historical and etymologizing orthography. Typologically it can be placed between Icelandic and New Norwegian. IX. The term Anatolian languages in its most comprehensive use includes both the Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages spoken in Anatolia (Asia Minor) before the Greco-Roman period. The Anatolian languages are known only from texts of the 2nd and the 1st millennia BC; the earliest evidence is that of the so-called Cappadocian tablets (19th and 18th centuries BC). The term Asianic is sometimes used as an alternative

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designation for the Anatolian languages, but, since the discovery in 1915 that Hittite, the main Anatolian language, is an Indo-European language, there has been a tendency to use Asianic in a more restricted sense for the non-Indo-European languages that existed in Anatolia before the entry of the Indo-Europeans. These are called substratum languages. Hattic (or Hattian), also misleadingly called Proto-Hittite, is the best-known substratum language. It is completely unrelated to Hittite and its sister languages as well as to Hurrian, a language also spoken in Anatolia. Now extinct, they were spoken from about 2000 BC in parts of present-day Turkey and Syria. The Anatolian group of Indo-European languages consists of Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian, in written represented by cuneiform, alphabetic, and hieroglyphic systems. Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian are known from 2nd-millennium cuneiform texts found in the excavations in Bogazköy-Hattusa since 1905; Hieroglyphic Luwian is found on scattered inscriptions and seals from Anatolia (mainly the southern area) and northern Syria dating mainly from later times (i.e. between 1200 and 700 BC, although there are earlier examples from the empire period, 1400 to 1190 BC). Lydian and Lycian are known from texts in alphabetic script from 600 to 200 BC.

To the languages mentioned supra, it seems fairly reasonable to add the Carian language of southwest Anatolia, as well as other less well documented languages like Sidetic. More to the east, in the Caucasus region centering around Lake Van, Hurrian of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC was replaced in the 1st millennium BC by the related Urartian language. Both of these languages are definitely non-Indo-European.30 X. Phrygian language. The early Phrygians probably were not organized in one strong and centrally governed kingdom. Their origins and the affiliations of their language are still enshrouded in mystery. Greek tradition—still in many cases the best source available—usually dates their migration into Anatolia from Europe about the period of the Trojan War (early 12th century BC), and the Greeks were convinced that the Phrygians came from Macedonia and Thrace. Thus, the Phrygian language once was believed to be related to Thracian or Illyrian. Most linguists, however, now view Phrygian as a separate Indo-European language that shares a number of

30 See articles on Anatolian languages in Encyclopædia Britannica `98 and Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation.

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isoglosses (i.e. on a linguistic map, it is the boundary line between dialectal features) with ancient Greek.31 XI. Generally assumed to be an Indo-European language, Thracian was spoken by the inhabitants of Thrace32 primarily in pre-Greek and early Greek times. Being an extinct language, it is known only from proper names, glosses in Greek writings, and a small number of inscriptions, some of which appear on coins; these sources date from as early as the 6th century BC. Many scholars believe Thracian to be related to the ancient Phrygian language spoken in Asia Minor. XII. Tocharian, also spelled Tokharian, is a small group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in the Tarim River Basin (in the center of the modern Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang, China) during the latter half of the 1st millennium AD. It has been suggested that the Tocharians, perhaps originally from the Balkans, formed part of the extensive migration from Europe into eastern Asia in the 8th and 9th centuries BC., a migration which resulted in the overthrow of the Chou dynasty in China in 771 BC. It is also believed that Illyrians, Thracians, Phrygians, and Teutons, too, were among those who took part in the movement. Differing greatly from almost all other Indo-European languages (i.e. it is not closely related to Indo-Aryan or Iranian languages, as one might expect judging from its historical position on the eastern frontier of the Indo-European languages), Tocharian shows, however, an affinity with such languages as Latin and the Germanic languages, and to a lesser extent with Balto-Slavic and Greek.

31 The Phrygian inscriptions and graffiti may be separated into two groups, the Old Phrygian texts in a typical Phrygian alphabet dating from c. 730-450 BC, and the New Phrygian inscriptions (sepulchral texts in the Greek alphabet) stemming from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The Old Phrygian texts may be divided into a central group (Midas City and the central area) and an eastern group (found in Gordium), with offshoots in a still more eastern direction marking the utmost Phrygian expansion (inscriptions in or around Hüyük near Alaca, in Bogazköy-Hattusas, and in Tyana). An important recent finding—and the longest Old Phrygian text to date—is the rock inscription near the village of Germanos (modern Soguk Çam) in Bithynia (found in 1966). The total number of Old Phrygian texts now stands at about 80; more than 50 of these are from Gordium and represent about one-quarter of the available material. (See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.) 32 An ancient country lying west of Istanbul and the Black Sea and north of the Aegean, now part of modern Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria. It extended as far west as the Adriatic but the Thracians retreated eastwards between the 13th and 5th centuries BC under pressure from the Illyrians and Macedonians. Conquered by Philip II of Macedon in 342 BC it later became a province of Rome. The region was ruled by the Ottoman Turks from the 15th century until the end of World War I, but northern Thrace was annexed by Bulgaria in 1885. In 1923 all of Thrace east of the Maritsa River was restored to Turkey.

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Documents dating to AD 500-700 attest to two languages: Tocharian

A, from the area of Turfan in the east, and Tocharian B, chiefly from the region of Kucha in the west but also from the Turfan area. (For language A and language B, the substitution of Turfanian and Kuchean, or of East Tocharian and West Tocharian, is sometimes found.) The Tocharian languages are written in a northern Indian syllabary (i.e. a set of characters representing syllables) known as Brahmi, which was also used in writing Sanskrit manuscripts from the same area. The first successful attempt at grammatical analysis and translation was made by the German scholars Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling in 1908. At the time of documentation, it is possible that Tocharian A was a dead liturgical language preserved in the Buddhist monasteries in the east, whereas Tocharian B was a living language in the west (judging by the

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commercial or at least nonliturgical documents found in that language). The presence of manuscripts in B mixed with those in A in the monasteries of the east can be accounted for by ascribing the B manuscripts to a new missionary initiative by Buddhist monks from the west.

As a conclusion to the above-presentation of the different subfamilies of the larger Indo-European language family, a few more facts are worth mentioning with reference to the linguistic evolution of these languages. Firstly, in general the evolution of the Indo-European languages displays a progressive decay of inflection. Thus, Proto-Indo-European seems to have been highly inflected, as are ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Avestan, and classical Greek; in contrast, comparatively modern languages, of which English, Persian, and others have moved towards an analytic system (using prepositional phrases and auxiliary verbs). In large part the decay of inflection was a result of the loss of the final syllables of many words over time, so that modern Indo-European words are often much shorter than the ancestral Proto-Indo-European words. Many languages also developed new forms and grammatical distinctions, whereas changes in the meanings of individual words have been even greater than those in sounds and grammar. Secondly, when Indo-European languages have been carried within historic times into territories presumably or certainly occupied by speakers of non-Indo-European languages, they have generally taken over a number of loanwords, as with English and Spanish in the Americas or Dutch in South Africa. In other words, these non-Indo-European languages had some effect on the speech of the newcomers. Generally speaking, sounds and grammar were less affected, except for when prolonged close contact with non-Indo-European speakers occurred, as is the case with Ossetic—an Iranian language in the Caucasus—, or when its speakers were very strongly influenced culturally by speakers of the aboriginal languages to which the Indo-Europeans spread. All these populations introduced many elements of their own language into the language they learned from their conquerors. Such is the case with Persian, in which Arabic plays much the same role as Latin does in English, but perhaps the best case is India, where certain grammatical features shared by Indo-European and Dravidian languages appear to have spread from Dravidian to Indo-European rather than vice versa.33 33 The existence of foreign, aboriginal elements in the various Indo-European languages is commonly termed “linguistic substratum,” whereas ‘later imports,’ coming from the languages of subsequent conquerors, are called “linguistic superstratum.” Such is the case of Spanish and Portuguese whose shared characteristics point to the influence of an Iberian substratum and a Moorish superstratum.

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HIGHLIGHTS:

• Proto Iondo-European: the hypothetical parent language from which all Indo-European languages developed.

• centum languages: describes ancient Indo-European language groups in which the /k/ sound did not palatalize when preceding a front vowel.

• satem languages: relating to Indo-European languages in which the consonant sounding like "k" developed into the sound “s” or “sh.”

ASSESSMENT TEST TWO – upon reading unit two, answer the following questions or comment briefly on the following issues.

1. Explain the function of Proto Indo-European as a lingua franca.

2. What culture is generally accepted to have triggered the formation of the Indo-European language family?

3. How is the fundamental division of the Indo-European family into centum and satem languages explained?

4. Explain the role played by the Insular Celtic dialects in the larger geographic area of the British Isles, in other words, their interaction with English.

5. Starting from the modern language, explain the general grouping of the languages belonging to the subfamily of Germanic languages.

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UNIT THREE: The Germanic Peoples and Their Languages – A Brief Survey of the History of the Old Germanic Tribes OBJECTIVES:

• to make the students understand the process that turned the Germanic languages into the most powerful and well-defined branch Indo-European languages; • to make the students understand how the history of the Germanic

tribes

TEXT: The origins of the Germanic peoples are obscure. It is generally believed that the Germanic peoples, organized in tribes (“gentes”) and representing that branch of Indo-European peoples that during the late Bronze Age inhabited southern Sweden, the Danish peninsula, and northern Germany between the Ems River on the west, the Oder River on the east, and the Harz Mountains on the south, i.e. the “Urheimat.”

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Here, the Germanic peoples probably managed to develop their own linguistic, cultural and physical characteristics and, consequently, to become the most powerful and well-defined branch of Indo-European peoples, and fairly homogeneous linguistically. Then in the closing centuries BC, the Vandals, the Gepidae, and the Goths migrated from southern Sweden and occupied the area of the southern Baltic coast roughly between the Oder on the west and the Vistula River on the east, and across it, to the shores of Estonia and perhaps Finland. Owing to the fact that the territory initially inhabited by the Germanic peoples was not very rich in natural resources, at an early date already, there was also migration toward the south and the west, obviously at the expense of the Celtic peoples who then inhabited much of nowadays western Germany: the Celtic Helvetii, for example, who were confined by the Germanic peoples to the area that is now Switzerland in the 1st century BC, had once extended as far east as the Main River.

This is also the date when the Proto-Germanic language (Urgermanisch) seems to have split into three major branches: North Germanic, Central Germanic, and South Germanic. But later, when the larger part of the central group (the Goths) emigrated to the southeast (southwestern Ukraine) a regroupment into West Germanic, North Germanic, and East Germanic languages occurred.

Much of what is known about Germanic peoples comes from historical accounts written by two Roman authors: Commentarii de bello Gallico (51 BC) by Julius Caesar, and Germania (AD 98) by Cornelius Tacitus. By comparing the two writings, it is possible to trace the evolution of Germanic society in the intervening period. In Caesar’s time, land tenure did not involve private property; instead, fields were divided annually among clans. By the time of Tacitus, however, land was distributed annually to individuals according to social class. The basic socio-political unit was the pagus (district belonging to a clan/pays/Gau). In Caesar’s period, some pagi had military leaders as chiefs, but only in time of war. By Tacitus’s time, however, several pagi, at least, had full-time elected chiefs. These leaders did not have absolute power but were limited by a council of nobles and an assembly of fighting men. Military chiefs had groups (comitium) of men who swore allegiance to them in both peace and war.34

Other reliable sources of information about Germanic tribes are: • Pytheas, the Greek navigator, geographer, and astronomer, who

apparently around 352 BC visited some northern European

34 See articles on Germanic peoples and languages in Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation.

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countries and may have traveled across the territory of certain Germanic tribes and reached the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic Sea;

• at the beginning of our era, the Greek geographer Strabo prided himself on having traveled westward from Armenia as far as the regions of Tuscany opposite Sardinia, and southward from the Black Sea as far as the frontiers of Ethiopia. In Books III to VI and then in Book VII of his Geographica, Strabo describes successively Iberia, Gaul, and Italy, respectively the Danube Basin and the European coasts of the Black Sea, for which his main sources were Polybius and Posidonius, both of whom had visited these countries;

• the Roman administrator and encyclopedic writer Gaius Plinius Secundus—Pliny the Elder—is apparently credited with the first division of the Germanic tribes into: Vindili (Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, etc.), Ingaevones (Angles, Frisians, Jutes and Saxons, along with Cimbri and Teutoni), Istaevones or Iscaevones (the tribes living along the Rhine and generally representing the later Franconians), Hermiones (the later upper German tribes), and Hilleviones (the North-Germanic tribes living in the Scandinavian Peninsula), and Bastarnae (tribes that lived in the region of Dacia, probably belonging to the Gothic population)35

By the time of Julius Caesar, Germanic tribes had settled west of the

Rhine River and toward the south they had reached the Danube River. Their first great clash with the Romans came at the end of the 2nd century BC, when, forced out of what is now Denmark by overpopulation and the encroaching sea, the Cimbri and Teutoni (Teutones) pushed southward, invaded southern Gaul and northern Italy and scored victories over the Romans in 113, 109, and 107. Following a particularly devastating Roman defeat in 105 at Arausio (Orange, France), command of the Romans was assumed by Gaius Marius who in 102 destroyed the Teutoni at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) and in 101 combined forces with Quintus Lutatius Catulus to annihilate, at Campi Raudii near Vercellae (Vercelli), the entire Cimbri army. After these battles, many women committed suicide, after having killed their children. The few survivors came to Roman slavery and thus the two tribes were completely destroyed along with their language. 35 Apud Richard Lang, Gramatica comparată…, op. cit., p. 11.

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Although individual travelers from the time of Pytheas onward had visited Teutonic countries in the north, it was not until the 1st century BC was well advanced that the Romans learned to distinguish precisely between the Germans and the Celts, a distinction that is made with great clarity by Julius Caesar. It was Caesar who incorporated within the frontiers of the Roman Empire those Germans who had penetrated west of the Rhine, and it is he who gave the earliest extant description of Germanic culture, as mentioned supra.

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In 9 BC, the Romans pushed their frontier eastward from the Rhine to the Elbe, but in AD 9 a revolt of their subject Germans headed by Arminius (Hermann, chief of the Cherusci tribe, who in service of the Romans had obtained both citizenship and equestrian rank) and the subsequent defeat of three legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest (southeast of modern Bielefeld) ended in the withdrawal of the Roman frontier to the Rhine. In this period of occupation and during the numerous wars fought between Rome and the Germans in the 1st century AD, enormous quantities of information about the Germans reached Rome, and, when Tacitus published in AD 98 the book now known as the Germania, he had reliable sources of information on which to draw.

Tacitus relates that, according to their ancient songs, the Germans were descended from the three sons of Mannus, the son of the god Tuisto, the son of Earth. Hence they were divided into three groups—the Ingaevones, the Herminones, and the Istaevones. (He probably dwells on Pliny the Elder’s division.) Tacitus records a variant form of the genealogy according to which Mannus had a larger number of sons, who were regarded as the ancestors of the Suebi, the Vandals, and others. At any rate, the currency of these songs suggests that in Tacitus’ time the various Germanic peoples were conscious of their relationship with one another. While individual Germans in Roman service would sometimes refer to themselves as “Germani,” the free Germans beyond the Rhine had no collective name for themselves until the 11th century AD, when the adjective “diutisc” (modern German “deutsch,”—“of the people”) came into fashion.

In the time of Tacitus, the principal Germanic peoples were distributed as follows:

• the Chatti lived in what is now Hesse; • the Frisii inhabited the coastlands between the Rhine and the

Ems; • the Chauci were at the mouth of the Weser; • south of them lived the Cherusci, the people of Arminius; • the Suebi, who have given their name to Schwaben, were a

group of peoples inhabiting Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia;

• the Semnones, living around the Havel and the Spree rivers, were a Suebic people, as were the Langobardi (Lombards), who lived northwest of the Semnones;

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• among the seven peoples who worshiped the goddess Nerthus

were the Angli (Angles), centered on the peninsula of Angeln in eastern Schleswig.

• as for the Danubian frontier of the Roman Empire, the Hermunduri extended from the neighborhood of Regensburg northward through Franconia to Thuringia;

• the Marcomanni, who had previously lived in the Main valley, migrated during the last decade BC to Bohemia (which had hitherto been occupied by a Celtic people called the Boii), where their eastern neighbors were the Quadi in Moravia;

• on the lower Danube were a people called the Bastarnae, who are usually thought to have been Germans;

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• the Goths, the Gepidae, and the Vandals were on the southern Baltic coast;

• the Suiones and the Sitones according to Tacitus were living in Sweden;

• he also speaks of several other peoples of less historical importance, but he knows nothing of the Saxons, the Burgundians, and others who became prominent after his time.

By the end of the 3rd century AD important changes had taken place.

East of the Rhine there were three great confederacies of peoples unknown to Tacitus. The Roman frontier on the lower Rhine faced the Franks.

The Main valley was occupied from about 260 by the Burgundians, while the Agri Decumates (of the Black Forest region) were held by the Alemanni. The Burgundians appear to have been immigrants from eastern Germany. The Franks and the Alemanni may have been confederacies of peoples who had lived in these respective areas in Tacitus’s day, though perhaps with an admixture of immigrants from the east.

The peoples whom Tacitus mentions as living on the Baltic coast had moved southeastward in the second half of the 2nd century. Thus the Goths now controlled the Ukraine and much of what is now Romania; the Gepidae were in the mountains north of Transylvania with the Vandals as their western neighbors.

By the year 500, the Angles and the Saxons were in England and the Franks controlled northeastern Gaul. The Burgundians were in the Rhône valley with the Visigoths as their western neighbors. The Ostrogoths were established in Italy and the Vandals in Africa.

In 507, the Franks expelled the Visigoths from most of the Gallic possessions, which had stretched from the Pyrenees to the Loire River, and the Visigoths thereafter lived in Spain until their extinction by the Muslims in 711.

In 568, the Lombards entered Italy and lived there in an independent kingdom until they were overthrown by Charlemagne (774). The areas of eastern Germany vacated by the Goths and others were filled up by the Slavs, who extended westward as far as Bohemia and the basin of the Elbe. After the 8th century, the Germans recovered eastern Germany, lower Austria, and much of Styria and Carinthia from the Slavs.

In terms of the languages that these Germanic tribes spoke, modern linguistics groups them into: East Germanic languages (the languages of the Goths, the Burgundians, the Vandals, the Gepidae and of the Lombards), West Germanic languages (the languages of the Franks, the Frisii, the

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Jutes, the Angles, and of the Saxons, i.e. Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, Old English, and the later Low German or Plattdeutsch and High German with its own dialects: Middle, Rhenish, East Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic, etc.) and North Germanic languages (primitive Scandinavian that was very close to old common Germanic, Old Norse, with its dialects: Swedish and Danish—the East-Scandinavian subgroup—and Icelandic and Norwegian—the West-Scandinavian subgroup.

Let us now have a closer look at the evolution of the more important Germanic tribes of the three linguistic groups.

I. The principal language of the East Germanic group is undoubtedly

Gothic. According to their own legend, reported by the mid-6th-century Gothic historian Jordanes, the Goths originated in southern Scandinavia and crossed in three ships under their king Berig to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, where they settled after defeating the Vandals and other Germanic peoples in that area. By the 3rd century AD, they had migrated southward from the Vistula region under Filimer, the fifth king after Berig and, after various adventures, arrived at the Black Sea, and in the following century they were Christianized by a missionary called Ulfilas. Our knowledge of Gothic is almost entirely due to Ulfilas’s translation from Greek of the Gospels and of parts of the New Testament. Throughout the 3rd century Gothic raids on the Roman provinces in Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula were numerous, and in the reign of Aurelian (AD 270-275) they obliged the Romans to evacuate the trans-Danubian province of Dacia. Those Goths living between the Danube and the Dniester rivers became known as Visigoths, and those in what is now the Ukraine as Ostrogoths.

The Visigoths were settled agriculturists in Dacia (nowadays Romania) when they were attacked by the Huns in 376 and driven southward across the Danube River into the Roman Empire. They were allowed to enter the empire but the unfair demands of Roman officials soon drove them to revolt and plunder the Balkan provinces, assisted by some Ostrogoths. On Aug. 9, 378, they utterly defeated the army of the Roman emperor Valens on the plains outside Adrianople, killing the emperor himself. For four more years they continued to wander in search of somewhere to settle. In October 382 Valens’s successor, Theodosius I, settled them in Moesia (in the Balkans) as foederati, giving them land there and imposing on them the duty of defending the frontier. It was apparently during this period that the Visigoths were converted to Arian Christianity. They remained in Moesia until 395, when, under the leadership of Alaric, they left Moesia and moved first southward into Greece and then to Italy,

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which they invaded repeatedly from 401 onward. Their depredations culminated in the sack of Rome in 410. In the same year Alaric died and was succeeded by Ataulphus, who led the Visigoths to settle first in southern Gaul, then in Spain (AD 415), where they founded a state which lasted for over 200 years, until it was destroyed by the Arabs in the battle of Jeres de la Frontera in AD 711.

