Old Germanic tribes and dialects
Seminar 2
Questions and assignments
1 What is meant by the outer and inner history of the language?
We are going to speak about the inner and outer history of the English language. The outer history of the language is the events in the life of people speaking this language, the history of the people reflected in their language. The inner history of the language is the description of the changes in the language itself, its grammar, phonetics, vocabulary or spelling.
Speak on:
Old Germanic tribes and dialects
It is well known that theEnglish language belongs to the Germanic subdivision of the Indo—European family of languages. The direct and indirect evidence that we have concerning old Germanic tribes and dialects in approximately twenty centuries old. We know that at the beginning of AD Germanic tribes occupied vast territories in western, central and northern Europe. The dialects they spoke at the time were generally very much alike, but the degree of similarity varied. It is common to speak about the East, North and West Germanic groups and their representatives
East Germanic group of dialects – mainly spoken in central Europe – Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian ;
North Germanic – Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Icelandic;and
West Germanic – the dialects of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others originally spoken in west Europe.The first knowledge of these tribes comes from the Greek and Roman authors which, together with archeological data, allows to obtain information on the structure of their society, habits, customs and languages.
The principal East Germanic Language is Gothic. At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from the North Sea to the shores of the Black Sea. The knowledge of Gothic we have now is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by Ulfilas, a missionary who Christianized the Gothic tribes. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it the earliest record of a Germanic language we possess. For a time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy and Spain. In this districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea ,where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark. Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century, dialectal differences become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish,
and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Of the early Scandinavian languages Icelandic is much the most importanIceland was colonized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and preserved a body of early heroic literature unsurpassed among the German People. Among the more important monuments is Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that probably date from the tenth or eleventh
century, Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241), and about forty sagas, or prose epics, in which the lives and exploits of various traditional figures are related.
West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs.It is divided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German) Sound-Shift analogous to that described below as Grimm’s Law.
This change, by which West Germanic p,t,k,d,etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of the Germanic are.a Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon,Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English.The last two are closely related and constituted a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup. Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian is the basis of modern Dutch in Holland and Flemish in northern Belgium, and Frisian survives in the Dutch province of Friesland.
Quantitative Ablaut
Qualitative Ablaut
The most important feature of the system of Germanic vowels is the so- called Ablaut, or gradation, which is a spontaneous, positionallyindependent alteration of vowels inhabited by the Germanic languages from the Common Indo-European period. This ancient phenomenon consisted in alteration of vowels in the root, suffix or ending depending on the grammatical form or meaning of the word.
There are two types of Ablaut : quantitative and qualitative.
The qualitative Ablaut is the alteration of different vowels, mainly the vowels [e]/[a] or [e]/[o]
Old Icelandic bera (to give birth) – barn (baby)
Old High German stelan (to steal) – stal (stole)
Latin tego (to cover, to cloth)- toga (clothes)
Quantitative Ablaut means the change in length of qualitatively one and the same vowel : normal, lengthened and reduced. A classical example of the Indo-European
Ablaut is the declension of the Greek word “pater” (father :
[e:] [e] [-]
pate:r pater patros
lengthened stage normal stage reduced stage
Ablautas a kind of internal flexion functioned in Old Germanic Languages both in form- and word-building, but it was the most extensive and systematic in the conjugation of strong verbs.
Grimm’s law.
Speaking about Germanic consonants, we should first of all speak of the correspondence between Indo-European and Germanic languages which was
presented as a system of interconnected facts by the linguist Jacob Grimm in 1822. This phenomenon is called the First Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s law.
Indo-European Germanic
Voiceless
p, t, k f, p,h
Lat pater OE fader (father)
Gr kardia OHG herza (heart)
The table below shows a scheme of Grimm’s law with the examples from Germanic and other languages. However, there are some instances where Grimm/s law seems not apply. These cases were explained by a Dutch linguist Karl Verner, and the seeing exceptions from Grimm’s law have come to be known as Verner’s law.
Indo-European Germanic
Voiceless
p, t, k f, p,h
Lat pater OE fader (father)
Gr kardia OHG herza (heart)
Lat tres Goth preis (three)
voiced voiceless
b d g p t k
Rus болото OE pol (pool)
Lat duo Goth twai (two)
Gk egon OIcl ek
Umlaut
Another phenomenon common for all Germanic languages was the tendency of phonetic assimilation of the root vowel to the vowel of the ending, the so- called Umlaut , or mutation.
This process must have taken place in the 5-6th centuries and can be illustrated by comparing words from the language of the Gothic bible (4th century)
Goth harjis OE here (army)
Goth domjian OE deman (deem)
Goth kuni OE cyn (kin)
The Germanic nouns’ cases and genders
The common Indo-European word consisted of three elements : the root, expressing the lexical meaning, the inflexion or ending, showing the grammatical form, and the so-called stem-forming suffix, a formal indicator of the stem type.
It should be also mentioned that Germanic languages belonged to the synthetic type of form-building, which means that they expressed the grammatical meanings by changing the forms of the word itself, not resorting to any auxiliary words.
The Germanic nouns had a well-developed case system with four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) and two number forms (singular and plural).They also had a category of gender (feminine, masculine, and neuter.)The means of form-buildings were the endings added to the root/stem of the noun.
The Germanic verb’s categories
The Germanic verb had a well-developed system of categories, including the the category of person (first, second, third), number ( singular and plural), tense (past and present, the latter also used for future actions), mood ( indicative and imperative) and voice. The categorical forms employed synthetic means of form-building.
Runic Alphabet
Although the people of the Germanic tribes were mostly, illiterate, some of the Germanic nations had their own mode of writing, with a distinctive alphabet called runic, each letter of which was called a rune. We know that runes were used to record early stages of Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English etc. On archeological grounds the earliest runes are dated to the second century. The early runes were not written, runic script was designed for inscribing, at first on wood, which explained in many of its characteristics. Letters were made up of vertical strokes, cut at right angles to the grain. The earliest known runic alphabet had twenty-four letters arranged in a peculiar order.
Summary
Thus we may summarize that the principle features common to all the languages of the Germanic language area were:
Fixation of the main stress on the initial syllable of the word
The first shift of affecting the Indo-European voiceless and voiced sounds
Reduction in the number of cases
Topics for presentations
:Ablaut/Umlaut
Grimm’s law
Verner’s law
Runic alphabet
Group work
Draw the map of Great Britain
Which languages are being spoken in its territory nowadays?
(Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton) . Scottish Gaelic is spoken only in the Highlands by about 75 thousand people, Irish- by half a million;
Make a list of Low German tongues from which the Modern Britain languages
took their origin;
(Old Saxon, Old Low Frankonian, Old Low Frisian and Old Low English.
The last two are closely related and constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup.)
Read the text The British
Speak on
The first inhabitants of Great Britain
Their appearance
Civilization
Main features of The English and Anglo-Saxons life