Invading southward from the Baltic Sea, the Ostrogoths built up a

huge empire stretching from the Don to the Dniester rivers (in present-day Ukraine) and from the Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes (southern Belarus). The kingdom reached its highest point under King Ermanaric, who is said to have committed suicide at an advanced age when the Huns attacked his people and subjugated them about 370. Although many Ostrogothic graves

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have been excavated south and southeast of Kiev, little is known about the empire. The Ostrogoths were probably literate in the 3rd century, and their trade with the Romans was highly developed.

After their subjugation by the Huns, little is heard of the Ostrogoths

for about 80 years, after which they reappear in Pannonia on the middle Danube River as allies of the Romans. But a pocket remained behind in the Crimea when the bulk of them moved to Central Europe, and these Crimean Ostrogoths preserved their identity through the Middle Ages until the 16th century. After the collapse of the Hun empire (Attila’s death in 453) the Ostrogoths under Theodoric the Great began to move again, first to Moesia (AD 475-488) and then to Italy. Theodoric became king of Italy in 493 and died in 526. A period of instability then ensued in the ruling dynasty, provoking the Byzantine emperor Justinian to declare war on the Ostrogoths in 535, in an effort to wrest Italy from their grasp. The war continued with varying fortunes for almost 20 years. In 555, the East-Roman general Narses

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defeated the last Ostrogoth army in the battle at the Vesuvius Mountain. The Ostrogoths thereafter had no national existence. The last survivors might have withdrawn to the Alps and become, thus, the ancestors of the Tirolese tribe. All extant Gothic texts were written in Italy before AD 554.

The Burgundians were a Scandinavian people whose original homeland lay on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, where the island of Bornholm (Burgundarholm in the Middle Ages) still bears their name. About the 1st century AD they moved into the lower valley of the Vistula River, but, unable to defend themselves there against the Gepidae, they migrated westward to the borders of the Roman Empire. There, serving as foederati, or auxiliaries, in the Roman army, they established a powerful kingdom, at Worms, which by the early 5th century extended to the west bank of the Rhine River until it was destroyed by the Huns in 436. Later, they centered on the eastern part of Gaul (la Bourgongne/Burgundy) and on Sapaudia (Savoy) near Lake Geneva. This second Burgundian kingdom remained independent until 534, when the Franks occupied the kingdom, extinguishing the royal dynasty.

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Also coming from the shores of the Baltic Sea, the Vandals migrated towards southwestern Europe, after passing through Dacia and Germany. Fleeing westward from the Huns at the beginning of the 5th century, the Vandals invaded and devastated parts of Gaul, before settling in Spain in 409. There the Asdingi Vandals under King Gunderic became the ascendant group after attacks by allies of the Romans had dissipated the Silingi and Alani Vandals. In 429 Gunderic’s brother and successor, Gaiseric (reigned 428-477), settled his people in North Africa, where they became foederati of Rome in 435. Four years later, Gaiseric threw off Roman overlordship, captured Carthage, and established an independent autocracy. With their rule firmly established in what is now northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria, the Vandals eventually annexed Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, and their pirate fleets controlled much of the western Mediterranean. Under Gaiseric, the Vandals even invaded Italy and captured Rome in June 455. For a fortnight they occupied the city and systematically plundered it, carrying off many valuable works of art. The Romans called this kind of devastation “vandalism.” In 534, the Vandal state of Carthage was destroyed by the East-Roman general Belisarius and North Africa was included into the Roman Empire again.

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The Gepidae were a Germanic tribe that lived on the southern Baltic coast in the 1st century AD, having migrated there from southern Sweden some years earlier. The Gepidae again migrated during the 2nd century and were reported in the mountains north of Transylvania by the end of the 3rd century. They united with other tribes in an assault on the Roman Empire but were crushed in 269 in a battle near Naissus (Niš). In 454 they and other Germanic tribes decisively defeated the Huns on the unlocated Nedao (Nedad) River in Pannonia, a province south and west of the Danube. Later, intermittent wars occurred between the Gepidae and the Lombards from 536 to about 567, when the Gepidae were finally crushed by a coalition of Lombards and Avars (a people of undetermined origin and language). Thereafter, the Gepidae became submerged in Avar domains.

The Lombards/Langobardi (derives from the long beards their warriors wore) were one of the Germanic tribes that formed the Suebi tribal group (the Marcomanni and Quadi, Hermunduri, Semnones, and the Alemanni), and during the 1st century AD their home was in northwestern Germany. Though they occasionally fought with the Romans and with neighboring tribes, the main body of the Lombards seems to have pursued a settled, pastoral existence until the beginnings of their great southward migrations in the 4th century. By the end of the 5th century they had moved into the area roughly coinciding with modern Austria north of the Danube River.

In 546, a new Lombard royal dynasty was begun by Audoin. At that time, it seems, the Lombards began to adapt their tribal organization and institutions to the imperial military system of the period, in which a hierarchy of dukes, counts, and others commanded warrior bands formed from related families or kin groups. For two decades the Lombards waged intermittent wars with the Gepidae, who were finally destroyed (AD 567) by Audoin’s successor, Alboin.

About this time the Lombards decided to migrate into Italy, which had been left almost defenseless after the Byzantine Empire’s armies had overthrown the Ostrogothic kingdom there. In the spring of 568, the Lombards crossed the Julian Alps. Their invasion of northern Italy was almost unopposed, and by late 569 they had conquered all the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. At the same time, they occupied areas in the central and southern parts of the peninsula, over which they ruled until the Franks entered Italy in 773. After a year’s siege Pavia fell to their armies and Charlemagne became king of the Lombards as well as of the Franks, crowning himself with the “the Iron Crown of the

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Langobards” at Milano in the year 774. Lombard rule in Italy thus came to an end.36

II. The West Germanic group is of chief interest to us as it is the

subgroup to which belong the very tribes that later on triggered the birth of the English language. This subgroup comprises the expansion to the west and southwest of the Germanic tribes living between the Elbe and the Oder rivers, which Tacitus had called the Ingaevones, the Istaevones, and the Herminones and which, in broad lines correspond to the Anglo-Frisian, the Franconian and the Upper German language groups.

The Franks emerged into recorded history in the 3rd century AD as a Germanic tribe living on the east bank of the lower Rhine River. Linguistically, they belonged to the Rhine-Weser group of Germanic-speakers. At this time they were divided into three groups: the Salians, the Ripuarians, and the Chatti, or Hessians. These branches were related to each other by language and custom, but politically they were independent tribes. In the mid-3rd century the Franks tried unsuccessfully to expand westward across the Rhine into Roman-held Gaul. In the mid-4th century the Franks again attempted to invade Gaul, and in 358 Rome was compelled to abandon the area between the Meuse and Scheldt rivers (now in Belgium) to the Salian Franks. During the course of these struggles the Franks were gradually influenced by Roman civilization. Some Frankish leaders became Roman allies (foederati) in the defense of the Roman frontier, and many Franks served as auxiliary soldiers in the Roman army.

The Vandals launched a massive invasion of Gaul in 406, and in the ensuing decades the Franks took advantage of the overstrained Roman defenses. They solidified their hold on what is now Belgium, took permanent control of the lands immediately west of the middle Rhine River, and edged into what is now northeastern France. The firm establishment of the Franks in northeastern Gaul by the year 480 meant that both the former Roman province of Germania and part of the two former Belgic provinces were lost to Roman rule. The small Gallo-Roman population there became submerged among the German immigrants, and Latin ceased to be the language of everyday speech. The extreme limit of Frankish settlement at this time is marked by the linguistic frontier that still divides the Romance-speaking peoples of France and southern Belgium from the Germanic-speaking peoples of northern Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany.

36 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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In 481/482 Clovis I succeeded his father, Childeric, as the ruler of the Salian Franks of Tournai. In the following years Clovis compelled the other Salian and Ripuarian tribes to submit to his authority. He then took advantage of the disintegration of the Roman Empire and led the united Franks in a series of campaigns that brought all of northern Gaul under his rule by 494. He stopped the Alemannic migrations into Gaul from east of the Rhine and in 507 he drove southward, subduing the Visigoths who had established themselves in southern Gaul. A unified Frankish kingdom in northern Gaul was thus established and secured. Clovis converted to Catholicism, and the mass adoption of orthodox Christianity by the Franks further served to unite them into one people. It also won them the support of the orthodox clergy and the remaining Gallo-Roman elements in Gaul, since most other Germanic tribes had adopted Arianism.

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Under Clovis’ successors, the Merovingians were able to extend Frankish power east of the Rhine. The Merovingian dynasty ruled the Frankish territories until they were displaced by the Carolingian family in the 8th century. The Carolingian Charlemagne (Charles the Great, reigned 768-814) restored the Western Roman Empire in cooperation with the papacy and spread Christianity into central and northern Germany. His empire disintegrated by the mid-9th century, when his son Louis I the Pious was forced to abdicate. After the death of Louis I the Pious (840), his sons continued their plotting to alter the succession. Louis II the German and Charles II the Bald affirmed their alliance against Lothair I (Oath of Strasbourg, 842). Later the three brothers came to an agreement in the Treaty of Verdun (843). The empire was divided into three kingdoms arranged along a north-south axis: Francia Orientalis was given to Louis, Francia Media (a stripe from the North Sea, along the Rhine, to Italy) to Lothair, and Francia Occidentalis to Charles the Bald. The three kings were equal among themselves. Lothair kept the imperial title, but it had completely lost its universal character and had meaning only in a portion of the old empire.37

By this separation of the eastern part (Germany) from the western part (France) of the former huge empire, both parts developed in their own way. In succeeding centuries, the people of the west Frankish kingdom (France) continued to call themselves Franks, although the Frankish element merged with the older population. In Germany, the name survived as Franconia (Franken), a duchy extending from the Rhineland east along the Main River.

The Saxons first appear in history after the beginning of the Christian era. The earliest mention of the Saxons is by the Egyptian mathematician and geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, at which time they appear to have dwelt in the south Jutland Peninsula, in the area of modern Schleswig and along the Baltic coast. They conducted piratical raids in the North Sea area, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries they pressed southward into the region of the River Weser, where they encountered the Chauci and the Angrivarii, Germanic tribes that they subdued and absorbed. In the second half of the 4th century, the Saxons invaded Roman domains, and by the close of the 6th century all northwest Germany as far east as the Elbe had become Saxon territory. The coastal stretch from the Elbe to the Scheldt River, however, was held by the Frisians, on whom the Saxons had great influence.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, some groups of Saxons invaded Britain, where they were joined by other Germanic peoples, the Angles and the Jutes. At the beginning of the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of

37 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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Britain was practically completed. In the 8th century, the Frankish king Pepin the Short attacked the Saxons who remained in Germany. His son, Charlemagne, subdued them after a series of fierce wars lasting from 772 to 804, and forced them to accept Christianity. In the course of the 9th century, a great Saxon duchy came into existence under Frankish sovereignty, and its rulers established a dynasty of German kings in the 10th century. This old duchy of Saxony was dissolved towards the end of the 12th century, and the name of Saxony later passed over to an entirely different region (a former province of east-central Germany on the upper reaches of the Elbe, earlier part of the large kingdom of Saxony).

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The Angles member of a Germanic people, which, together with the Jutes and Saxons, invaded England in the 5th century AD. The Angles gave their name to England (“Englaland”), as well as to the word “Englisc,” used even by Saxon writers to denote their vernacular tongue. The Angles are first mentioned by Tacitus as worshipers of the deity Nerthus (Mother Earth). According to the Venerable Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, their continental homeland was centered in Angulus, traditionally identified as the Angeln district in Schleswig between the Schlei inlet and the Flensburger Förde, which they appear to have abandoned at the time of their invasion of Britain. They settled in large numbers during the 5th and 6th centuries in the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria, and East and Middle Anglia.

The Jutes were an early Germanic tribe of Denmark and northern Germany that, according to the Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede, participated in the conquest of southeastern Britain during the 5th century AD. The Jutes have no recorded history on the European continent, but there is considerable evidence that their home was in the Scandinavian area (probably Jutland); their territory bordered that of the Saxons, who, with the Angles, also settled in Britain driving the Britons westward into present-day Wales. According to the Venerable Bede, the Jutes settled in Kent, the Isle of Wight, and parts of Hampshire. In Kent their name soon died out, but there is considerable evidence in the social structure of that area that its settlers were of a different race from their neighbors. There is archaeological evidence to confirm Bede’s statement that the Isle of Wight and Kent were settled by the same people, and their presence in Hampshire is confirmed by place-names.

Those who did not migrate to Britain were later absorbed by the Danes. Through assimilation, the Jutes gradually lost their identity as a people, and by the 8th century the term “Jute” had almost completely disappeared from the English language.

If historically and politically these West-Germanic tribes and peoples were independent, except for when they formed alliances and tribal leagues (i.e. the Saxon Tribal Alliance that resulted in migration to Britain, the Franconian Tribal League that occupied a wide zone in Central Germany, north and south of the Main River, or the Suebi tribal group, which gave its name to the German Duchy of Swabia, now divided between Germany, Switzerland, and France) in order to migrate to other territories, to conquer territories, to fight one another for supremacy, or to protect themselves from dominant intruders (mostly Rome), linguistically they are much more related with one another. Consequently, it is fairly difficult to

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draw a well-defined and clear-cut diagram without underlining certain correspondences and mutual influences.

Traditionally, the West Germanic group of languages38 is divided into two branches, Low and High German tongues and dialects.

The Low German (Niederdeutsch/Niedersächsisch) tongues are further subdivided into: • Old Saxon, • Old Low Franconian, • Old Frisian and • Old English. The last two are so closely related that they are also called the Anglo-Frisian subgroup. Moreover, Old Saxon (Altsächsisch) the basic constituent of Modern Low German (Plattdeutsch); Old Low Franconian (Altniederfränkisch), with a mixture of Frisian (Friesisch) and Saxon elements, became the basis of Modern Dutch and Flemish (Netherlandic) and, further on, Afrikaans (in South Africa). Frisian is still in use in the Dutch province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, and in the islands on the coast. High German is composed of a wide range of dialects, such as Middle Franconian, Rhenisch Franconian, East Franconian, Thuringian, Bavarian, Alemannic, etc., and chronologically linguists divide it into:

• Old High German (Althochdeutsch)—spoken between AD 740-1100,

• Middle High German (Mittelhochdeutsch)—spoken between 1100-1500, and

• Modern German (Neuhochdeutsch) spoken beginning with the Reformation. It was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible and beginning with the 16th century it had gradually become Standard German. 39

Here is a brief description of these languages using as starting point

the modern language. 38 There are different ways to classify West Germanic languages according to the feature on which the division is based. Commonly, these languages are also divided into an Anglo-Frisian group (English and Frisian) and a German group (Low and High German and Old Saxon). However, when it comes to charting these languages and dialects, for the sake of simplicity, as well as for didactic purposes, we shall use the basic and more traditional classification. But when it comes to closer characterize these languages and focus on their evolution towards the modern languages, we believe that their division into the above-mentioned two major groups, i.e. Anglo-Frisian and German groups, is much more logic and suggestive. 39 See Albert C. Baugh &Thomas Cable, A History ..., op. cit. pp.31-32.

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A. The Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages includes:

1. Frisian (FRIESISCH), the West Germanic language most closely related to English. Although Frisian was formerly spoken from what is now the province of Noord-Holland (North Holland) in The Netherlands along the North Sea coastal area to modern German Schleswig, including the offshore islands in this area, Modern Frisian is spoken in only three small remaining areas, each with its own dialect. These dialects are: West Frisian, which is spoken in the province of Friesland in The Netherlands, including the islands of Schiermonnikoog and Terschelling; East Frisian, which is spoken in the Saterland west of Oldenburg, Germany, and North Frisian, which is spoken along the west coast of Schleswig in Germany, on the Halligen Islands and Helgoland, as well as on the offshore islands of Sylt, Föhr, Amrum; these last three islands apparently constituted the passageway for the West Saxons when they crossed to Britain. Written records date from the end of the 13th century and are in Old Frisian, a stage of the language that lasted until the late 16th century. Old Frisian shows all the features that distinguish English and Frisian from the other Germanic languages.

2. The history of the English language begins with the migration of the

Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from Germany and Denmark to Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their Anglo-Saxon language is known as Old English (the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English) and was spoken and written in England before AD 1100. Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West Saxon in southern and southwestern England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often classed together as the Anglian dialects. Most extant Old English writings are in the West Saxon dialect.

3. Netherlandic (English DUTCH, or FLEMISH, Netherlandic

NEDERLANDS, Flemish VLAAMS) emerged as a structurally distinct branch of West Germanic as the result of language contact between speakers of North Sea Germanic and speakers of the South Germanic “Franconian,” or Frankish, the speech of the Western Franks. The crucial early period of this contact occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries and resulted from the expansion of Frankish (Merovingian and early

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Carolingian) power into the western coastal areas that were populated by North Sea Germanic groups. Today is the national language of The Netherlands and, with French, one of the two official languages of Belgium. Although speakers of English usually call the Netherlandic of The Netherlands “Dutch” and the Netherlandic of Belgium “Flemish,” they are actually the same language. Netherlandic, which occurs in both standard and dialectal forms, is the language of most of The Netherlands, of northern Belgium, and of a relatively small part of France along the North Sea, immediately to the west of Belgium. Netherlandic is also used as the language of administration in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Afrikaans [also called CAPE DUTCH, it developed from 17th-century Netherlandic by the descendants of European (Dutch, German, and French) colonists, indigenous Khoisan peoples (Hottentot and Bushmen), and African and Asian slaves in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope], which is a derivative of Netherlandic, is one of the official languages of South Africa. Although Afrikaans is very similar to Netherlandic, it is clearly a separate language, differing from Standard Netherlandic in its sound system and its loss of case and gender distinctions.

B. The German group of West Germanic languages comprises the continental dialects that resulted in the genesis the German language. Standard German itself is something of a hybrid language in origin, drawn from elements of the dialects spoken in the central and southern districts but with the phonetic characteristics of the north predominating. The pronunciation of standard German is, in fact, an arbitrary compromise that gained universal currency only in the late 19th century.

The three major dialectal divisions of today’s Germany coincide almost identically with the major topographical regions of the North German Plain; the Central German Uplands; and the southern Jura, Danube basin, and Alpine districts. In reverse order, these dialectal divisions are known as Upper German, Central German, and Low German.

1. Low German, Plattdeutsch or Low Saxon, is spoken in the north, in a narrow fringe along the border between the Netherlands and Germany, and in the northern lowlands as far east and northeast as the River Elbe, including the cities of Münster, Kassel, Bremen, Hanover, Hamburg, and Magdeburg (the North German Plain). While it is called Low German (Plattdeutsch) by the Germans, the Dutch refer to the language as Low Saxon (Nedersaksisch) as they see themselves as having a

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Saxon, not German, heritage. There are many different varieties of Low Saxon in the Netherlands and across north Germany. Although it has been largely displaced by Standard German, it is still widely spoken, especially among elderly and rural inhabitants in the areas near the North Sea and the Baltic, and is used in some radio broadcasts, newspapers, and educational programs.

2. The Central German/Middle German, or Franconian, dialects and

the Thuringian helped to form the basis of Modern Standard German. Here is a brief survey of their use today:

• the present-day influence of Thuringian/Upper Saxon is of greatest significance in Thuringia (in the environs of Weimar, Jena, and Erfurt), Saxony (Dresden), and Saxony-Anhalt states;

• East Franconian is spoken in northern Bavaria; • South Franconian in northern Baden-Württemberg; • the Rhenish Franconian dialect extends northwest from

approximately Metz (in French Lorraine) through the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse;

• Moselle Franconian extends from Luxembourg through the Moselle valley districts and across the Rhine into the Westerwald;

• Ripuarian Franconian begins roughly near Aachen, at the Dutch-Belgian border, and spreads across the Rhine between Düsseldorf and Bonn into the Sauerland;

• Luxembourgeois, spoken in Luxembourg, Belgium and middle Germany;

• Lower Silesian, spoken in Lower Silesia of Poland and parts of the Czech Republic and Germany;

3. Of the Upper German dialects in use are:

• the Alemannic branch in the southwest, which is further subdivided into Swabian, Low Alemannic, and High Alemannic. The first, the most widespread and still-ascending form, is spoken to the west and south of Stuttgart and as far east as Augsburg. Low Alemannic is spoken in Baden-Württemberg, Alsace, as well as in the southwestern corner of Bavaria and in Austria, while High Alemannic is the dialect of German-speaking Switzerland.

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• The Bavarian dialect, with its many local variations, is spoken in the areas south of the Danube River and east of the Lech River, south of Nuremberg, including Munich, throughout all of Austria, (including the cities of Innsbruck, Vienna, and Graz), and in parts of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy, except for in the Vorarlberg state, which is Swabian in origin.

• last but not least, Langobardic, the ancient language spoken at one time in the parts of Lombardy (Italy) occupied by the Germanic tribe of the Langobards; the Langobardic dialect is of great historical interest because it is the earliest (mid-7th century AD) recorded German dialect, whereas the majority of German dialects can be traced back only to the 8th, 9th, or 10th centuries.

Other German languages are: • Pennsylvania Dutch (also called Pennsylvania German), spoken

in the United States and Canada. It evolved from the languages of German settlers in Pennsylvania, incorporating a mixture of several German dialects (mainly Rhine-Franconian) with some English influences.

• Hutterite German, or Tirolean, is spoken in western Canada and small areas in the United States. The Hutterites originated in Tirol, Austria, and are linked through their common religion. Speakers of Hutterite German are usually bilingual in at least Standard German.

• Plautdietsch, a Low German language different to Low Saxon but sometimes called Low German, is spoken primarily in Canada and also in some South American countries, in the United States, and Belize. Many of the South American speakers are monolingual, while those in Canada, Germany, and the United States tend to be bilingual in either Standard German or English.

• In Venezuela, Colonia Tovar German (or Alemán Coloneiro), which originated from mid-19th-century Alemannic and other south German dialects, is spoken by a minority.40

C. Yiddish, although Germanic, is not a typical Germanic language; it includes not only Germanic features but also elements from Romance,

40 See related articles in Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation and Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavic languages. The language had its beginnings in the 10th century when Jews from northern France and northern Italy settled in the Rhineland. These early Jewish settlements were dislocated by the Crusades and later by the persecutions that followed in the wake of the Black Death. The subsequent move to Slavic territory had enormous influence on the development of the language. Scholars divide the history of Yiddish into four periods:

• Earliest Yiddish, to 1250; • Old Yiddish, 1250-1500; • Middle Yiddish, 1500-1750; and • Modern Yiddish, 1750 to the present.

The earliest literary tradition had a Western Yiddish dialectal base; writing in this literary dialect continued into the Modern Yiddish period long after the major population centers had shifted to the east. The establishment of the modern literary language on an Eastern Yiddish base occurred only in the early 19th century. At the same time a new style in the language of Yiddish Bible translation emerged, free from the constraints of the original Hebrew syntax and of the stricture against the use of Yiddish words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin in translating from Hebrew. The continuous contacts of Yiddish speakers with Hebrew-Aramaic texts and in the European language area with one or another Germanic or Slavic language have been important factors in the development of the language. The basic dialectal division is between Western Yiddish, which occurs largely within the German language area, and Eastern Yiddish in the Slavic-speaking areas. Eastern Yiddish is traditionally subdivided into Northeastern Yiddish and Southern Yiddish, the latter consisting of Central Yiddish and Southeastern Yiddish. The phonological criteria on which this division is based are typically reflected in the variants of the phrase “to buy meat”:

• Western Yiddish—“kafn flas,” • Central Yiddish—“kojfn flajs,” • Southeastern Yiddish—“kojfn flejs,” • Northeastern Yiddish—“kejfn flejs.”

Other phonological and many lexical differences reinforce the distinctness of Western Yiddish. In the east, Central Yiddish is further distinguished by a full set of contrasts in vowel length, while the varieties of Southeastern Yiddish have made changes in vowel quality that have led to the types “hont” for “hand,” “huz” for “house,” and “rign” for “rain.”

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Northeastern Yiddish is characterized by the loss of the neuter gender. Standard Yiddish adheres more closely to Northeastern Yiddish in its sound system and more closely to Southern Yiddish in its grammatical patterns.

Although there were some 11 million speakers of Yiddish before World War II, approximately 6 million were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. There are several million Yiddish speakers today, including native speakers and those who use it as a second language. Most speakers live in the United States and Israel.41 III. The North Germanic languages are nearer to the eastern branch than to the western one and until approximately the year AD 700 (the beginning of the Viking Age) they are characterized by fairly unitary forms. About 125 inscriptions dated from AD 200 to 600, carved in the older runic alphabet (futhark), are chronologically and linguistically the oldest evidence of any Germanic language. Most are from Scandinavia, but enough have been found in southeastern Europe to suggest that the use of runes was also familiar to other Germanic tribes. Most inscriptions are brief, marking ownership or manufacture, as on the Gallehus Horns (Denmark; about AD 400): “Ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawido” —“I, Hlewagastiz, son of Holti, made [this] horn.” A number of inscriptions are memorials to the dead, while others are magical in content. The earliest were carved on loose wooden or metal objects, while later ones were also chiseled in stone. Further information about the language is derived from names and loanwords in foreign texts, from place-names, and from comparative reconstruction based on related languages and later dialects. However, the scantiness of the material (fewer than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the relationship of Proto-Scandinavian or Ancient Scandinavian —“urnordisk”—to Germanic and its daughter languages, but shows few distinctively North Germanic features. The earliest inscriptions may reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to the splitting of North and West Germanic (but after the separation of Gothic). Only after the departure of the Angles and Jutes for England and the establishment of the Eider River in southern Jutland as a border between Scandinavians and Germans is it reasonable to speak of a clearly Scandinavian or North Germanic dialect.

41 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98. Contributions by Marvin Irving Herzog. Atran Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Yiddish Studies, Columbia University. Director and Editor in Chief of Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry.

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Inscriptions from the latter part of the Ancient period show North Germanic or Old Scandinavian/Old Norse as a distinct dialect. The expansion of Nordic peoples in the Viking Age (c. 750-1050) led to the establishment of Scandinavian speech, i.e. “Danish”, “dönsk tunga” in Norse in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, as well as parts of Ireland, Scotland, England, France (Normandy), and Russia. Scandinavian languages later disappeared in all these territories except the Faroes and Iceland through absorption or extinction of the Scandinavian-speaking population. After AD 700, Old Norse gradually split into:

• East Norse (Danish, Swedish, and Gutnic—Gutnish of Gotland, an island and province of Sweden, in the Baltic Sea) and

• West Norse (Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic).

The six standard languages of today, in the order of their emergence as languages of culture and prestige, are Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, New Norwegian (Nynorsk), and Dano-Norwegian. 1. Danish (DANSK) is the official language of Denmark, spoken there by more than 5 million people. Danish belongs to the East Scandinavian branch of North Germanic languages. It began to separate from the other Scandinavian languages, to which it is closely related, about AD 1000. The oldest Danish records are runic inscriptions (c. AD 250-800) found from Jutland to southern Sweden, and the earliest manuscripts in Danish date from the 13th century.

Danish is clearly the Scandinavian language that has undergone the greatest amount of change away from Old Scandinavian. In the 18th century, a mildly puristic reform led to the replacement of many French loans by their native equivalents (e.g., “imagination” was replaced by “indbildning”; compare to German “Einbildung”), and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Danish became the vehicle of a classical literature. There are regional differences in the cultivated speech norm, but upper-class Copenhagen speech probably has the highest prestige. A spelling reform in 1958 eliminated the capitalization of nouns and introduced the letter å for aa, thereby making the spelling more similar to that of Norwegian and Swedish. Danish is spoken by most of the more than five million inhabitants of Denmark and in a few communities south of the German border; it is taught in the schools of the Faroe Islands, of Iceland, and of Greenland.

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2. Closely related to Norwegian and Danish, Swedish (SVENSK) is the national language of Sweden and, with Finnish, one of the two official languages of Finland. After Sweden ceded Finland to Russia in 1809, the role of Swedish was gradually reduced in that country. Since independence (1917), however, Finland has accepted Swedish as an official language and has taught Swedish in its schools, but less than 6 % of the Finnish population uses it. Until World War II, it was also spoken in parts of Estonia and Latvia. Today, Swedish is spoken by about 9 million people, i.e. by about 90 % of the population of Sweden. The history of Swedish from the Common Scandinavian period (600-1050) until about 1225 is known chiefly from numerous runic inscriptions. Radical changes took place in the language, especially in the sound system, during the 14th and 15th centuries. Modern Swedish is usually dated from 1526, when a translation of the New Testament was first printed. The standard language began to emerge in the 17th century, formed principally on the Svea dialects spoken in Stockholm and around Lake Mälar but with some features from the Göta dialects. The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, published a Swedish grammar in 1836 and later began work on a dictionary. 3. Icelandic (ISLENSK), the national language of Iceland, belongs (with Norwegian and Faroese) to the West Scandinavian group of North Germanic languages and developed from the Norse speech brought by settlers from western Norway in the 9th and 10th centuries. Old Icelandic, usually called Old Norse, is the language in which the Eddas, sagas, and skaldic poems (honoring heroes and their deeds) were written in the Middle Ages. By the time these works were written, several dialectal characteristics that differentiate Icelandic from Norwegian had emerged.

Despite the long period of Danish rule, in grammar, vocabulary, and orthography, modern Icelandic is the most conservative of the Scandinavian languages, mainly because of the geographic remoteness of Iceland, a scattered population, and the great linguistic differences between Danish and Icelandic. It still has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), four cases for nouns (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative), several declensions, and complicated pronoun and verb systems that have changed little since the classical period. For this reason, Icelanders today can still read the Old Icelandic sagas without difficulty.

A great deal of change has taken place, however, in the pronunciation since Old Norse times. Although Icelandic borrowed words from Celtic,

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Danish, Latin, and Romance languages, most of these words have been replaced with totally Icelandic forms since the beginning of the 19th century, when a purist movement developed. A firm orthography along etymological lines was gradually established, and the policy of not adopting foreign words was confirmed (now, all technical and abstract terms are formed only from Icelandic elements), so that Icelandic today appears strikingly different from the other Scandinavian languages. Icelandic is spoken by the entire population of the country, some 270,000 people. 4. Faroese (FøROYSK), also spelled Faeroese, is the language spoken in the Faroe Islands by some 45,000 inhabitants. It belongs to the West Scandinavian group of the North Germanic languages and preserves more characteristics of Old Norse than any other language, except modern Icelandic, to which it is closely related, but with which it is mutually unintelligible. The Danish linguist Rasmus Rask, who wrote the first Faroese grammar (1811), described the language as a dialect of Icelandic, but it is actually an independent language, intermediate between West Norwegian and Icelandic and containing many Danish loanwords. Traditional dance ballads were written down after 1773, before the establishment in 1846 of an independent orthography. This orthography is etymologizing and unphonetic and gives Faroese a strong Icelandic appearance. taught in schools. 5. Norwegian (NORSK) exists in two distinct and rival norms: Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål, or Riksmål) and New Norwegian (Nynorsk):

• Dano-Norwegian stems from the written Danish introduced during the union of Denmark and Norway (1380-1814).

• New Norwegian (initially called Landsmål, but now officially Nynorsk) was created by the language scholar Ivar Aasen during the mid-19th century, primarily from the dialects of the western rural districts, in order to carry on the tradition of Old Norse. Old Norwegian had diverged from the other Scandinavian languages

by the end of the 12th century. Spoken language in Scandinavia underwent rapid evolution late in the Middle Ages. This change, the lack of a printing press in Norway until 1643, and the influence of unions with Sweden (1319) and then Denmark (1380) hindered the development of a national written language in Norway. Between the late 14th and the early 16th centuries Middle Norwegian became the tongue of most native speakers, though the urban elite were influenced by Danish. However, educational problems due to the linguistic distance between Danish and spoken Norwegian and socio-

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political considerations, as well as the ideology of “national Romanticism,” stimulated a search for a national standard language. In 1853 a young, self-taught linguist of rural stock, Ivar Aasen, constructed a language norm from the spoken dialects. This standard continued the Old Norwegian tradition and was meant to eventually replace Danish. After long research and experimentation, he presented this New Norwegian norm in a grammar, a dictionary, and numerous literary texts.

New Norwegian was officially recognized as a second national language in 1885. Today, all Norwegians learn to read and write it, but only a fifth of the population use it as their primary written language. The use of Dano-Norwegian is more widespread than that of New Norwegian; it is used in all national newspapers and in most of the literature. Both of these mutually intelligible languages are used in government and education, and plans have been made to bring them closer together gradually into a common Norwegian language, Samnorsk, though resistance to these plans has been vigorous. Eventually, this plan was abandoned as an official language policy. In its current form, Dano-Norwegian is the predominant language of Norway’s population of 4.3 million, except in western Norway and among the Sami minority in the North.42

42 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98 and Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2005 © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation.

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Modern Standard Germanic Languages where spoken approximate number use as a of native speakers second language English Great Britain, Ireland, United 450,000,000 extreme States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa German Germany, Austria, Switzerland 98,000,000 extensive (part) Netherlandic The Netherlands, Belgium 21,000,000 moderate (Dutch, (part) Flemish) Swedish Sweden, Finland (part) 8,000,000 slight Afrikaans South Africa (part), Namibia (part) 6,000,000 slight Danish Denmark 5,000,000 slight Norwegian Norway 4,000,000 slight Frisian The Netherlands, Germany 400,000 -- Yiddish various countries 400,000 slight Icelandic Iceland 260,000 -- Faroese Faroe Islands 44,000 -- The source for the English-, Netherlandic-, and Yiddish-language figures is B.E. Grimes (ed.), Ethnologue (1992); other figures, except Frisian, are from

Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannic

various official country sources.

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HIGHLIGHTS: • Urheimat: the original or earliest area/home country inhabited by a tribe or population;

• gens / PL. gentes: a group of people who are related through their male ancestors. In ancient Rome, a group of families who shared a name and claimed a common origin.

• pagus / PL. pagi: clan; the basic socio-political unit of the Germanic tribes;

ASSESSMENT TEST THREE – upon reading unit three, answer the following questions or comment briefly on the following issues:

1. What role did land tenure play according to Caesar and Tacitus in the evolution of the Germanic society?

2. Where is the term “vandalism” derived from?

3. How did the Germanic tribes of the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes come to invade Britain and then settle there?

4. What historical events resulted in the advent and the spread of Modern German?

5. What factors and policies resulted in the conservatism of Modern Icelandic?

6. Explain the somewhat “strange status” of Norwegian!

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UNIT FOUR: Linguistic Characteristics of the Germanic Languages OBJECTIVES:

• to familiarize the students with the general linguistic features of the Germanic languages;

• to help the students understand the phonetic laws and phenomena that affected the evolution of the sub-family of Germanic languages;

TEXT

A. The Family Tree Like every spoken over a considerable geographic area, Proto-Germanic presumably consisted of a number of geographic varieties or dialects that over time developed in different ways into the different early and modern Germanic languages. Late-19th- century scholars used a family tree diagram to show this splitting into dialects and the relationships among the dialects:

There is indeed much truth in this diagram, if we take into account the ‘end products’; however, its major drawback is that it overemphasizes the notion of “splits” into separate “branches” and conceals the fact that the transition from one dialect to another was gradual rather than abrupt.

Mid-20th-century scholars, using the findings of archaeology and the methods of geographic linguistics, attempted to correct the distortions of this family-tree model by noting also the linguistic features shared by two or more dialect areas. Archaeological evidence suggests that about 750 BC a relatively uniform Germanic people was located in southern Scandinavia and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts from what is now The Netherlands to the Vistula River. By roughly 250 BC they had spread

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south, and five general groups are distinguishable: (a) North Germanic in southern Scandinavia, excluding Jutland; (b) North Sea Germanic, along the North Sea and in Jutland; (c) Rhine-Weser Germanic, along the middle Rhine and Weser; (d) Elbe Germanic, along the middle Elbe; and (f) East Germanic, between the middle Oder and the Vistula rivers.

By about AD 250 the division was much the same, though the Elbe group had spread southward to the Danube River, and the East Germanic group had moved southeast into the Carpathian Mountains and beyond. Then, toward the end of the 4th century, began the great Germanic tribal migrations: (a) North Sea Germanic speakers spread south along the coast of the

Low Countries and began their conquest of Britain; (b) North Germanic speakers moved into Jutland; (c) the Rhine-Weser group (Franks) expanded farther into Gallo-

Roman territory west of the Rhine; (d) the Elbe group (Alemanni, Bavarians, and

Langobardi/Lombards) spread farther south to the Alps and beyond; and

(e) several East Germanic groups left the Oder-Vistula area to begin their wanderings.

It goes without saying that the great Germanic tribal migrations

also triggered further linguistic divisions. Thus, the first major division was between East Germanic and Northwest Germanic and occurred roughly between the 1st-3rd centuries AD. Northwest Germanic encompassed all the Germanic territory from Scandinavia southward across much of Germany and the Low Countries. Spoken over such a relatively large area, Northwest Germanic had at least minor dialectal distinctions from the start, but several linguistic innovations spread throughout.

The next major division was the fragmentation of Northwest Germanic. It was dated roughly to the period of the 3rd-6th centuries and resulted in three major dialect divisions: (a) North Germanic (in Scandinavia); (b) North Sea Germanic (in Jutland and the northwest of Germany), and (c) South Germanic (in central Germany). Moreover, a number of linguistic developments from this period are shared by North Sea Germanic and South Germanic (but not by North Germanic), and the term “West Germanic” is used in recognition of the strong affinities between these two groups. During this same period, however, North Sea Germanic and North Germanic also follow sometimes similar lines with regard to phonological developments in contrast with South Germanic. The three-way division is then based in part on the differing participation of North Sea Germanic in shared developments with either

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North or South Germanic and in part on developments that were peculiar to each of the three dialects. North Sea Germanic was at once a transitional dialect and a centre of innovation within the larger Northwest Germanic dialect continuum.

Similarly, there surely existed transitional dialects between North Sea and South Germanic within West Germanic. Old Saxon, for example, shows a mixture of features agreeing with North Sea Germanic, as in English and Frisian, on the one hand, and with South Germanic, as in Old High German, on the other hand.

So, what we get in the end, after these successive divisions and re-groupings, is the nowadays accepted classification of Germanic languages into: the East Germanic, the West Germanic and the North Germanic groups.

B. The Main Phonetic Features The Germanic languages, as already mentioned before, form a well-defined group of the Indo-European family of languages and their nearest affinities are undoubtedly with the neighboring languages, i.e. Celtic and Italic languages, on the one hand, and with the Baltic and Slavic languages, on the other hand. Nonetheless, despite these affinities, they have developed special characteristics that distinguish them from other Indo-European languages, which result from numerous phonological and grammatical changes.

Here are some interesting phonological features associated with the dialect divisions inside the sub-family of Germanic languages:

(1) In Northwest Germanic, the reduplicated forms, found in the past

tense of certain strong verbs, were eliminated and replaced instead by new Ablaut alternations (i.e. alternation in the vowels of related word forms were employed often involving the vowel e2 i.e. a high midvowel, like in the Old English hēr “here”), while, in Gothic (East Germanic), reduplicated forms were maintained:

e.g., (ON, OE, OS) het, (OHG) hiez vs. (G) haihait “was called.”

(2) In Gothic, the Proto-Germanic *z was maintained as z (or s in

final position), but, in Northwest Germanic, *z generally became r—e.g. Proto-Germanic *maiz- “more,” Gothic maiza but Old Norse meire, Old English mara “more,” Old High German mero “mehr.” Within Northwest Germanic, however, treatment of *z in final position varied dialectally: (a) in North Germanic, it was maintained and appears as r; (b) in West Germanic (i.e. North Sea and South Germanic), *z was generally lost in final position in

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polysyllabic words; (c) in North Sea Germanic, *z was also lost in final position in monosyllabic words: e.g. - (PGmc) *dagaz “day,” (Go.) dags, (ON) dagr, (OHG) tag,

(OS) dag, (OE) dæg; or - (PGmc) *wiz or *wiz “we,” (Go.) weis, (ON) ver, (OHG)

wir, (OS) wi, (OE) we. (3) Associated with the West Germanic grouping are:

(a) the change of *ð to d in all positions; e.g. - (Proto-Germanic *bloð- “blood,” Old Norse bloð- but (OE,

OS) blod, (OHG) bluot. (b) the replacement of the inherited second person singular past tense forms of strong verbs; e.g. - (PGmc) *namt “you took,” (ON) namt but (OE) nome, (OS,

OHG) nami. (5) Some changes were shared across major dialects but carried out to

differing degrees or at different times. For example: (a) in West Germanic all consonants (except “r”) preceded by

a short vowel and followed by j were geminated (doubled), but in North Germanic only velars (k, g) were affected: e.g. - (PGmc) *satjanan “set,” (Go.) satjan, (ON) setja but

(OE) settan, (OS) settian, (OHG) setzen; or - (PGmc) *lagjanan “lay,” (Go.) lagjan but (ON)

leggja, (OE) lecgan, (OS) leggian, (OHG) lecken. (b) Similarly, the loss of nasals in the cluster “nx” with

lengthening and nasalization of a preceding short vowel occurred in Proto-Germanic; in North Germanic this change also occurred in sequences of a short vowel plus “ns,” e.g. the Old Norse oss “us,” Old High German “uns” and in North Sea Germanic when the nasal was followed by any voiceless fricative mf, nþ, ns (English loses the nasal but German preserves it: before f—soft/sanft; before þ—other/ander; before s—goose/Gans).1

The Consonant Shift

After the fundamental distinction, i.e. the treatment of certain velar and palatal consonants, by which the Indo-European languages are divided into centum (western) languages and satem (eastern) languages, the fundamental phonological characteristic of the Germanic languages lies

1 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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in the treatment of the Indo-European plosives and fricatives. In other words, all consonants other than the above-mentioned maintained their place of articulation, with few exceptions only. This was discovered by the German scholar Jakob Grimm and presented in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819) as the Germanic Sound/Consonant Shift (Germanische Lautverschiebung), the most famous of the sound laws (though Grimm himself did not use the term “law”). Pointing out prominent correlations between the Germanic and the other Indo-European languages of Europe and western Asia, the law was a systematic and coherent formulation, well supported by examples, of patterns recognized as early as 1814 by the Danish philologist Rasmus Kristian Rask. It is of utmost importance for historical linguistics because it clearly demonstrates the principle that sound change is a regular phenomenon and not a random process affecting only some words, as had been thought previously.

Nowadays, linguists agree on the fact that the beginnings of the consonant shift must be traced back to the period 2000-1000 BC whereas the end of this process must have occurred around the year AD 500. This seems to coincide chronologically with the great Germanic tribal migration. We do not know for sure what may have triggered such a major linguistic change (possibly the long isolation of the Germanic tribes from the other Indo-European peoples), nonetheless, it turned out to be a continuous process that developed in and near the Germanic homeland (Scandinavia and northern Germany) and it probably ceased soon after each tribe settled in the new home.

Jakob Grimm described two consonant shifts involving essentially nine consonants. The 1st Consonant Shift, which lasted until apparently the 5th century BC, separates all Germanic languages from the other Indo-European languages by shifting three groups of consonants—labials (p, b), dentals (t, d) and velars (k, g) according to the following pattern:

(1) I-E voiced unaspirated plosives (b, d, g), Latin and Greek included, → Gothic corresponding voiceless unaspirated plosives (p, t, k) → Mod. E (p, t, k) and the Modern German (f, ts, kh = help→helfen / ten→zehn / corn→Khorn, i.e. aspirated in early High German, now “Korn”:

e.g. - (L.) duo → (Go.) twa / tu → (OHG) zwo → two; zwei. - (I-E) * dék → (L.) decem → (Go.) taíhun → (A-S) tyn →

(OE) tīen → (OHG) zehan → ten; zehn. - (L.) edere → (Go) itan → (OE) etan → (OHG) ezzan → to

eat; essen. - (L.) genu → (Go) kneo → (OE) cneo → (OHG) chniu →

knee, Knie.

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- (L.) gelidus → (ON) kaldr → (OS) kald → (A-S) ceald → (OHG) kalt → cold; kalt.

- (Lith.) slãbnas “weak” → (ON) slāpr → (Go.) slēpan → (OS) slāpan → (A-S) slǣpan → (OHG) slafan → to sleep; schlafen.

- (Gr.) baidei [bedi] → (Go.) paida [peda] “tunic, shirt” → (OS) pēda → (OE) pād → (OHG) pheit → (OBavarian) pfeit (garment)

(2) I-E voiceless unaspirated plosives (p, t, k) → Gothic voiceless

fricative (f, þ, h) → Mod. E. ( f, th, h) and MHG (f, d, h): e.g. - (L.) pedem → (Go.) fotus → (OE) fot → (OHG) fuoz → foot; Fuß.

- (I-E) *nepōt- → (Skt) nápāt [offspring] → (L.) nepōs → (OLith) nepuotis → (ON) nefe → (OE) nefa → (OS/OHG) nevo → nephew; Neffe.

- (I-E) *treies → (L.) tres → (Go.) þreis → (ON) þrīr → (A-S) þrīe (OE) þreo → three; drei.

- (I-E) *uert- → (Go.) waírþan → (ON) verða → (A-S) weorðan → to become; werden.

- (L.) cornus → (OE) horn → (OHG) horn → horn; Horn. - (L.) cordis → (OE) heorte → (OHG) herza → heart; Herz.

(3) P-I-E voiced aspirates (bh, dh, gh), which are preserved in Sanskrit but were changed in the other Indo-European languages by the loss of either voice or aspiration, → Germanic voiced plosives (b, d, g). e.g. - (I-E) *bhrāter → (L.) frāter → (Go.) brōþar → (ON)

brōðer → (A-S /OE) brōðor → (OS) brōðar → (OHG) bruoder → brother; Bruder (in spite of Grimm’s Law).

- (I-E) *dhur- → (L.) foris, forēs → (Go.) daúr / aú = o → (AS, OS) dor → (OHG) tor → door; Tor.

- (I-E) *steigh → (Go) steigan → (ON) stīga → (A-S) stigan → (OS /OHG) stīgan → to climb; steigen.

But, when the voiceless fricative “s” preceded the voiceless

plosives (p, t, k) the consonant shift did not take place: e.g., - (L.) spuō → (Go.) speiwan → (ON) spyja → (A-S, OS,

OHG) spīwan → to spit; spucken. - (I-E) *ster- → (L.) stēlla → (Go.) staírnō → (ON) stjarna → (A-S) steorra → (OHG) sterno → star; Stern.

- (Late NorthIE) peysk (L.) piscis → (OE) fisc → (OHG) fisk → fish; Fisch.

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However, in the case of the latter “sk” combination, the cluster is preserved as such in the northern branch of the Germanic languages, whereas in English and German if shifted to [ʃ], represented by “sh” in English and by “sch” in German:

e.g. - (Gr.) skia → (OE) scinan → (OHG) skinan → (Swed.) skina, (Dan.) skinne, whereas in (Mod.E) to shine and (MHG) scheinen.

Grimm also tried to explain the further shifting of plosives and fricatives from Low German to High German (the 2nd Shift) but, as many linguists agree, he apparently made two major mistakes:

• He supposed that both shifts occurred at approximately the same time, whereas the latter took place at least one thousand years later, i.e. High German began to exist only after the beginning of the 8th century AD. Consequently, the 2nd Consonant Shift occurred about the year AD 500 in the southern and middle part of Germany of today.

• He strongly believed that this second shift materialized with the same mathematical perfection as the first; in fact, it turned out to be incomplete with both dentals (t, d) and labials (p, b) and, moreover, it did not even occur in the velars (k, g).

Karl Verner, a Danish linguist, supplemented Grimm’s Law by

explaining the apparent exceptions to it. In his article, “Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung“ (“An Exception to the First Sound Shift”), published in the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung of July 1875, Karl Verner, threw light on a number of other phonetic changes that Grimm had not been able to explain accurately. They are called Verner’s Law. Verner noticed that Grimm’s Law was valid whenever the accent fell on the root syllable of the Sanskrit cognate, but that:

(1) “the Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, þ/d, h), i.e. the former Indo-European voiceless plosives (p, t, k), become voiced (v/b, ð/d, g) in the middle of a word, if it is preceded by an unaccented syllable in Indo-European or Sanskrit.” e.g. - (Skt) pita → (Old Pers) pitár → (L) pater → (Gmc.) *faþár

→ faðar → (Go.) fadar → (OE) fæder → father; Vater. - (PIE) weyk- [exert force], (Lith.) vaikýti [chase away], (L)

vincō [conquer] → (PGmc) weiχ-, waiχ-, wig-, → (Go.) weihan [fight], (OHG) wīhan → (OHG) wīgan [battle], gi-wigan [destroyed] → (ON) vega [fight].

- (Skt) aparám [later] → (OPers) apara [behind, following] → (Go.) afar [afterwards], → (OHG) avar / abur [again] → (OS) aaro [descendant].

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(2) Verner’s Law explains then the change of voiceless “s” into voiced “z” that passes further into “r”: e.g. - (Go.) dius → diuzam [dat. pl.] (wild animal/deer) → (OE)

dēor → (OS) dior → (OFris) diar / dier → (OHG) tior [wild animal, esp. deer].

- (Go.) mais [adv. more; comp. of filu] → maizo [more] → (OE) mǣra / māra → (OS, OHG) mēro [more].

(3) It also explains that if in Proto-Indo-European words “p” is

immediately preceded by a stressed syllable, then it turns into “v”; if the syllable is unstressed then it turns into “f”: e.g. - (PIE) septṃ →(Skt) saptá → (L) septem → (CrimGo.)

sevene → (OFris.) soven / si(u)gun → (OS) siun → (OHG) sibun → (OE) seofon → seven; sieben.

- (I-E) *nepōt- → (Skt) nápāt [offspring] → (L.) nepōs → (OLith.) nepuotis → (ON) nefe → (OE) nefa → (OS, OHG) nevo → nephew; Neffe.

(4) Finally, Verner also points out the grammatical alternation

(rotation) between “s” and “r”: e.g. - (PIE) ōws-/us- → (Go.) ausō → (ON) eyra → (OE) ēare →

(OS, OHG) ōra → ear; Ohr. - (OE) hara → (OHG) haso → hare; Hase.

Verner’s Law is still working in modern German pronunciation. Thus, the city of Hanover (Germ. Hannover) is pronounced “Hannofer,” but the inhabitants—the Hannoveraner—are pronounced “Hannoweraner,” i.e. since the syllable “-nof-” is no longer stressed, the pronunciation “f” turns into “w.”2 Besides Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, there are other important phenomena governing Germanic consonants, such as:

(1) Assimilation of two different consonants to a double consonant, i.e. consonant lengthening, e.g. I-E “nw” → Gmc. “nn” or I-E “ln” → Gmc “ll”:

- (Skt) tanú → (L) tenuis → (PGmc) þuno- → (OE) þynne → (OS) thunni → (OHG) dunni → thinn; dünn.

- (PIE) pḷnós → (L) plēnus (by metathesis becomes “pelnus”) → (Lith.) pìlnas → (Go.) fulls → (ON) fullr → (OE, OFris, OS) ful(l) → (OHG) fol(l) → full; voll.

(2) Insertion of consonants in order to render pronunciation easier,

e.g. I-E “sr” → Gmc. “str” or I-E “mr” → Gmc. “mbr”:

2 Apud, Richard Lang, Gramatica…, op. cit., p. 28.

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- (PIE) swesōr → (Skt) svásā → (L) soror → (CrimGo.) schuuester → (Run swestar ) → (ON) systir → (OE) sweostor → (OFris.) swester / suster → (OHG) swestar → sister; Schwester.

- (IE) *sreu- “flow” → (Skt) sru- → (Ir) sruth → (Lith.) sriovė → (OE) strēam → stream; Strom.

- (PIE) dem- (connected with the term for ‘house’) → (PIE) dem-ro- → (PGmc) tem(b)ra- (‘timber’ construction) → (Go.) * timrjan / timbrjan (build up, strengthen) → (ON) timbra → (OS, OE) timbrian → (OHG) zimberen →(MHG) zimbern → to build of timber; zimmern.

(3) Metathesis, a change in the order of sounds; e.g. - (PIE) nogho- “foot” → (Skt) nakhás → (L) unguis →

(PGmc) nagla- → (ON) nagl → (OE) nægel → (OFris) neil → (OS, OHG) nagal → nail; Nagel.

- (PIE) ĝr-H-no-m → (L) grānum → (OIr) grān → (Go.) kaurn → (CrimGo.) *korn / kor → (ON) korn → (OE) corn → (OHG) korn → grain; Korn.

Having reached this point, we believe that it is both helpful and functional to present synthetically, by means of tables, the evolution and development of the 15 Proto-Indo-European stop consonants to their Proto-Germanic counterparts and the Two Germanic Consonant Shifts:

A. The Proto-Indo-European Stop Consonants:

B. The Proto-Germanic consonants:

1. Semi-vowels: 2. Nasals: m n ŋ (velar) 3. Liquids: l r 4. Sibilants (hissing sounds): s z þ ð 5. Fricatives: f v h 6. Voiceless plosives: p t k (velar) 7. Voiced plosives: b d g

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C. The Germanic Consonant Shift

D. Results of the High German Consonant Shift p- pound Pfund pp apple Apfel Vp** hope hoffen t- ten zehn tt sitting sitzen Vr** bite beissen k- can khann* kk lick lekchen* Vk** make machen *Khann and lekchen, with affricates, are southern dialect forms; Standard German has stops: kann, lecken. **V represents any vowel.

The Germanic Vowel Shift The vowel system of Proto-Indo-European consisted of the following long and short vocalic sounds: *a, *e, *o, *i, and *u.

The vowel of any given root was not necessarily fixed but varied in an alternation. The four mid vowels participated in this pattern of alternation, called “ablaut,” a phenomenon that will be dealt with later. For example, the root that means “sit” was alternately *sed-, *sod-, *sd-, *sed-, and *sod- (NE sit is from *sed-, sat from *sod-, and seat from *sed-); and the root that means do was *dhe-, *dho-, and *dhə - (NE deed is from *dhe-, and do is from *dho-).

In addition to the above vowels, Proto-Indo-European also had resonants, i.e. sounds which functioned as vowels in some positions and as consonants in others. These resonants were *i, *u, *m, *n, *l, and *r.

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Thus, *bhrtó- (Skr bhrtá- “borne”) had syllabic *r (i.e., r functioning as a vowel), but *bhéreti (Skr bhárati “he bears”) had nonsyllabic *r (i.e., r functioning as a consonant).

In time, the difference between long and short vowels completely disappeared in certain Indo-European languages, such as in Late Latin, in Slavic, or lessened. The Early Germanic languages not only preserved the contrast between short and long vowels but, on the contrary, they emphasized it and turned it into the most outstanding feature of Proto-Germanic vowel development. The Proto-Indo-European system of vowels contrasting with resonants was reshaped in Germanic by a number of changes, such as:

• syllabic *i, *u, *m, *n, *l, and *r became in Proto-Germanic the vowels *i and *u and the sequences *um, *un, *ul, and *ur, respectively;

• nonsyllabic *m, *n, *l, and *r developed into the nasals and liquids *m, *n, *l, and *r, respectively;

• nonsyllabic *i and *u before vowels resulted in the semivowels *j (also symbolized as *y) and *w, though after vowels they continued to form diphthongs (*ei, *ai, *oi; *eu, *au, *ou).

The Proto-Indo-European vowels and diphthongs then changed

into Proto-Germanic sounds as follows3:

In this diagram the lines between two sounds indicate that the

Proto-Indo-European sound developed into the corresponding Proto-Germanic sound; for example, Proto-Indo-European *i became either *i or *e, and Proto-Indo-European *ə, *a, and *o coalesced in Proto-Germanic as *a. These changes gave the following vowels for Proto-Germanic:

• short vowels, *i, *e, *a, *u ~ o; • long vowels, *i, *e2, *e1, *u, *o; • diphthongs, *ai, *au, *iu ~ eo.

The origins of the vowel *e2 are disputed, but it probably first arose

from the diphthong “ei” in certain environments; *e2 and *e1 were high 3 See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.

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[e] and low [æ] midvowels, respectively. In Gothic the two e’s merged, while elsewhere they remained distinct; thus, with *e2, (OHG) hiar and (OS, ON, and OE) hēr “here” (i.e. it is narrowed to “e:”) but with *e1, (OHG) tāt, (OS) dad, (ON) dað, and (OE) dæd “deed” (i.e. it was lowered to “ā”). It is only in Modern English that [dæd] evolves to [de:d] and eventually to [di:d].

Proto-Germanic also had three nasalized vowels: long *i, *a, and *u, which arose when, in the sequences *inx, *anx, and *unx, the n was lost with nasalization and lengthening of the preceding vowel. Some Germanic Short Vowels (PIE) e → (Gmc) e;

e.g. (PIE) bherH-ĝ-o- → (PGmc) berkanō → (Go) * bairkana → (Go) bercna “name of the b-rune in the Gothic” → (OE) beorc, bierce, byrke → (OHG) bircha, birihha → birch; Birke.

(PIE) e → (Gmc) i; e.g. (PIE) bhedh- “to bow, to bend”→ (Go.) bidjan / bidan → (OE)

biddan → (OFris) bidda → (OS) biddian → (OHG) bitten → ask/request/prey; bitten.

(PIE) i → (Gmc) e; e.g. (PIE) ĝī- / ĝēy- “to sprout, split, bloom” → (Go) *keinan →

(OE) cīnan → (OS) kīnan → (OHG) chīnan → (Sw) kina → to sprout; keimen.

(PIE) i → (Gmc) i; e.g. (PIE) misdhó- “reward, prize” → (Skt) miḍhám “prize” (Go.)

mizdo “reward” → (OE) meord “payment” → (OFris) mēde “rent, gift” → (OHG) mieta → meed (reward); Miete (rent).

(PIE) a → (Gmc) a; e.g. (PIE) al- + -ti- → (Go.) *alds (generation, age) → (OE)

yield(o) → (OS) eldī → (OHG) altī → old; alt. (PIE) o → (Gmc) a;

e.g. (PIE) otōw → (Go.) ahtau → (CrimGo) athe → (ON) ātta → (OFris, OE) eahta → (OS, OHG) ahto → eight; acht.

(PIE) ə → (Gmc) a; e.g. (PIE) pət£r → (L) pater → (Go.) fadar → (OE) fæder → (OS)

fadar → (OHG) fater → father; Vater.

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(PIE) u → (Gmc) u; e.g. (PIE) yuHwṇtí “young woman” → (Go) junda → (OE) geogoþ

(OFris) jogethe → (OHG) jugund → youth; Jugend. Some Germanic Long Vowels (PIE) ā → (Gmc) ō;

e.g. (PIE) bhāgós “beech” → (L) fāgus → (PGmc) bōks —“a tablet of beechwood for inscribing” → (Go.) boka —“letter, something written” → (OE) bōc → (OFris) bōk → (OHG) buoh → book; Buch.

(PIE) ō → (Gmc) ō; e.g. (PIE) plō-/ē “shed tears”→ (Go.) flōdus “stream”→ (ON) flōþ

→ (OE, OFris, OS) flōd → (OHG) flōt / flout →flood; Flut. (PIE) ē → (Gmc) ē;

e.g. (PIE) ēy- + adv -r → (PGmc – ē2) → (Go.) her → (OE, OS, ON) → hēr → (OHG) hiar → here; hier.

Worth mentioning is also the fact that the Indo-European vowel “ə” (schwa)4 is not always included by linguists in the inventory of Germanic vowels, but the fact that we find it today in English, German and other Germanic languages stands as proof of its existence in Proto-Germanic, too, although no special letter was either invented or developed to represent it, i.e. the unaccented vowel in the unstressed

sh, Dutch and High German occurred before

e.g. - (

→

- ch → (OHG) steinag → Standard

German steinig; stony.

syllable. As to the Germanic diphthongs, in a first phase they tend to become monophthongs through contraction, i.e. as a consequence of the strong stress accent characteristic of the Germanic languages, the first element of the diphthong glides gradually towards the second element, until it will be absorbed by it. Then, in a second phase, the Germanic languages started developing diphthongs again. Thus, the most extensive process of diphthongization in Engli

the end of the Middle Ages: PIE) steygh- “to climb” → (Go.) *steigan [*at-steigan “descend,” *ga-steigan “get into,” ufar-steigan “go out”] → (ON) stīga → (OE, OS) stīgan → (OFris) stīga(OHG) stīgan → Standard German steigen; to climb. (PIE) stāy- “thicken” → (Go.) *staineins → (OE) stāneg / stnig → (MLG) stēni

4 “ə,” called “schwa” or “shva,” is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and transcribes the unaccented vowel in the unstressed syllable.

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Having reached this point, we believe that two other important processes are worth mentioning in connection with the evolution of the Germanic vowel-system:

• Vowel Mutation (“Umlaut”/“Vowel Harmony”) and • Vowel Gradation (“Ablaut”)

Vowel Mutation

Coined by Jakob Grimm, Vowel Mutation, designates the process in Germanic languages mainly by which the quality of a vowel was altered in certain phonetic contexts, i.e. the change of a stem vowel in the direction of o vowel of a suffix or ending, which in Germanic languages is in most cases “i” and “u.” Thus:

1. under the influence of a following “i” or “j,” the back vowels “a, o, u” are mutated to the front vowels “e”— spelled [ä] — “ö and ü” and

2. under the influence of a “u” or “w” the vowels “e” and “o” are mutated to “i” and “u.”

In Germanic languages, Vowel Mutation on a large scale began

sometime between the 5th and the 6th century AD. Therefore, it is not recorded in the in Wulfila’s5 Gothic and is much more characteristic of West and North Germanic languages. Moreover, this process became a grammatical device of utmost importance and assumed functional value with certain morphological categories, such as: the noun (plural of nouns), the adjective (comparative and superlative degree of comparison), the verb (indicative, subjunctive moods), etc.

In Norse and West Germanic consonant shift and vowel mutation seem to stand in inverse ration, i.e. the more consonant shift a dialect

5 Ulfilas, Gothic WULFILA (b. c. 311—d. c. 382, Constantinople [now Istanbul, Turkey]), Christian bishop and missionary who evangelized the Goths, reputedly created the Gothic alphabet, and wrote the earliest translation of the Bible into a Germanic language. Although his life cannot be reconstructed with certainty, fragments have come from 4th- and 5th-century ecclesiastical historians. Ulfilas’ outstanding contribution to writing is his invention of the Gothic alphabet, which he devised from Greek (primarily) and Latin. For the first time in the Germanic world, writing could be used for the propagation of ideas. He coined a Germanic Christian terminology, some of which is still in use. Before 381 he translated parts of the Bible from Greek to Gothic. Much of his Gothic translations of the Gospels and Pauline Letters survive, together with fragments of his Book of Nehemiah. Although he reputedly translated the whole Bible except the Books of Kings, the extent of his work cannot be ascertained. Surviving passages from his Bible translation are in W. Streitberg’s Gotische Bibel (3rd ed., 1950). He reportedly wrote many sermons and interpretations in Gothic, Greek, and Latin, and some extant Arian writings have been ascribed to him. (See related articles in Encyclopædia Britannica `98.)

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shows, the more restricted is vowel mutation in that particular dialect. The explanation for it seems to be the fact that if the consonant shift was already changing the form of the original word and making, thus, its understanding difficult, the listener was less willing to accept a shift regarding vowel sounds, too. After Old High German became well established, vowel mutation began to work extensively in it, too, and the result is that in today’s Standard German vowel mutation is about six times greater than in Old High German.

In English, too, the effects of vowel mutation, belonging either to the late continental or to the earlier insular period, are best seen in the modern variety of the language, mainly in:

• irregular nouns that form the plural by changing the root-vowel (man-men, foot-feet, woman-women, mouse-mice, etc.);

• in the formation of certain nouns by suffixation (fox+in → vixen, corn + el → kernel, wide+itha → width, broad+itha → breadth, long+itha → length, strong+itha → strength);

• old plural forms (child-children, brother-brothers/brethren, cow-cows/kine, etc.);

• in certain adjectives (old, older/elder, the oldest/the eldest); • in adjectives by adding the suffix – isc/ish (Angel/Angle+isc

→English, Frank+isc → French); • in the formation of transitive verbs from nouns or adjectives (full-to

fill, gold-to gild, foul-to defile); • it was also applied to Latin borrowings (Latin coquina → Late

Latin cucina → OE cycene → kitchen; Latin catillus → OE cetel → kettle; Latin molina → OE mylen → Mid.Eng. miln →mill).6

Vowel Gradation

Also coined by the German linguist Jakob Grimm, Vowel Gradation is a systematic alternation in the vowels of related word forms, especially in Germanic strong verbs, as in Mod. English—sing, sang, sung, drink, drank, drunk—, or in Standard German—springen, sprang, gesprungen, trinken, trank, getrunken. Gradation is a reflex of pitch and stress, i.e. the two accent types of Indo-European.

Pitch, or musical accent, is the degree of highness or lowness of a tone, which depends on the number of vibrations per second produced by the vocal cords. In time, it led to an alternation between front and back vowels, restricted to the alternation between the vowels “ and ,” e.g. (Gk.) lego “I speak” and logos “speech.” The result of pitch accent is called qualitative gradation, or Abtönung, in German; it is frequently 6 Apud, Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction…, op. cit., 69-75.

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explained as the result of the loss of accent and, to a certain extent, it is also related with the Germanic vowel shift. Stress, or dynamic accent, is defined as the intensity given to a syllable of speech by special effort in utterance, resulting in relative loudness. On the one hand, it produces the weakening or loss of unstressed vowels and, on the other hand, a lengthening of overstressed vowels. The result of stress accent is called quantitative gradation, or Abstufung, in German, and it consists in the reduction or the increase of vowel quantity. A vowel, which is short in normal accent conditions, is weakened or dropped in unstressed syllables (i.e. it does not disappear entirely but is rather turned to the “ə” sound). On the other hand, a vowel will be lengthened when it is over-accented. Being a factor of fundamental importance in Proto-Indo-European, vowel gradation has been not only well preserved, but even extended in the Germanic Strong Verb. Linguists and grammarians arranged the various types of gradation into series or classes. Here are the seven classes of verbs resulted from Jakob Grimm’s 14 initial conjugations and arranged according to the changing root-vowel/diphthong of the four stem forms of the Proto-Germanic verb—the present, the preterit singular, the preterit plural, and the past participle. (The examples, however, are Gothic verb forms.)

Series Present Preterit singular

Preterit plural

Past Participle

I II III

IV

V

VI

VII

i steigan iu giutan i hilpan i niman i sitan a hafjan ē lētan

ai staig au gaut a halp a nam a sat ō hōf ō lailōt

i stigum u gutum u hulpum ē nemum ē sētum ō hōfum ō lailōtum

i stigans (i-dipht.): to ascend; steigen u gutans (u-dipht.): to pour; gießen u hulpans (liquid/nasal dipght.): to help; helfen u numans (monopht. bef. liquid/nasal): to take; nehmen i sitans (monopht. bef. plosive/fricat.): to sit; sitzen a hafans (Gmc. a/ō series): to heave/lift; hieven (hochziehen) ē lētans (reduplicating class): to let/ to leave; lassen/verlassen

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For the sake of comparison, here are the forms of two of the above-mentioned verbs in the more important Germanic languages.7

Germanic lang. Infinitive Preterit singular Preterit plural Past Participle Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German Standard German

niman nema niman niman neman *nehmen

nam nam nōm nam nam *nahm

nēmum nōmom nōmom nāmum nāmum *nahmen

numans namenn numen ginuman ginoman *genommen

Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German Standard German

giban gefa giefan geban geban *geben

gaf gaf geaf gaf gab *gab

gēfum gbfom geafon gabun gābum *gaben

gibans gefenn giefen gigeben gigeben *gegeben

Gradation and Mutation Combined Mention should also be made of the fact that both processes of gradation and mutation combined in the formation of Transitive (Weak/Regular) Verbs from Intransitive (Strong/Irregular) Verbs. Transitive verbs were usually formed according to the following pattern:

• Stem of Past Tense of Strong Vbs. + “i” → Infinitive obtained by Mutation of

obtained by Gradation stem-vowel

Intransitive / Strong Verb Transitive / Weak Verb English Old English Past Tense by

Gradation Transitive Infinitive

Infinitive by Mutation

English

to drink drink—an dranc dranc—i—an dranc—an to drench to sit sitt—an sat sat—i—an sett—an to set to lie lic—an laʒ laʒ—ian lecʒ—an to lay to rise ris—an ras ras—ian reer—an to rear

• Gradation without mutation, in the case of certain verbs of Scandinavian

origin; the original pronunciation of the Past Tense, Intransitive (Strong) Verb is preserved since the Old Norse diphthong “ei” is not subject to mutation.

Intransitive / Strong Verb Transitive / Weak Verb

English Old Norse Past Tense by Gradation

Transitive Infinitive English

to rise ris—a reis reis—a to raise to bite bit—a beit beit—a to bait

7 Ibid., pp. 78-81.

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• Sometimes Transitive (Weak) Verbs are derived from the Present Tense and

not from the Past Tense.8

Intransitive / Strong Verb Transitive / Weak Verb English Old English Transitive

Infinitive Infinitive by

Mutation English

to fall fall—an fall—i—an fell—an to fell to swoop swap—an swap—i—an swǣ—an to sweep

In conclusion to what has been said so far, we can say that, in a first phase, Proto-Germanic altered significantly the sound-system (consonants, vowels and diphthongs) that it had inherited from the parent Indo-European language. In a second phase, these changes were continued within the three sub-families of East, North and West Germanic languages at different ratios. Here is now a review of these distinctive features: A) East Germanic—Gothic The Gothic consonant system seems to have been largely identical with that assumed for Proto-Germanic: p, t, k, kw (this last sound was probably much like the qu in queen); f, þ, h, hw (this last sound was probably pronounced much like the wh in white); b, d, g; s, z; m, n; l, r; w, j. The nasal n was presumably velar before the velar consonants k, q, and g; in these positions it was usually written (as in Greek) as g or gg. Examples of this spelling include dragk “drank,” igqis “you two,” and briggan “bring,” although n was occasionally used as in Latin (e.g., þank “thanks,” inqis “you two,” and bringiþ “bring ye”).

The Gothic alphabet contained the five simple vowel symbols, i, e, a, o, and u, from which four compound symbols, ei, ai, au, and iu, also were made; in addition, w was used to transliterate Greek υ [upsilon] and οι [omicron+iota] (both of which were pronounced as umlauted u /ü/ in 4th-century Greek). The generally accepted development of the Proto-Germanic vowels in Gothic can be diagrammed as follows:

• brackets in the Proto-Germanic line indicate that the two linked sounds coalesced into one;

8 Ibid., pp.82-83.

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• brackets in the Gothic line indicate two variants of the same sound that are in different phonetic environments.

• Proto-Germanic *i and *e apparently first merged as a single vowel and then became Gothic i in most positions but became ai before h, hw, and r.

• Similarly, Proto-Germanic *u ~ o became Gothic u in most positions, but au before h, hw, and r.

Gothic shows a number of archaic features that had been almost or entirely lost by the time the other Germanic languages began to appear in writing: the shortening of most long vowels in final unstressed syllables and the loss of most short vowels (e.g., Proto-Germanic *erþo “earth” became Gothic airþa, Proto-Germanic *stainaz “stone” became Gothic stains). Finally, voiced fricatives that occurred or came to occur at the end of a word are unvoiced (e.g., nominative *hlai az, accusative *hlai an “bread, loaf” changed to hlaifs and hlaif, respectively [but dative hlaiba]).

B) West Germanic—English, Frisian and German The most striking changes that distinguish them from the other Germanic languages are:

• the loss of nasal sounds before the Proto-Germanic voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, and *s (contrast the following pairs of words, in which English loses the nasal but German preserves it: before f—soft/sanft; before þ—other/ander; before s—us/uns, goose/Gans);

• palatalization of Proto-Germanic *k before front vowels and *j, giving modern English ch (English/German pairs: chin/Kinn, birch [Old English birce]/Birke);

• and palatalization of Proto-Germanic * before front vowels, giving modern English y (English/German pairs include yield/gelten, yester-[day]/gestern, yard [Old English geard]/Garten; this palatalized *

• merged with the j [y sound] from Proto-Germanic *j: year/Jahr). • Other changes include palatalization of gg before j to Old English

cg (Proto-Germanic *brugjo, pre-Old English *bruggju, Old English brycg “bridge”;

• contrast the unpalatalized ck from gg of German Brücke “bridge”); a front reflex of Proto-Germanic *e1 (English/German pairs include deed/Tat, seed/Saat, sleep/schlafen, meal/Mahl); and

• backing and raising of nasalized a, from Proto-Germanic *a and *a before nasal plus f, þ, and s (English/German pairs include brought/brachte, thought/dachte, other/ander, and goose/Gans).

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C) North Germanic—Old Scandinavian North Germanic differs from West Germanic (but not East Germanic) in having ggj and ggv for medial jj and ww, respectively (Old Norse tveggja “two,” hoggva “hew”).

North Germanic differs from East Germanic (but not West Germanic) in that original e becomes a (Old Norse máni “moon”) and original z becomes r (Old Norse meiri “more”);

• back vowels are mutated to front vowels by the influence of a following i or j (“i-umlaut”); thus a and i become æ and, o and i become ø [ø represents umlauted o], u and i become y and [y represents umlauted u], au becomes ey or øy;

• the number of unstressed vowels is reduced to three (a, i, u). North Germanic differs from both West Germanic and East Germanic in the following ways:

• rounding of unrounded vowels by following u or w (“u-umlaut”) u and a become o and [o represents a low back rounded vowel], e becomes ø, i becomes y, ei becomes ey or øy);

• loss of initial j and of w before rounded vowels (Old Norse ár “year,” ungr “young,” orð “word”);

• loss of final nasals (Old Norse frá “from,”and generally in infinitives: Old Norse fara “fare, go”; compare Old English faran, German fahren);

• diphthongization (the creation of a gliding monosyllabic speech sound) of short e to ja or jo (Old Norse jafn “even,” jord “earth”).

HIGHLIGHTS: • ablaut: alternation in the vowels of related word forms, especially in Germanic strong verbs (e.g. in sing, sang, sung);

• umlaut: the process in Germanic languages by which the quality of a vowel was altered in certain phonetic contexts;

• assimilation: the process by which one sound is made similar in its place or manner of articulation to a neighbouring sound (e.g. the pb → b in cupboard);

• metathesis: a change in the order of sounds (e.g. East Anglian “singify” instead of “signify”;

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ASSESSMENT TEST FOUR – upon reading unit four, answer the following questions or comment briefly on the following issues: 1. What is the Germanic Vowel Shift? 2. Explain the peculiarity about the Germanic diphthongs! 3. What was the direct outcome of Vowel Mutation? 4. What was the direct outcome of Vowel Gradation?

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UNIT FIVE -- The Main Morphological Features OBJECTIVES:

• to help the students understand the phenomena that affected the evolution of Germanic languages from a morphological point of view;

TEXT

The Noun Phrase The morphology of nominal phrase comprises the morphology of the noun, the pronoun, the adjective and the numeral. Before focusing on them let us have a brief look first at the three grammatical categories shared by the parts of speech belonging to the noun phrase, i.e. gender, number, and case. 1. Gender. Proto-Germanic kept the Proto-Indo-European system of three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, as to the origin of gender, scholars still seem to be far from reaching an agreement, but at least one thing is certain, i.e. originally, the concept of gender had nothing to do with sex.

Paradoxically, contemporary grammarians bring the development of gender in close connection with cattle-raising by the early Indo-Europeans and explain it in the following way. They start from the fact that the o-stems—the most numerous I-E nouns—appear in historical times generally as masculine gender. Nevertheless, originally, the o-stems did not denote male beings (humans and animals) exclusively. Thus, The I-E *éwos “horse” and wkwos “wolf” did not necessarily mean “stallion” and “he-wolf,” but rather a definite horse or wolf. The corresponding nouns in a-stems, i.e. éwā and wkwa, had either generic or collective force, denoting the species “horse,” “wolf” or “a group of horses,” respectively, “a group of wolves.” Then, the general type of domestic animal was represented by the female animal that was preserved for reproduction and milk, while the male animal appeared as the exceptional individual. Thus, the I-E word for “cattle”— *gwōus— came to mean the female animal in Germanic, e.g., (OE) cū → (OS) kō → cow; Kuh.

So, when referring to the animal type, the forms in ā apparently became the starting point for the feminine gender. But when the same ā-forms were used with a collective meaning, they generated the neuter plural

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(which has the same ending as the feminine singular, e.g., (L) aquila, mensa = fem. sg., whereas verba = neuter, pl.).

Moreover, neither the generic use of the ā-stem nor the individualizing character of the o-stem was necessarily restricted to the female or the male sex. Hence, nouns like the (L) scriba “scribe,” agricola “farmer,” the (Slav.) sluga “servant,” or the (Mod. G) die Bedienung “waiter/waitress” or die Kundschaft “customers (pl)” take feminine form morphologically but indicate both male and female individuals of the general type.

Initially, there was no distinction between masculine and neuter singular, except for the latter’s lack of the nominative form for which the accusative was substituted. Thus, for instance, the form (L) verbum “word” is both nominative and accusative, and so is the (Go.) waurd (n.) “word. The explanation for the lack of a nominative form is the fact that these neuter nouns generally denote inanimate objects, which cannot function as active subjects in a clause.

In time, these three categories—the individual, the generic and the collective— were generalized and turned into the three grammatical genders of masculine, feminine and neuter. The three genders have been preserved in a number of Indo-European languages up to the present, i.e. in Slavic and German. In the Romance languages (French, Spanish and Italian) nouns are classified into masculine and feminine (masculine and neuter having coalesced), whereas English has turned to the natural gender.51 2. Number. Initially, Indo-European nouns had three numbers: singular, plural, and dual. Gradually, the latter became obsolete and was dropped almost everywhere, except for the Slavic languages where it is still in use for those parts of the body that are in pairs (eyes, ears, etc.). Germanic languages have preserved it with the personal pronoun, e.g., wit “we two” in Gothic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, respectively vit in Old Norse, and jut “you two” in Gothic, ġit in Old English, it in Old Norse. 3. Case. It is almost impossible to state nowadays the exact number of case forms of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language for the simple reason that the number of distinct case forms in the several Indo-European languages varied greatly. However, of one particular fact at least we can be sure, i.e. in time the number of case forms decreased as result of two or three

51 Apud Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction…, op. cit., pp. 90-93 and Gertrud Schmidt, Comparative…, op. cit., pp. 102-3.

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cases combining in one form. This process is called syncretism, or the merging of different inflectional varieties of a word during the development of a language. Originally there were eight cases in Proto-Indo-European, although not all of them were in use in all stem classes and numbers:

• the Nominative indicated the subject and the subject complement (predicative);

• the Accusative denoted the person, object or idea directly affected by the verb;

• the Genitive had adverbial functions; with verbs it indicated a less direct and complete influence of the verb concept on the noun concept than the accusative; with nouns it covered various types and degrees of connection between two nouns, such as the possessive, the partitive, etc.

• the Ablative indicated the instrument or the source of action, the point of departure, the origin or separation; its function is partly related to the genitive and partly to the instrumental case;

• the Dative was the case of the noun in regard to which something was done; it indicated the recipient and the beneficiary of an action performed by the agent in the nominative;

• the Locative denoted the place of action, the position in space or time; • the Instrumental expressed the means by which something was done; • the Vocative was the form of address.

Of these original eight cases, the early Germanic languages preserved

four: basic cases: the Nominative, the Genitive, the Dative and the Accusative. Gothic also kept the Vocative, whereas in the other Germanic languages it coincides with the Nominative. Early German preserved the Instrumental to a considerable extent, while Early Anglo-Saxon preserved many traces of the Locative. In Germanic, the functions of the Ablative were taken either by the Dative (with or without preposition) or by the Genitive. Generally speaking, the cases that were lost were often replaced by prepositional phrases.52

52 Apud Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction…, op. cit., pp. 95-97 and Gertrud Schmidt, Comparative…, op. cit., pp. 103-4.

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The Noun It is a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things; structurally nouns consist of three elements: the root, the stem building element, and the inflectional element.

the root found in all words belonging to the same family (dūc-ere; duc-s = dux)

The final element of the stem is extremely important because according to its being a consonant or a vowel we distinguish the vocalic/strong or the consonantal/weak declension classes (terms also coined by Jakob Grimm): A. The Germanic vocalic/strong declension consists of four declensions:

• the Germanic a – declension (1st declension) corresponds to the Latin o – declension (2nd declension), a consequence of the Consonant Shift o → a; this declension contains masculine and neuter gender;

• the Germanic o – declension (2nd declension) corresponds to the Latin

a – declension (1st declension), a consequence of the Consonant Shift a → o; this declension contains nouns of feminine gender;

• the Germanic i – declension (3rd declension) corresponds to the Latin

3rd declension;

• the Germanic u – declension (4th declension) corresponds to the Latin u – declension.

B. The Germanic consonantic/weak declension is also called n – declension because the nouns shows the ending – n in nearly all the cases.

e.g. (L) duc – tu – s the inflectional element / case ending the stem building element (frū-tu-s; exi-tu-s)

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C. The Germanic Minor Declensions are subgroups of declensions and refer to a few nouns having the stems -īn, -nd, -r, or -s. (The Germanic –r stems indicate relationship and they include words like fadar (father), dauhtar (daughter), broþar (brother), swistar (sister). The word “mother” does not appear in Gothic texts (Ulfilas uses the term aiþei) but it must have been mōdar throuogh analogy with fadar.

Synoptic Tables of Declensions

The Strong Declension

1. a- Declension Pure a- stems

Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. dagaz dags dagr dǣʒ dag tag (day) G. dagas (-is) dagis dags dæʒes dages tages D. dagai daga dage dæʒe dage tage A. daga dag dag dæʒ dag tag I . — — — — dagu tagu

Plural N. dagoz/-os dagos dagar daʒas dagos taga G. dago dage daga daʒa dago tago D. dagamiz dagam dogom daʒum dagum tagum A. daganz dagans daga daʒas dagos taga

ja- stems N. herdijaz hairdeis hirþer hierde hirdi hirti (shepherd) G. herdijiz hairdeis hirþes hierdes hirdies hirtes D. herdijai hairdja hirþe hierde hirdi hirte A. herdija hairdi hirþe hierde hirde hirtie I. — — — — hirdiu hirtiu

Plural N. herdijoz/-os hairdjos hirþar hierdas hirdios hirte G. herdijo hairdje hirþa hierda hirda hirta D. herdijamiz hairdjam hirþom hierdum hirdium hirtum/-im A. herdijanz hairgjans hirþom hierdas hirdios hirte

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2. o- Declension Pure o- stems Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. gebo giba gjǪf ʒiefu gea geba (gift) G. geboz gibo gjafar ʒiefe gea geba G. geboi gibai gjǪf ʒiefe geu gebu A. gebo giba gjǪf ʒiefe gea geba

Plural N. geboz gibōs gjafar ʒiefa/-e gea gebā G. gebo gibō gjafa ʒiefa/-ena geo/-ono gebōno D. gebomiz gibōm gjǪfom ʒiefum geum gebōm A. geboz gibōs gjafar ʒiefa/-e gea gebā 3. i- Declension Masculine Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. gastiz gasts gastr ʒiest gast gast (guest) G. — gastis gests ʒiestes gastes gastes D. — gasta gest ʒieste gaste gaste A. gasti gast gest ʒiest gast gast V. — gast = Nom. = Nom. = Nom. = Nom. I . — — — ʒieste gasti(u) gastiu (gestiu)

Plural N. gastiz gasteis gester ʒiestas gesti gesti G. gastio gastē gesta ʒiesta gestio gestio/-eo D. gastimiz gastim gestom ʒiestum gestium gestim A. gastinz gastins geste ʒiestas gesti gesti 3. i- Declension Feminine Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. anstiz ansts nauðr (need) ēst anst anst (favor) G. anstaiz anstais nauðar ēste enti ensti D. anstei anstai nauð ēste ensti ensti A. ansti anst nauð ēst anst anst

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Plural N. anstiz ansteis nauðir ēsta ensti ensti G. anstio anste nauða ēsta enstio enstio/-eo D. anstim(i)z anstim nauðom ēstum enstium enstim A. anstinz anstins nauðir ēsta ensti ensti 4. u- Declension Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. sunuz sunus sunr sunu sunu sunu (son) G. sunauz sunaus sonar suna sunies sunes D. suneu sunau syni suna suno sune A. sunu sunu sun sunu sunu sun/-u V

. — sunu/-au = Nom. = Nom. = Nom. = Nom

Plural N. suniwiz sunjus synir suna suni suni G. suniwo suniwē sona suna sunio suneo D. sunum(i)z sunum sunum sunum sunum sunim A. sununz sununs sunu suna suni suni

The Weak Declension (n- stem)

Masculine

Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

Singular N. hane/-o hana hani hana hano hano (cock) G. haniniz/-az hanins hana hana hanon hanen/-in D. hanini hanin hana hanan hanon hanen/-in A. hananu hanan hana hanan hanon hanon

Plural

N. hananiz hanans hanar hanan hanon hanun/-on G. hanano hanane hana hanena hanono hanono D. hananmiz hanam honom hanum hanon hanom A

. hananunz hanans hana hanan hanon hanun/-on

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Feminine Singular

N. tungo tuggō tunga tunʒe tunga zunga (tongue) G. tungoniz/-az tuggōns tungo tunʒan tungun zungun D. tungoni tuggōn tungo tunʒan tungun zungun A

. tungonu tuggōn tungo tunʒan tungun zungun

Plural N. tungoniz tuggons tungor tunʒan tungun zungun G. tungono tuggono tungna tunʒena tungono zungono D. tungonmiz tuggom tungom tunʒum tungon zungom A. tungonunz tuggons tungor tunʒan tungun zungun

Minor Declensions

r- stems Singular

Gmc. Go. ON OE OS OHG

N. broþer brōþar broðir brōþor brōðer bruoder (brother) G. broþriz/-az brōþrs broðor brēþer brōðer bruoder D. broþri brōþr broðor brēþer brōðer bruoder A

. broþern brōþar broðor brōþor brōðer brooder

Plural

N. broþriz brōþruns brøðr brōþor brōðer bruoder G. broþro brōþrē brøðra brōþra brōð(e)ro bruodero D. broþrumiz brōþrum brøðrum brōþrum brōðrum bruoderum A. broþrunz brōþruns brøðr brōþor brōðer bruoder

nd- stems (Present Participle Stem)

Singular

N. frijond frijōnds frǣndi frēond friend friunt (friend) G. frijondiz/-az frijōndis frǣndi frēondes friundes friuntes D. frijondi frijōnd frǣndi frīend friunde friunte A. frijondu frijōnd frǣndi frēond friend friunt V. — frijōnd — — — —

Plural

N. frijondiz frijōnds gefendr frīend friend friunt G. frijondo frijōnde gefanda frēonda friundo friunto D. frijondumiz frijōndam gefondom frēondum friundum friuntum A. frijondiz frijōnds gefendr frīend friend friunt

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The Adjective

In the Germanic languages, morphologically adjectives are nouns, in the sense that their declension did not differ from that of the corresponding noun stems. Since adjectives denoted quality, their most frequent syntactic function was that of attribute connected with the noun. Consequently, the adjective became a separate part of speech that developed new declensional groups. In keeping with his classification of the Germanic nouns (strong and weak), Jakob Grimm named the two declensions of the adjective as:

• strong (pronominal) – an indefinite function; it occurs mainly when no pronoun precedes the adjective; it adds pronominal endings to the stem, substituting them for the usual endings of the o and a- stems.

• weak (nominal) – a definite function; it is used when a pronominal adjective (mainly the demonstrative adj.) precedes the adjective; it consists in the change of all adjective stems to n- stems; in time the demonstrative adjective becomes the definite article.

The Strong Declension in Gothic

Masculine Singular Feminine Singular Neuter Singular láisareis juggs = a young teacher qēns jugga = a young wife barn leitil = a little child N. láisareis juggs N. qēns jugga N. barn leitil G. láisareis juggis G. qēnáis juggáizos G. barnis leitilis D. láisarja juggamma D. qēnai juggái D. barna leitilamma A. láisari juggana A. qēn jugga A. barn leitil M

asculine Plural Feminine Plural Neuter Plural

N. láisarjōs juggái N. qēneis juggōs N. barna leitila G. láisarjē juggáize G. qēnē juggáizo G. barne leitiláizē D. láisarjam juggáim D. qēnim juggáim D. barnem leitiláim A. láisarjans juggins A. qēnins juggōs A. barna leitila

The Weak Declension in Gothic

Masculine Singular Feminine Singular Neuter Singular láisareis sa jugga = qēns sō juggō = barn þata leitilō = the young teacher the young teacher the little child

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N. láisareis sa jugga N. qēns sō juggō N. barn þata leitilō G. láisareis þis juggins G. qēnáis þizōs juggōns G. barnis þis leitilins D. láisarja þamma juggin D. qēnái þizái juggōn D. barna þamma leitilin A. láisari þana juggan A. qēn þō juggōn A. barn þata leitilō Masculine Plural Feminine Plural Neuter Plural N. láisarōs þais juggans N. qēneis þōs juggōns N. barna þō leitilōna G. láisarjē þizō jugganō G. qēnē þizō juggōno G. barna þizō leitilanō D. láisarjam þaim juggam D. qēnim þáim juggōm D. barnam þáimleitilam A. láisarjans þans juggans A. qēnins þōs juggōns A. barna þō leitilōna

The Comparison of Adjectives The Comparative took the suffixes –iza or –oza that were derived from the Latin –ior, -ius.

e.g. (Go.) alþiza → (ON) ellre → (OE) ieldra → (OS) eldiro → (OHG) altiro → older; älter.

(Go.) swinþs → swinþōza — strong; [→ (MHG) swint/swinde = powerful, capable, swift; geschwind. garaihts → garaihtōza — just; gerecht.

The Superlative took the endings –ista or –osta that were derived from Greek.

e.g. (Go.) reikista — the mightiest; [by extension → the richest; der reichste]; háuhista — the highest; der höchste; armosta — the poorest; der ärmste.

A small group of adjectives show an Irregular Comparison, deriving their comparative and superlative degree from a different root than the positive. e.g. (Go.) goþs batiza batista (good, better, the best) (ON) gotr betri bestr (OE) ʒod betera/bettra betest/betst (OHG) guot bezziro bezzisto (Go.) ubils waírsiza — (evil, worse, the worst) (OE) yfel wyrsa wyrrest/wyrsta (OHG) ubil wirsiro wirsisto (übel) (Go.) mikils maiza maists (much, more, the most) (ON) mikill meiri mestr (OE) micel mara maest (OHG) mhhil meriri/mero meist (big → much)

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(Go.) leitils minniza minnists (little, small ← Latin “minus”)

(ON) litill minui minstr (OE) lytel laessa laest (OHG) luzzil minniro minnisto

The Pronoun Linguists agree to the fact that in comparative grammar the pronoun is a most difficult chapter because of the following reasons that prevent them from drawing a comprehensive conclusion, making a reliable reconstruction an apparently impossible task:

• the number and forms of the pronouns of the Indo-European parent language are difficult to establish, so no definite conclusion regarding the pronouns in Indo-European can be reached;

• most pronouns had, and still have in certain modern dialects, accented and unaccented forms used side by side, the use being determined by sentence stress;

• one cannot speak of a proper declension but rather of a grouping together of stem forms, although “endings” also appear;

• many inflection forms appeared by analogy which means that, in time, many forms of the pronouns lost their original inflections and were formed on the model of others

On the other hand, all Germanic languages do share a few

characteristics, such as: • the 1st and 2nd pers. sg. and pl. are common for the three genders; • the 3rd person has different forms for every gender; • the personal pronoun has also a reflexive form; • there are always three numbers: singular, plural, and dual, except for

Old High German where there was no dual; [in Bavarian today the forms os, enk, and enker for the 2nd pers. pl. are old duals of Gothic origin; moreover, in other Germanic languages old duals have become plurals, such as in Modern Icelandic where the old dual forms have plural meanings];

• in the parent language, the nominative of the personal pronoun was rarely used, except for emphasis, because it was sufficiently indicated by the personal endings of the verb.

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Here are the paradigms of certain types of pronouns.

The Personal Pronouns

1st Person

Number Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German

Case Singular

N. G.

D. A.

Dual N. G. D. A.

Plural N. G. D. A.

ik meina mis mik wit ugkara ugkis ugkis weis unsara uns(is) uns(is)

ek mīn mēr mik wit okkar okkr okkr vēr vār oss /øss oss /øss

ic mīn m mec / m wit uncer unc unc wē ūre / ūser ūs ūs / ūsic

ik mīn m mik / m wit unkaro / unkero unk unk w /we ūser ūs ūs

ih mīn mir mih — — — — wir unsēr uns unsih

2nd Person

Number Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German

Case Singular

N. G.

D. A.

Dual N. G. D. A.

Plural N. G. D. A.

þu þeina þus þuk jut igqara igqis igqis jus izwara izwis izwis

þū þīn þēr þik it ykkar ykkr ykkr ēr yþvār yþr yþr

þū þīn þē þē / þec ʒit incer inc inc ʒ ēower ēow / īow ēow

th thīn th thik / th ʒit inkero ink ink ʒ /ʒe euwar / iuwar eu / iu eu / iu

d dīn dir dih — — — — ir iuwār iu iuwih

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3rd Person

Gender Number

Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German

Case Masculine Singular

N. G.

D. A.

Feminine Singular

N. G. D. A.

Neuter Singular

N. G. D. A.

Masculine Plural

N. G. D. A.

Feminine Plural

N. G. D. A.

Neuter Plural

N. G. D. A.

is is imma ina si izos izai ija ita is imma ita eis ize im ins ijos izo im ijos ija ize im ija

sā / henn þess þeim þann su / hon þeirar þeire þa þat þess þvi þat þeir þeira þeim þa þǣr þeira þeim þǣr þan þeira þeim þan

hē his him hine / hiene hēo / hīo hire (hiere, hyre) hire (hiere, hyre) hīe / hī hit his him hit Plural all genders N. hīe, hī G. hira, hiera, heora, hiora D. him, heom A. hīe, hī

h is im / imu ina siu iro iro sia / sie it is im / imu it Plural all genders N. sia / siu G. iro D. im A. sia / siu

er sin imu / imo inan / in siu / si ira / iru / iro íru / iro sia / sie iz is / es imu / imo iz sie iro im sie sio iro im sio siu iro im siu

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The Reflexive Pronoun

In the Germanic languages, the personal pronouns of the 1st and the 2nd person came to be used reflexively too. In time it became restricted to the 3rd person. The reflexive pronoun had no form for the Nominative case and the same forms were used for both numbers and genders. Old English and Old Saxon used the forms of the personal pronoun.

Genitive Dative Accusative Gothic seina sis sik

Old Norse sīn sēr sik Old High German sīn — sih

The Possessive Pronoun

The possessives are adjectives derived from the Genitive case of the personal pronoun stems to which the following suffixes were added: -ino for the singular, and –oro for the plural and dual. The possessives follow the strong declension of adjectives.

Singular Plural Dual Gothic meins þeins seins unsar izwar ugkar iquar

Old Norse minn þinn sinn vārr yþuarr okkarr ykkarr Old English mīn þīn sīn ūser (ūre) ēower uncer incer Old Saxon mīn thin sīn ūsa euwa unka inka Old High German

mīn din sīn unsēr iuwēr — —

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The Demonstrative Pronoun Originally, demonstrative pronouns were simple and compound in the Old Germanic languages. Later on, the Definite Article was derived from the simple demonstrative pronouns.

Gender Case

Gothic Old Norse Old English Old Saxon Old High German

Masc. Neut. Masc. Neut. Masc. Neut. Masc. Beut Masc. Neut. Singular N. G. D. A.

Feminine N. G. D. A.

Plural N. G. D. A.

Feminine N. G. D. A.

sa þis þamma þana sō þizōs þizai þō þai þizē þaim þans þōs þizō þaim þōs

þata þō

sā þess þeim, þuī þann sū þeirar þeire þō þeir þeira þeim þā þǣr þeira þeim þǣr

þat þau

sē þæs þǣm þone sēo þǣre þǣre þā þā þāra þā þǣm þā þāra þǣm þā

þæt

th thes themu thena thiu thera theru thia thea thero thm thea thea thero thm thea

that thiu

der des demu den diu dera deru dea dē dero dēm dē deo dero dēm deo

daz diu

Compound demonstrative pronouns are formed in all Germanic languages. They have the force of the English this when compared to the. Here are some of the most important: e.g. (Go.) masc. sah, fem. sōh, neut. þatuh; (ON) masc. þsja, fem. þessi, neut. þetta; (OE) masc. þes, fem. þiso, þeos, neut. þis; Plur. þas; (OHG)Sg. masc. deser fem. desiu neut. diz; Pl. masc. dese fem. deso neut. desiu.

The Relative Pronoun

In Proto-Germanic there was no proper relative pronoun and that is the reason why the ensuing Germanic languages expressed it in a fairly large variety of forms.

In Gothic it was formed by the demonstrative pronoun + the suffix –ei, for the 3rd person, whereas for the 1st and the 2nd persons, the personal pronouns + the same suffix –ei was used:

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e.g. (Go.) ik+ei → ikei “I who”; þu + ei → þuei “thou who”

mas. sa+ei → saei; fem. sō+ei → sōei

neut. þata+ei → þatei. Other Germanic languages resorted to particles and even the conjunction at “that.” At a first stage, they used these relative particles instead of the pronouns. Later on, they dropped these particles, omitted even the –ei ending and the þa- stem assumed the function of a relative pronoun.

The Interrogative Pronoun

The interrogative pronoun was derived from the Latin “quis, quid; qui, quae, quod.” By shifting the initial k → h, all interrogative pronouns in Old Germanic languages begin with “hw-”: e.g. (Go.) hwas, hwo, hwa (who? what?); hwarjis (which?); (ON) hwerr (who?); hwat (what?);

(OHG) hwer (who?); hwaz (what?); hwedar (which of the two?); hwelih (which?);

(OE) hwa, hwaet (who? what?); hwilc (which?). Since in Middle English the initial fricative ceased being pronounced, the spelling was inverted: hw → wh, the way it is now preserved in Modern English.

The Numerals

A. The Cardinal Numerals The names of the numerals in the Old Germanic languages show clearly their relation to the numerals in other Indo-European languages, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how much the Indo-European vocabulary was altered in Germanic: e.g. (IE) *oinos → (Skt) ēka → (L) ūnus → (Go.) ains (originally

“alone”) → (ON) einn → (OE) ān → (OS) ēn → (OHG) ein → (O.Pruss.) ains;

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Number Indo-European Gothic Old English Old High German 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 200 300 400 500 600-800 900 1000

*oy-no- * do/dwō(u)/dwai *trei- / trī- / teri- *kwetwres *penkwe * swes / ses *sept *ot¤ *néṇ *dé -likw → Gmc –lif tóm tūs- + -sont / -sṇt

ains twai þreis fidwōr fimf saihs sibun ahtau niun taíhun *ainlif [ain + lif] twalif *not proved in texts fidwōr + taíhun fimftaíhun *not proved in texts *not proved in texts *not proved in texts *not proved in texts twai + tigjus þreis tigjus *fidwor tigjus fimf tigjus saihs tigjus sebun-/ sibun + tehund ahtautehund niuntehund taihuntehund — — twa hunda þrija hunda *not proved in texts fimf hunda *not proved in texts *not proved in texts niun hunda þusundi

ān twʒen / twā / tū þrīe / þreo fēower fīf siex seofon eahta niʒon tīen endleofan twelf þri + tēne fēowertēne fīftēne siextēne siofontēne eahtatēne niʒontēne twēntiʒ þritiʒ fēowertiʒ fīftiʒ sixtiʒ hundseofontiʒ hundeahtatiʒ hundniʒgontiʒ hundteontiʒ / hund hund + endleofan + tiʒ hundtwelftiʒ tu hund þreo hund fēower hund … etc. þūsend

ein / einer/einiu/einaz zwēne /zwa / zwo/ zwei drī / drio / driu fior → fier fimf / finf / funf sehs sibun ahto niun zehan einlif zwelif drī + zehan fiorzehan fin(/m)fzehan sehszehan sibunzehan ahtozehan niunzehan zwein + zug drīzzug fiorzug finfzug sehszug sibun + zo ahtozo niunzo zehanzo zwe hunt driu hunt ... etc. dūsunt

B. The Ordinal Numerals With the exception of the first two numbers, ordinals are derived from the corresponding cardinal numbers. e.g. “the first” appears in two forms: - (Go.) fruma, (OE) forma, (OS) fromo; - (ON) fyrstr, (OE) fyrest, (OS) furisto. “the second” (it is a comparative) appears in (GO.) anþar, (ON)

annar, (OE) ōðer, (OS) ōthar, (OHG) andar; “the third” is in (Go.) þridja, (ON) þriþe, (OE) þridda, (OS)

thriddio, (OHG) dritto.

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Up to “the twelfth” the ordinals go together in the Old Germanic languages, but after that number most languages follow their own lines of development and comparison becomes next to impossible.53

Gothic Old English Old High

German Ord .Num.

the 1st eristo / furisto forma, formest, fyrest fruma, frumei, frumo the 2nd ander ōðer/æfterra (who comes after) anþar the 3rd dritto þridda þridja the 4th feordo / fiordo fēowerta *not proved the 5th fimfto /finfto fīfta fimfta the 6th sehsto sixta saihsta the 7th sibunto siofonta *not proved the 8th ahtodo eahtoða ahtunda the 9th niunto niunda niʒoða the 10th zehanto taihunda tienta the 11th einlifto endleofanta *not proved

*not proved *not proved *not proved fimfraitahunda (it is the last proved)

the 12th zwelifto twelfta drittozehan + to the 13 þriteota … etc. using –ta / ða

the 14th fiordozehanto the 15th finftazehanto …

the 20th zweinzug + osto the 30th drizugosto the 40th fiorzugosto …

etc. the 100th zehanzugosto

The Verb The tendency of simplification, already operating within the noun and the adjective in the Germanic languages, seems to be at work in the case of the verb, too. The extremely complicated system of the Proto-Indo-European language, in which each word had its own grammatical characteristic, was the main reason why the verb showed a considerable number of endings to express person, number, mood, and tense. It was the shifting of the accent to the first syllable and the weakening of final unstressed syllables that triggered and then contributed substantially to this simplification of grammatical forms in all Germanic languages. Here are in brief the more important changes that occurred: 53 Apud Virgil Ştefănescu-Drăgăneşti, Introduction…, op. cit., pp. 124-5.

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1. If in the Indo-European parent language there were three voice forms (the active voice—the action or state of the subject, the medium voice—the action occurs somehow in the sphere of the subject, i.e. the medium of interest, the reflexive medium, etc., and probably the passive voice, although there no forms to illustrate it), Germanic maintained only two, i.e. the active voice and the medium, which conveyed a passive meaning. Besides, Norse developed reflexive forms with medio-passive function.

2. In Indo-European there were five moods: the indicative—expressing

reality, the subjunctive—the expression of will, the optative—expressing wish or possibility, the imperative—expressing command, and the injunctive—somewhat similar to the subjunctive but more authoritative than it. Germanic preserved only three: the indicative, the optative, which included the functions of the subjunctive and partly some of the imperative, and the imperative.

3. In Indo-European there were five tenses: present, imperfect, aorist [a

past tense of a verb (especially in Greek), which does not contain any reference to duration or completion of the action], perfect, and future. Germanic, however, in its oldest form that has been handed down to us possessed only two tenses: the present and the preterit, which took over all the functions of the past. Thus, we can say that the latter tense was a Germanic innovation, which in the case of the strong verb consisted in the combination of the Indo-European perfect and aorist forms, similar to the Latin perfect. Then the imperfect and the future disappeared for which, in the case of the former, English developed “the progressive” (a combination of Tense and Aspect). As to the future tense, the Germanic languages developed several substitutes during the Middle Ages and later. Firstly, verbal prefixes gave future meaning to the present tense (e.g. the prefix ga-). Secondly, verbs like waírþan (to become), skal and wiljan (will), started to suggest future meaning and gradually turned into the standardized auxiliaries of today, i.e. waírþan → (Mod.German) werden; skal and wiljan → (Mod.English) shall, will.

4. The compound perfect with the two auxiliaries to have and to do

developed during the latter part of the Middle Ages in the Germanic languages independently.

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5. The Indo-European verb had three numbers: singular, plural, and dual, the latter being fairly well preserved in Gothic and Old English.

6. The Indo-European number had three persons that were preserved in

Gothic, too.

7. Germanic had less non-finite forms than the Indo-European parent

language, i.e. three non-finite forms: the infinitive, the present participle, and the past participle.

8. In Indo-European we distinguish two types of conjugation, i.e.

thematic conjugation—when a vowel is inserted the root and the ending of the verb (e.g. *bher-e-ti) and the athematic conjugation—when the ending is added directly to the root. Whereas in all Germanic languages the inflection of the verb generates a great difference between strong and weak conjugation. Besides these two great classes, there are also a few other verbs which linguists have grouped and called minor/anomalous verbs.

The distinction between the two fundamental types is based on the forms of the preterit.

Strong verbs have the following features: - vowel gradation/ablaut (changing of the root-vowel); - the past participle ends in –n; - Old Germanic languages have four fundamental forms:

infinitive, past tense singular, past tense plural, and past participle. (Old High German has five, displaying two different forms for the infinitive and the present tense).

Weak verbs have the following features: - no vowel gradation; - the past tense and the past participle end in –d or –t (or –þ); - such verbs have three fundamental forms—infinitive (and

present tense), past tense and past participle.

A. Strong Verbs: Gothic vs. Old English and Old High German Apart from the above-mentioned general features that the two languages share within the language family, there are also a few peculiarities that will be highlighted along this brief, contrastive presentation of the types of verbs.

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Strong verbs form their preterit either by gradation of the root vowel (e.g. giba – gab “to give”), or by reduplication, i.e. by repeating the first consonant and linking it to the root by an “e” sound (e.g. lētan – laílōt → to let; lassen). Consequently, in Gothic strong verbs are subdivided into two categories: non-reduplicated (using ablaut) and reduplicated verbs. The non-reduplicated verbs include 6 classes (the first 5 imitate the old Indo-European gradation system, whereas with the last the system of gradation differs from that of the parent language). The reduplicated verbs constitute class 7 and they are further subdivided into simply reduplicated verbs (preserve the same root-vowel, e.g. háitan – hafháit – hafháitum – háitans → to be called/named; heißen) and verbs combining reduplication and gradation (e.g. lētan – laílōt – laílōtum – lētans) The Old English strong verbs also fall into two categories: those using vowel gradation and contracted verbs, i.e. the former Gothic reduplicated verbs: e.g. (Go.) háitan – hafháit – hafháitum – háitans; (OE) hatan – het – heton (contracted form) – haten. The Old English strong verbs still preserve the 4 fundamental forms (infinitive, past tense singular, past tense plural, and past participle) and the 6 classes of vowel gradation, although certain changes occurred in their evolution from Gothic. As compared to Gothic and Old English, the Old High German conjugation of the verb lost some features, such as the passive voice and the dual number. Moreover, strong verbs still preserved the classification into verbs using vowel gradation and reduplicating verbs, but it is no longer a reduplication similar to Gothic. In fact, the reduplication in past tense disappeared, being replaced by a new kind of “Ablaut” (a new vowel) that differed from any of the 6 rows of vowel gradation. The 6 classes of vowel gradation were also preserved but the number of fundamental forms was extended to 5, the present tense being added next to the infinitive. Here is the evolution of the 6 “Ablautreihen”: 1st cl. (Go.) i - ai - i - i > (OE) ī - ā - i - i > (OHG) i - i - ei - i - i; (Go.) greipan – graip – gripum – gripans (ei stands for ī in Go.); (OE) ʒrīpan – ʒrāp – ʒripon – ʒripen (to grasp; greifen); (OHG) ritan – ritu – reit – ritum – giritan (to ride; reiten).

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2nd cl. (Go.) iu - au - u - u > (OE) ēo - ēa - u - o > (OHG) eo - iu - o - u – o (Go.) kiusan – kaus – kusum – kusans (to choose); (OE) bēodan – bēad – budon – boden (to bid, to offer; bieten);

(OHG) beoton – biutu – bot – butum – gibuntan (to bid; bieten).

3rd cl. (Go.) i - a - u - u > (OE) i - a - u - u > (OHG) i - i - a - u - u (Go.) bindan – band – bundum – bundans (to bind; binden); (OE) bindan – band – bundon – bunden; (OHG) bintan – bintu – bant – buntum – gibuntan.

• a subgroup in Old English is e - ea - u – o (OE) helpan – healp – hulpon – holpen (to help; helfen).

4th cl. (Go.) i - a - e - u > (OE) e - æ - - o > (OHG) e - i - a - a - o (Go.) stilan – stal – stēlum – stulans (to steal; stehlen); (OE) stelan – stæl – stlon – stolen;

(OHG) stelan – stilu – stal – stalum – gistolan.

5th cl. (Go.) i - a - e - i > (OE) i - æ - - e > (OHG) e - i - a - a - e (Go.) giban – gaf – gēfun – gibans (to give; geben), (OE) biddan – bæd – bdon – beden (to pray; beten); (OHG) geban – gibu – gab – gabum – gigeban. 6th cl. (Go.) a - o - o - a > (OE) a - ō - ō - a > (OHG) a - a - ou - ou - a (Go.) faran – fōr – fōrum – farans (to drive; fahren); (OE) faran – fōr – fōron – faran;

(OHG) feran – faru – fuor –fuorum—gifaren. The most important of the above 6 classes of vowel gradation is the 3rd, still extant in all modern Germanic languages: (Mod.E) sing – sang – sung, drink – drank – drunk; (Mod.G.) singen – sang – gesungen, springen – sprang – gesprungen.

The Gothic 7th class of reduplicating verbs became the Old English subgroup of contracted verbs, which split further into 2 classes of vowel gradation.

7th cl. (Go.) > 1st class of vowel gradation (OE) æ - e - e - æ (Go.) lētan – laílōt – laílōtum – lētans; (OE) lætan – let – leton – læten (to let; lassen). Or the (OE) a - e - e - a (Go.) háitan – hafháit – hafháitum – háitans;

(OE) hātan – hēt – hēton – hāten (to be called; heißen).

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7th cl. (Go.) > 2nd class of vowel gradation (OE) ea - eo - eo - ea (Go.) haldan – haíhald – haíhaldum – haldans; (OE) healdan – hēold – hēoldon – healden (to hold; halten). The same Gothic 7th class of reduplicating verbs in Old High German ecame the following 2 classes of vowel gradation: b

7th cl. (Go.) > 1st cl. (OHG) a - a - ia - ia - a (Go.) haldan – haíhald – haíhaldum – haldans; (OHG) haltan – haltu – hialt –hialtum – gihalten (to hold; halten); altum – gihalten (to hold; halten); Or the (OHG) ei - ei - ia - ia - ei Or the (OHG) ei - ei - ia - ia - ei (Go.) háitan – hafháit – hafháitum – háitans; (Go.) háitan – hafháit – hafháitum – háitans;

(OHG) heizan – heizu – hiaz – hiazum – hiheizan (to be called; heißen).

(OHG) heizan – heizu – hiaz – hiazum – hiheizan (to be called; heißen).

7th cl. (Go.) > 2nd cl. (OHG) ou - ou - eo - eo - ou or later, ou - ou - eo - eo - ou 7th cl. (Go.) > 2nd cl. (OHG) ou - ou - eo - eo - ou or later, ou - ou - eo - eo - ou (OHG) loufan – loufu – leof – leofum – giloufan (to run; laufen) → (OHG) loufan – loufu – leof – leofum – giloufan (to run; laufen) → loufan – loufu – life – liefun – giloufan. loufan – loufu – life – liefun – giloufan.

Paradigms of Conjugation of Strong Verbs Paradigms of Conjugation of Strong Verbs

I. Active Voice: Present Tense I. Active Voice: Present Tense Gothic Old English Old High German Indicative

Singular 1st pers. nimu ic binde nima 2nd pers. nimist ðū bindest nimis 3rd pers. nimit hē bindeþ nimiþ Dual 1st pers. nimos 2nd pers. nimats Plural 1st pers. neman (later: nemen) wē bindaþ nimam 2nd pers. nimit nimiþ ʒē bindaþ 3rd pers. hī bindaþ nemant (later nement) nimand

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Active Voice: Present Tense

Gothic Old English Old High GermanOptative (Conjunctive)

nimáu nimáis nimái

Singular 1st pers. neme ic binde 2nd pers. nemest ðū binde 3rd pers. nems hē binde

Dual

1st pers. nimáiwa 2nd pers. nimáits

nimáima nimáiþ nimáina nim! nimadáu nimats

wē binden ʒē binden hī binden

Plural

1st pers. nemen 2nd pers. nemet 3rd pers. nemen

Imperative Singular

2nd pers, nim! bind! 3rd pers.

Dual

2nd pers. Plural

1st pers. nemanes (nemen) nimam 2nd pers, nemat (nemet)! nimiþ bindaþ 3rd pers. nimandáu

neman binden niman (to take; nehmen) Infinitive

*Infl. Inf. tō bindanne Pres. Participle nemanti (nementi) nimands (taking; nehmend) bindende

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Active Voice: Past Tense (Praeteritum) Gothic Old English Old High GermanIndicative

Singular 1st pers. ic band 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Dual 1st pers. 2nd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Optative (Conjunctive) Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Dual 1st pers. 2nd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Past Participle

nam namt nam nemu nemuts nemun nemuþ nemun nemjau nemeis nemi nemeiwa nemeits nemeiwa nemeiþ nemeina

ðū bunde hē band wē bundon ʒē bundon hī bundon ic bunde ðū bunde hē bunde wē bunden ʒē bunden hī bunden (ʒe)bunden

nam nami nam namum (later: namun) namut namun nami namist nami naminn namit namin ginoman

II. Passive Voice of Gothic Strong Verbs There is only Present Tense and no Dual number more. Indicative Optative (Conjunctive) Singular: 1st pers. nimada Singular: 1st pers. nimaidau 2nd pers. nimaza 2nd pers. nimaizau 3rd pers. nimada 3rd pers. nimaidau Plural: 1st, 2nd, 3rd pers. Plural: 1st, 2nd, 3rd pers. nimanda nimaindau

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B. Strong Verbs: Gothic vs. Old English and Old High German Unlike strong verbs, weak verbs do not change their root-vowel nor do they have rows of vowel gradation. In the Germanic languages, weak verbs form the preterit by adding a syllable containing a dental: e.g. (GO) –da /–ta; briggan – bigga – brāhta – brāhts (to bring;

bringen); (OE) –de –te; habban – hæfde – ʒehæft (to have; haben);

(OHG) –t; salbon – salbota – gisalbot (to embalm; salben). In Gothic there are four classes of weak verbs depending on the suffix of the infinitive and its vowel: 1st class — suffix –jan: nasjan (to rescue); hailjan (to heal; heilen); 2nd class — suffix –on: salbon (to embalm); fiskon (to fish; fischen); 3rd class — suffix –an (but use the Gothic –ái to form the theme of the verb) habban (habáiþ); 4th class — suffix –no / –na: fullnan (to become full; sich füllen). In Old English, weak verbs have only three fundamental forms like in Modern English (infinitive, past tense, and past participle) and they do not show any vowel gradation. They are grouped in three classes: 1st class — suffix –ian in the infinitive (those with a long root-vowel

dropped the i): hīeran (to hear; hören); nerian (to save); 2nd class — contain the element –oja in the infinitive and –o in other forms: hopian – hopode (to hope; hoffen); luftian – lufode (to love; lieben); 3rd class — is characterized by the stem-forming suffix –ai, but this suffix

can no longer be found in Old English texts, because the suffix of the past tense and that of the past participle are added to the root without any intermediary element: libban – lifde – lifd (to live; leben); secʒ(e)an – sʒde – sʒd (to say; sagen).

In Old High German, weak verbs have the same fundamental forms, the latter two being the same in many cases. Weak verbs are then subdivided into 3 classes according to the different endings of their infinitive: 1st class — ending in –jan: nerjan (nerjan) – nerita – ginerit (to save); 2nd class — ending in –on: salbon – salbota – gisalbot (to embalm; salben); 3rd class — ending in –en: haben – habeta – gihabet (to have).

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As an example of the conjugation of a weak verb we shall give here the paradigm of the verb “to have” in the Gothic, Old English, and Old High German.

I. Active Voice: Present Tense Gothic Old English Old High GermanIndicative

Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Dual 1st pers. 2nd pers.

Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Optative (Conjunctive) Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Dual 1st pers. 2nd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Imperative Singular 2nd pers, 3rd pers. Dual 2nd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers, 3rd pers Infinitive Inflected Inf. Pres. Participle

ic hæbbe haba þū hæfst /hafast habáis

habáiþ habōs habats habam habáiþ haband habáu habáis habái habáiwa habáits habáima hábaiþ habáins habái habadáu habats habam habáiþ habandáu haban habands

hē hæfþ /hafaþ wē habbaþ ʒē habbaþ hī habbaþ ic hæbbe þū hæbbe hē hæbbe wē hæbben ʒē hæbben hī hæbben hafa habban habbaþ habban tō habbenne hæbbende

habem habest habet habem (-n) habet habent habe habes habe habem (-n) habet haben habe! habem (es)! habet! habēn habeti

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Active Voice: Past Tense (Praeteritum)

Gothic Old English Old High GermanIndicative Singular 1st pers. ic hæfde habeta habáida 2nd pers. þū hæfdest habetas

habeta

habáidēs 3rd pers. hē hæfde habáida Dual 1st pers. habáidēdu 2nd pers. habáidēduts Plural 1st pers. wē hæfdon habáidēdum 2nd pers. habáidēduþ ʒē hæfdon 3rd pers. habáidēdun hī hæfdon Optative (Conjunctive) Singular 1st pers. habáidēdjáu ic hæfde 2nd pers. habáidēdeis þū hæfde 3rd pers. habáidēdi hē hæfde Dual 1st pers. habáidēdeiwa 2nd pers. habáidēdeits Plural 1st pers. habáidēdeima wē hæfden 2nd pers. habáidēdeiþ ʒē hæfden 3rd pers. habáidēdeins hī hæfden Past Participle ʒehæfd habáiþe

habetam (-n) habetat habetan habeti habetis habeti habetim (-n) habetit habetin gihabet

II. Passive Voice of Gothic Weak Verbs

There is only Present Tense and no Dual number more. Indicative Optative (Conjunctive) Singular: 1st pers. habada Singular: 1st pers. habáidáu 2nd pers. habaza 2nd pers. habáizáu 3rd pers. habada 3rd pers. habáidáu Plural: 1st, 2nd, 3rd pers. Plural: 1st, 2nd, 3rd pers. habanda habáindáu

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C. Anomalous Verbs Anomalous verbs are a few verbs very frequently used in communication, which do not follow either conjugation, strong or weak. They add the personal endings directly to the root. These are the verbs to be, to do, to go and will. We shall give below the paradigms of to be in Gothic, Old English and Old High German.

However, mention must be made that to be in Old English, i.e. bēon, and wesan, in the present indicative has forms from different stems.

I. Present Tense Indicative Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers.

Gothic

im is ist sijum sijuþ sind siju sijuts sijau sijais sijai sijaima sijaiþ

Dual 1st pers. 2nd pers. Optative (Conjunctive) Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Imperative 1st pers. 2nd pers. Infinitive Pres. Participle

sijaina wisan wisands

Old English ēom bēo(m) eart bis(t) is biþ sind / sindon bēoþ sind / sindon bēoþ sind / sindon bēoþ sīe bēo sīe bēo sīe bēo sīen / sīn bēon sīen / sīn bēon sīen / sīn bēon wes bēo

Old High German bim, bin bist ist birum birut sint sī sīs / sīst sī sīm / sīn sīt sīn

wesaþ bēoþ

**wesan / bēon

wesan

** The Gothic forms of the present can be traced back to the Indo-European *es-root. The Gothic plural is probably derived from an Indo-European *si-stem. The West Germanic forms beginning with b contain a second Indo-European root *bhū and *bheụ(ā) respectively.The Old English corespondant is bēo -. The same root is the basis of the OE plural bēoþ. All

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the other forms represent contamination forms of the two Indo-European roots *e sans *bhū. The preterit forms of this verb derive from another root *wes-.54

Past Tense (Praeteritum) Indicative Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Optative (Conjunctive) Singular 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Plural 1st pers. 2nd pers. 3rd pers. Past Participle

Gothic

was wast was wēsum wēsuþ wēsun wēsjau wēseis wēsi wēseima wēseiþ wēseina

Old English

wæs wre

Old High German

was wari

wæs was wron wron wron

warum / waren warut warun / waren

wre wre wre

warimes warit warin

wren wren wren giweran

Prepositions and Conjunctions

Here are some of the most frequently encountered prepositions and conjunctions in Gothic, Old English, and Old High German.

Gothic I. Prepositions af (of/from), du (to), miþ (with), us (out of), faura (before), fram (from), undaro (under), þairh (through), inu(h) (without), faur (for), at (at), afar (after), uf (under), hinder (behind), ufar (over), etc.

54 Apud Gertrud Schmidt, Comparative …, op. cit., p. 154.

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II. Conjunctions jah (and), -uh (and, as suffix, cf. Lat. –que), nih (and not, Lat. neque), andiz-uh (+ aiþþau) [either (+ or)], ak/akei (but), auk (for, also), jabai/ibai (if) nibai (if not, unless), þatei (that), þauh (when) unte (until, as long as), etc.

Old English

I. Prepositions æfter (after), æt (at), r (ere, before), beforan (before, in front of), for (before, in front of, because), be (by), betweox between, among), mid (by means of), onʒēan (against, towards), oþ (up to, until), būtan (except, outside, without), wiþ (towards, opposite, against, along, in exchange of), ʒeʒn (against), ʒeond (throughout), in (in/into), ofer (over), on (on), tō (to), þurh (through) under (under) up (up), ut (out), ymb(e) [at, near (place), at, after (time), about, concerning), etc. II. Conjunctions - and/ond (and), if (if), hwonne (when), þæt (that), ac (but), hwæþ(e)re

(however, yet), oþþe…oþþe/ swā…swā/ þe…þe (either…or), ne…ne/ nāpor ne…ne (neither…nor), etc.

- Adverbs that are also used as conjunctions: nū (now that), siþþan (after, since), swā (as), þā (when), þr (where), þonne (whenever), þ (because), nefne (unless), þ ls (þe) (lest), etc.

Old High German I. Prepositions in (in), untar (under), ana (on), ubar (over), zuo (to), miti (with), at (at), ab (from), etc. II. Conjunctions daz (that), enti (and), -go (and, suffix, cf. Lat. –que), do (there, when), eddo (or), ibu/oba (if) etc.

127

HIGHLIGHTS: • gender: division of a class of words (as nouns) that determines

agreement of other words;

• number: a grammatical classification of words that consists typically of singular and plural, and, in Greek and certain other languages, dual;

• declension: the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number, and gender are identified;

• syncretism: in Linguistics, it is the merging of different inflectional varieties of a word during the development of a language.

ASSESSMEN TEST FIVE – upon reading unit four, answer the following questions or comment briefly on the following issues:

1. How do contemporary grammarians explain the development of gender?

2. What peculiarity do you know with respect to the category of number and how is it explained?

3. What are the basic changes that contributed to the simplification of the Germanic verb?

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A List of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Old Germanic Languages

Gothic Old Norse Old English Old High German

Modern English

Modern High German

- fairwhus, middangeard, weorold;

- mittilgart, weralt;

Welt world - heimr, verbld; (midjungards);

- airþa, land; - eorþe, land; - erda, land; - Erde,Land; - earth, land;- jbrð, land; - berg,

buhil,houc; - Berg, Hügel;

- mountain, hill;

- fjall; - fairguni, hlains; - beord, dūn, - staps, ibns; munt, hyll; - ebanōti, - Ebene,

Fläche,Feld; -plain, field;

- slētta; - emnet, feld; feld; - dals; - valley, vale, dale, dell;

- dalr; -Tal; - dæl, denu; - tal; - watō;

- water; - vatn; -Wasser; - marei; - wæter; - wazzar; -sea; - haf, sær,

marr; - das Meer, die See;

- s, mere; - mari, sēo; - river, stream, brook;

- ahwa, flōdus, rinnō;

- ā, lækr, (bekkr);

- Fluss, Strom, Bach;

- ēa, strēam, rīp, brōc;

- fluz, aha, strōm, bach;

- mēna; - moon; - māni,

tungl; - Mond; - mōna; - māno;

- þeiwō; - thunder; - reiðar,

þruma; - Donner; -þunor; - donar;

- liuhaþ; - light; - ljōs; - Licht; - skadus; - lēoht; -liocht; - shade, shadow;

- skuggi; - Schatten; - scate, scūwo;

- scead; scū(w)a;

- cloud; - Wolke; - sk; -wolkan; - milhma; - wolcen; welkin (poetic); “sky” only in latter sense;

- snaiws;

- snow; - snr (snjōr/snjār);

- Schnee; - snēo; - snāw; - fōn; - fire; - eldr, (fūrr); - Feuer; - fiur, fuir; - brinnan (v.i.)

brannjan (v.t.); - fr;

-to burn; - brinna (v.i) -brennen; - brinnan (v.i.), brennan (v.t);

- beornan (v.i.), bærnan (v.t.);

brenna (v.t);

- man (human being);

- man(n), guma;

- Mensch; -maðr, gumi;

- man, mannisco, gomo;

- manna;

- man (vs. woman), churl;

- Mann; (proper name Karl), Kerl

- karl, karlmaðr (man without

- man, gomman, wer, karl;

- wair (guma, manna);

- wer, ceorl, man;

rank) (contempt)

129

- qinō; - kona; - cwēn; cwene, wīf, wīfman;

- magus; - mawi; - swistar; - widuwō; - auhsus; - swein; - gaits; - fula; - waurms; - blōþ; - haubiþ; - ausō; - augō; - munþs; - tunþus; - fōtus; - brusts; -speiwan; - hailjan; - drugkans; - þaurstei; - siujan; - skohs; - gairda

- piltr (mbgr = boy, son, man); knappr; - mr, stūlka; - systir; - ekkja; - oxi, uxi; - swīn; - geit; - foli; fyl; - ormr, snākr; - blōð; - haufuð; - eyra; - auga; - munnr/ mūðr; - tbnn; - fōtr; - brjōst - spja; - lækna; - drukkinn; - þorsti; - sauma *sja; - skōr; - gjbrð, belti;

- magu (son, servant); cnapa, cnafa; cniht; - mæʒden; - sweostor; - widuwe; - oxa / stēor; - swīn; - gāt; - fola, colt; - wyrm, wurm, snaca; - blōd; - hēafod; - ēare; - eage; - mūþ; - tōþ; - fōt; - brēost; - spīwan; spyttan, sptan; - hlan, lācnian; - druncen; - þurst, þyrst; - sīwian; - scōh; - gyrdel, belt;

- wīb, quena; - knabo, kneht; - magad; - swestar; - wituwa; - ohso, stior; - swīn; - geiz; ziga; - folo; - wurm, slango; - bluot; - houbit; - ōra; - ouga; - mund; - zan(d); - fuoz; - brust; - spīwan, spīan; - heilen, lāchinōn; - truncan; - durst; - siuwan; nājan; - scuoh; - gurtil, balz;

- Frau, Weib;

- Knabe, Knecht; Bube (knave, servant); - Mädchen, Magd; -Schwester; - Witwe;

- Ochs, Stier; - Schwein; - Ziege, Geis; - Fohlen; - Wurm, Schlange; - Blut; - Haupt, Kopf; - Ohr; - Auge; - Mund; -Zahn; - Fuss; - Brust; - spucken, speien; - heilen; - betrunken; - Durst; - nähen; - Schuh; - Gürtel;

- woman; (cwēn > queen; cwene > quean /harlot); - boy (ON bōfi > Fris. boi > Du. boef); lad, (cnafa > knave/rascal); (cniht > knight)

- girl, maid, lass; - sister; - widow; - ox, steer; - swine; - goat; - colt;

- worm; snake; - blood; - head; - ear; - eye; - mouth; - tooth; - foot; - breast; - to spit; to heal, to cure; - drunk; - thirst; - to sew - shoe; - belt;

- skuggwa;

- skuggsjā; spegill;

- glæs;

- spiegal, scūcar;

- Spiegel;

- glass, mirror;

130

- rōhsns; gards; - daur, haurds; - badi; - stōls; - graban; -skaurō; rikan (to heap up); - hawi; - blōma; - laufs; - arbaiþ; waurstw; - biugan; - brikan; - straujan; - þwahan; - gulþ; - silubr; - eisarn; * Celt. isarnon >

(*Lat. speculum)

- garðr; - dyrr (pl.); hurð; hlið; gat; grind; - beðr; - stōll; - grafa; - skūfa (to scoop); reka; - hey; - blōm; blōmstr; - laufsblað; - verk; erfiði; - benda; - brjōta; - breiða; strā; - þvā, vaska; - gull; - silfr; - īsarn; jārn <from Ir. iarn;

- geard; - duru; port; hyrdel; hlid; geat; grindlas; - bedd; - stōl; - grafan, delfan; - scofl, - scūfan; raku; - hēg; hīg; - blōstma; lēaf, blæd; - weorc; - bgan; - brecan; - brdan; strēowian; - þwēan; wæscan; swillan;

- gold; - siolfor; seolfor; - īsern; īsen; īren;

- garto; - turi, tur; hurt; hlit; pforta; grinlit; - be(t)ti; - stuol; - graban; - scūvala; scioban; - hewi; houwi;- bluomo; - blat; loub; - we(a)h; arabeit; - biogan; bougen; - brehhan; - breitan; streuwen; - dwahan> OPruss. “twaxtan”-scrubbing brush; wascan; - gold; - sil(a)bar; - īsarn; īsan;

- Garten; - Tür, Tor; Pforte; Hürde; Lid (Augenlid); Gitter; - Bett; - Stuhl; - graben; - Schaufel; schaufeln; - Heu; - Blume; - Blatt; Laub; - Arbeit; Werk; - biegen; beugen; - brechen; - ausbreiten; streuen;

- waschen; - Gold; - Silber; - eisern (strong);

- yard (court); - door, port; hurdle; lid; grating; - bed; - stool; - delve; “dig” comes probably from OFr. “diguer” ‘make a dike’> OE dīc > ditch. - rake; - shovel, to shovel; -hay; - blossom; - leaf; - work; - to bend; - to break - to spread; to strew;

- to wash; to swill;

- gold; - silver; - iron;

- waian;blēsan; -sliupan;

- blāsa; - skreppa;

- blāwan; wāwan; - slīdan;

- blāsan; wājan; - slīfan;

- blasen; wehen; - gleiten;

- to blow; - to slide;

131

- qiman - faran; farjan; - gaggan; - þliuhan; - bairan; dragan (ga-dragan “heap up”); - dreiban; draibjan; wrikan (to pursue);

- staiga; - gatwō; - jukuzi; - skip; - huzd; - þiufs; hliftus;

- leihwan;

- wairþ; - nēhw(a); - urruns (not Gmc, but literal translation from Greek); - saggqs (not Gmc, but literal translation from Greek);

– – - braiþs;

- ganōhs;

skriðna; - koma; - fara; - ganga; - flja; - bera; draga - drifa (drift, let drift); reka (drive away); - stīgr; - gata; - ok; - skip; - hodd; - þjofr;

- ljā; - verð; - nær(i);

- austr; - vestr (probl. A derivation of Gmc *wes-); - norðr; - suðr; - breiðr; - (g)nōgr;

slūpan; - cuman; - faran; fēran; - gangan; gān; - flēon; - beran; dragan; - drīfan; wrecan; - stīg; *pæþ (possibly a loanword of Greek or Iranian origin); > ME gate; - eoc; ioc; - scip; - hord; - þēof; - lēon; - weorþ; - nēah; - ēast;

- west; - norþ; - sūþ;

- brād;

- genōg;

slupfan; - queman; coman; - fuoren (to lead); faran; - gangan; gān; - fliohan; -beran; tragan; - trīban; rehhan; - stīga, pfad; - gazza; - joh; juh; - scif; scef; - hort; - diob;

- līhan;

- werd; - nāh(o);

- ōstan;

- westan; - nord; norden;

- sundan;

- breit;

- ginuog(i);

schlüpfen; - kommen; - fahren (to travel);

to slip; - to come; - to fare (to get along, to prosper);

- gehen; - fliehen; - tragen; - treiben; rächen;

- to go; - to flee; - to bear (to carry); to drag/to draw; - to drive; to wreak (to inflict); - path; - gate; - yoke; - ship; - hoard; - thief;

- to lend;

- worth; - near;

- east;

- west; - north; - south;

- Steige, Stiege, Pfad; - Gasse; - Joch; - Schiff; - Hort; - Dieb;

- leihen;

- Wert; - nah(e);

- osten;

- westen; - norden;

- süden;

- breit; - broad;

- genug;

- enough

- halbs; - frumist; fruma;

- halfr; - first;

- healf; - first; firmest; ǣrest;

- halp; - ēristo;

- halb; - erst;

- half; - first; erst (archaic: long ago; formerly);

132

- niujis; - juggs; - nu;

- andeis; - ufta; - dags; - maurgins; – - andanahti (on to night);

– - afarsabbatē dags; − −

− − -fruma sabatō; - sabbatō dags;

- mēnōþs; - jēr; - wintrus; − - asnas; −

- nr; - ungr; - nū; - endi; - opt; - dagr; - morginn; - miðr dagr; - aptann; - vika; - sunnudagr; - mānudagr;

- tsdagr;

- ōðinsdagr; - þōrthdagr; - frijādagr - kaugardagr; (‘bathday’); þvāttdagr (‘washday’);

- mānaðr;

- ār; - vetr; - vār; - sumar; - haust;

- nūve; - geong; - nū; - ende; - oft; - dæg; - morgen; mergen; - middæg; - ǣfen; - wice; wicu; - sunnandæg; - monandæg; - tūvesdæg; - wōdnesdæg; - þunresdæg; - frīgedæg; - sæter(n)dæg;

- mōnað; - ēar; - winter; - lencten; - sumor; - hærfest;

- niuwi; - jung; - n;

- enti; - ofto; - tag; - morgan;

- neu; - jung; - nun;

- Ende; - oft; - Tag; - Morgen;

- mittiag; - Mittag; - Abend; - Woche;

- Sonntag;

- ābant; - wecha; - sunnūtag;

- māneatag; - ziostag;

- mittwocha (maybe a reflection of the Medieval Latin media hebdomas); - donarestag; - frīatag; - sambaztag; sunnūnāband (thr eve preceding Sunday); - mānōt; - jār;

- winter; - lenzo; lenzin (having long days); - sumar; - herbist;

- Montag; - Dienstag;

- Mittwoch; - Donnerstag; - Freitag; - Samstag, Sonnabend; - Monat;

- Jahr;

- Winter; - Lenz, Frühling (‘vrüelinc = early); - Sommer; - Herbst;

- new; - young; - now;

- end; - often; - day; - norning; - midday; - evening; - week;

- Sunday; - Monday; - Tuesday;

-Wednesday; - Thursday; - Friday; - Saturday; - month;

- year;

- winter; - lent; spring (‘spring of the yere’ = beginning of the year); - summer; - autumn, ‘harvest time’;

- saiwala; - hlahjan;

- sāl(a); - hlǣja;

- sāwel; gāst (from IE ‘heizd’ = frighten); - hliehhan; hlæhhan;

- Seele, Geist; - lachen;

- soul; ghost;

- sēla; geist;

- to laugh; - (h)lahhan;

- cyssan; - küssen; - to kiss;

133

- kukjan; - tagr; - kunnan; -witan; - namo; - fraihnan; - andhafjan; - faurbiudan; - bōka; − - bōkos; - kuni; − - þiudans; - manna gōdakunds (‘good born’); - baurgja; - freis;

- fijands; - wēpna; − - -

- kyssa; - tār; - kunna; kenna; - vita; - nafn; - fregna; - andsvara; - fyrirbjōða; - (bōk)stafr; - penni; - bōk; - kind; kyn; - drōttning; - konungr; - Ǫðlingr; - borgarmaðer; - frjāls;

- fjāndi; - vāpn; - klumba / klubba; - kylfa; - kūla;

- kussen; - Träne; - tear; - tēar; - trahan; - können;

kennen; - can; to know;

- cunnan; cennan; (to make known); gecnāwan;

- cunnan; bi/irchennan; - wissen; -to observe; - be-witian; - wizzan; to determine;

- name; - Name; - nama; - namo; - to ask; -fragen; - fregnan;

āscian; - frāgēn;

- to answer; - antworten; - andswarian;

- antwurten; andwyrdan; - to forbid; - verbieten; - forbēodan; - farbiutan;

- Buchstabe; - letter;

- (bōc)stæf;

- buohstab; ME * letter; - pen; - Feder; - feþer; - fedara;

- book; ME *penne;

- Buch; - bōc; - kin; - buoh; - Stamm; - cyn(n); - queen;

- kunni; Geschlecht; gislahti; - Königin; - cwēn;

- kunninginna; kunningīn; - König; - king; - cyning;

- Edelmann; Adlige;

- nobleman; - kuni(n)g; - æþeling; - edeling;

- Bürger; - citizen;

- ceasterware; ME *citesein; burhsittend;

- burgāri;

- free; - frei; - frēo;

- frī; - enemy;

- Feind; - fēond; f

iend (devil); - fiant;

- weapons; - club;

- butt-end; - ball (bullet); - cudgel;

- Waffen; -wǣpnu; - wāfans; >>>>>>>> > ME clubbe; >>>>>>>>>

- Kolben >> >>>>>>>>>>>- cycdel >>> >>>>>>>>> - Kugel;

- Keule >>> MHG kūle>> kiule >>>>>

− − - - skildus;

- rudda (pliant stick for whipping);

- spjǪr; - swerð; - skǪldr;

- rodd; - ruota; - Rute; - rod;

- sper; - swert; - scilt;

- spere; - Speer; - spear; - sweord; - Schwert; - sword; - scild; - Schild; - shield;

134

- helmet; - hilms; - weitwōþs; - swaran;

- hjalmr; - vitni;

- helm; - helm; - giwizzo;

- Helm; - witness; - gewita;

gewitness; - Zeuge;

- to swear - sverja; - swerian - sweren; - schwören;

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baugh, C. Albert and Cable, Thomas. A History of the English Language. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Buck, Carl Darling. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Freebom, Dennis. From Old English to Standard English. Houndmills:Macmillan.l998.

Iarovici, Edith. A History of the English Language. Bucureşti:Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1973.

Kleine Enzyklopädie: Deutsche Sprache. Leipzig:VEB Bibliographisches Institut,1983.

Kleine Enzyklopädie: Die Deutsche Sprache. Leipzig:VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1969.

Lang, Richard. Gramatica comparată a limbilor germanice. Cluj:Universitatea ,,Babeş-Bolyai, 1974.

Lehmann, P. Winfred. A Gothic Etymological Dictionary. Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1986.

Mitchell, Bruce and Robinson, C. Fred. A Guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

Mitchell, Bruce. An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.

Schmidt, Gertrud. Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages. Tipografia Universităţii din Timişoara, 1974.

Sinka, Z. Tiberiu. Prelegeri de Gramatică Istorică şi Comparată a Limbilor Germanice. Cluj:Universitatea ,,Babeş-Bolyai, 1975.

Skeat, W. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1956.

Ştefanescu-Drăgăneşti, Virgil. Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Germanic Languages. Universitatea din

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Bucureşti. 1977. *** 2000 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. *** Bertelsmann—Das Grosse 2002 wissen.de Lexikon. *** Encyclopaedia Britannica'98. *** Microsoft Encarta 2005 Encyclopedia. *** The Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language.

Chicago:Consolidated Book Publishers, 1967. *** Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English

Language. Springfield:Merriam-Webster Inc., Publishers, 1993.

136

KEY TO ASSESSMENT TESTS

ASSESSMENT TEST ONE

2. Acc. to Ferdinand de Saussure, the primary goal of Comparative Linguisitcs is to classify the languages of the world, to sort them out and to assign them to genetic families by study, first, the history of all observable rules in the attempt to reconstruct, as far as possible, the more ancient idiom, the proto-language, of which they are the direct continuation. Secondly, Comparative Linguistics attempts to determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages in order to deduce the general laws and the evolution of each language considered individually.

3. Modern linguistics resorts to the synchronic (descriptive) method, the

diachronic (historical) method and the comparative-historical (contrastive) method.

5. The axiom of the comparative-historical method is: a group of of

words belonging to different languages but having similar sound-complexes and identical or related meanings can have only a common origin.

6. Closest to the modern classification of languages is the one suggested

by the German linguist Wilhel von Humboldt. ASSESSMENT TEST TWO 2. The prehistoric Kurgan culture (located in the lower Volga River basin

between 5000 and 3000 BC) is believed to have triggered the formation of the Indo-European language family.

4. The fact that, in some Indo-European subfamilies, certain presumed k

sounds (velars) of Proto-Indo-European became sibilants, such as s and ś, lead to two different treatments of the Proto-Indo-European simple velars, and thus to the distinction between centum (western) and satem (eastern) languages.

137

ASSESSMENT TEST THREE

1. In Caesar’s time, fields were divided annually among clans, as land tenure did not involve private property. By the time of Tacitus, however, land was distributed annually to individuals, according to social class.

2. Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage

to public or private property. The term is derived from the Germanic tribe of the Vandals who, under Gaiseric, in June 455 captured and systematically plundered Rome for two weeks.

3. After the Roman legions withdrew from Britain, in the absence of

Roman administrators, the Romano-Celtic warlords, nominally Christian, ruled small, unstable kingdoms and continued some Roman traditions of governance. In the mid-5th century, they revived the Roman policy of hiring Germanic mercenaries to help defend them against warlike peoples of the north (the Picts and the Scots). The Saxon mercenaries revolted against their British chiefs and began the process of invasion and settlement that destroyed the native ruling class and established Germanic kingdoms throughout the island by the 7th century. These invaders were variously Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, and Franks in origin, but were similar in culture and eventually identified themselves indifferently as Angles or Saxons.

4. The Reformation, triggered by Martin Luther’s translation of the

German Bible, led to the dissemination of Modern German. Beginning with the 16th century, the latter gradually became Standard German.

5. The conservatism of Modern Icelandic is, on the one hand, the result

of geographic remoteness, a scattered population and the great linguistic differences between Danish and Icelandic, combined, on the other hand, with the action of a purist movement, which lead to the introduction of a firm orthography along etymological lines and the replacement of all borrowings with totally Icelandic forms (now, all technical and abstract terms are form only from Icelandic elements).

138

ASSESSMENT TEST FOUR

1. Acc. to the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, the Vowel Shift involved a shift in the articulation of vowels with respect to the positions assumed by the tongue and the lips. This shift took the form of vowel mutation (“Umlaut”), a process by which a vowel was altered in certain phonetic contexts (i.e. the change of a stem vowel in the direction of a vowel of a suffix or ending) and vowel gradation, a systematic alternation in the vowels of related word forms (i.e. Germanic strong verbs, Mod. English irregular verbs). Both terms were coined by the German linguist Jakob Grimm.

2. The direct out come of vowel mutation was the assumed functional

value with certain morphological categories, such as: the noun (plural of nouns), the adjective (comparative and superlative degree), the verb (indicative, subjunctive moods), etc. In English it is to be found with irregular nouns, in the formation of certain nouns via suffixation, in old plural forms, in certain adjectives, in the formation of transitive verbs from nouns and adjectives, etc.

3. The direct out come of vowel gradation is the alternation between front

and back vowels (in Germanic strong verbs), the weakening or loss of unstressed vowels, a lengthening of stressed vowels. Linguists and grammarians managed to arrange the various types of gradation into series and classes.

ASSESSMENT TEST FIVE

1. Contemporary grammarians link the advent and the development of gender to cattle-raising. They start from the fact that the most numerous I-E nouns (o-stems) appear generally as masculine gender. The corresponding nouns in a-stems had either a generic or collective force, denoting the species or a group. Then, the general type of domestic animal was represented by the female animal (used for reproduction and milk), while the male animal appeared as the exceptional individual. Hence, the forms in ā apparently became the starting point for the feminine gender. But when the same ā- forms were used with a collective meaning, they generated the neuter plural. In time, these three categories – the individual, the generic and the collective – were

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generalized and became the three grammatical genders of masculine, feminine and neuter.

2. Indo-European nouns had three numbers: singular, plural and dual. In

time the dual number became obsolete and was lost almost everywhere, except for the Slavic languages where it is still used for those parts of the body that are in pairs (eyes, ears, legs, etc. ). Germanic languages have preserved with the personal pronoun, e.g. wit, jut, it, ġit.

3. The basic changes that contributed to the simplification of the

Germanic verb are: - the Germanic verb maintained only two voices: active and

passive; - the Germanic verb preserved only three moods: the indicative,

the optative (which included the functions of the subjunctive), and the imperative;

- Germanic languages, initially, possessed only two tenses: the present and the preterit; English developed the progressive form – a combination of tense and aspect. As to the future tense, the Germanic languages developed several substitutes during the Middle Ages and later.

- the Indo-European number (three persons) was preserved in Gothic, too;

- the Germanic verb reduced the number of non-finite forms to three: the infinitive, the present participle and the past participle;

- in all Germanic languages the inflection of the verb generated the difference between the strong and the weak conjugation.