Крайчинська Г.В.

III курс. Introduction to Germanic Languages

Lecture 1. G erm anic languages

Plan

1. M odern Germ anic Languages. W est-Germanic languages. East-Germanic

languages. North-Germ anic languages.
2. Proto-Germ anic. The existence o f Proto-Indo-European.
3. What was the Early Germanic society?
4. Reconstruction o f Old Forms. Internal reconstruction. External reconstruction.
W illiam Jones, A ugust Schleicher, Jacob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp,
Ferdinand de Saussure.
5. The Com parative Method.

1. Modern G erm anic Languages

Germanic 1-ges belong to the Indo-European family, and at our today’s lecture we try
to remind the main facts o f the distinction o f the Indo-European languages.

The Indo-European languages are a family o f several hundred related languages

and dialects, including most major languages o f Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South
Asia, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Azia. And the Indo-
• • iCvlfUt'Lf. AJ-'Ci V.H.L’
European fam ily of languages is significant to the field o f historical linguistics as
possessing the longest recorded history. It is very important that Indo-European
languages are spoken by the largest number for any recognized language family.

O f the top 20 contemporary languages in terms o f native speakers, twelve are

Indo-European: English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Bengali, German, French,
Italian. The various subgroups o f the Indo-European language family include twelve
major branches, given in the chronological order o f their earliest surviving written
sources. Indo-European languages are spread from Europe to all continents, and today
there are over three billion speakers o f Indo-European languages, distributed over all
the w orld.

Slide 3. The G erm anic languages are usually divided into three groups: North
Germanic, East Germanic, W est Germanic

Slide 4. North G erm anic,

that is, the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and
Faroese*
East Germanic,
that is, Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a fragmentary biblical translation
from the fourth century;
West Germanic,
which includes High German, English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian.

*
Slide 5. The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows:

• English - in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the
South African Republic, and many other form er British colonies;
• German - in the Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, part o f Switzerland;
• Netherlandish - in the Netherlands and Belgium (known also as Dutch and
Flemish respectively);

Slide 5. Afrikaans - in the South African Republic;

• Danish - in Denmark;
• Swedish - in Sweden and Finland;
• Norwegian - in Norway;
• Icelandic - in Iceland;
• Frisian - in some regions o f the Netherlands and Germany;
• Faroese - in the Faroe Islands;
. Yiddish - in different countries.

M embership o f these languages in the Indo-European language family is

determined by genetic relationships, meaning that all members are presumed to be
descendants o f a common ancestor. The common ancestor o f a family (or branch) is
known as its "proto-language". For example, the reconstructible proto-language o f the
well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European (it was not known
from written records, since it was spoken before the invention o f writing). Indo-
European is originally a linguistic term, which became a collective name for cultures
and religions associated with these languages. These cultures arose from the expansion o f
an ancient people, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, possibly originating from somewhere
around the Black Sea region from the 5th millennium B C . As we mentioned, membership
in the various branches, groups and subgroups or Indo-European is also genetic, but here
the defining factors are shared innovations among various languages, suggesting a
common ancestor that split o ff from other Indo-European groups. For example, what
makes the Germ anic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their
structure and phonology can so be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many o f
their common features are presumed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Indo-
European, the source o f all the Germanic languages.

Slide 7. The existence o f Proto-Indo-European. There are 2 main problems to the

existence o f Proto-Indo-European. Actually, when and where was it spoken. The time
can hardly be accurately dated. It is dated far back 10000 B.C. - 4000 B.C. (In the 15th
thousand B.C. I-E still existed and people spoke it. 10000 B.C. is the most probable time
o f existing P-I-E hom eland). It is based upon linguistic and archeological facts.

Slide 8. Linguistic facts of the existence of Proto-IE Language

1. words denoting the sea (the root mor- denotes the water area)
2. names o f the tress
3. names o f the rulers
 /

4. names o f the devices for cultivating soil (the plough)

Slide 9. Archeological facts of the existence of Proto-IE Language

1. the crockery, the pots, the burial places

2. people in pow er were buried with what they possessed
3. tools made o f stone and absence o f metal
4. evidences o f transition from gathering food to cultivating soil
5. pre-historic m onum ents were reconstructed with huge stones (megalithic culture).
6. Proto-Germanic. The existence o f Proto-Indo-European.

Slide 10. № 2. Proto-G erm anic. The existence of Proto-Indo-European.

Proto-Indo-European developed in different ways in the various parts o f the world

to which its speakers traveled. Indo-Europeans were driven from their original homeland
to many parts o f Europe and Asia, various migrations began. At the beginning o f
historical times languages that derived from it were spoken from Europe in the west to
India in the east. The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the common ancestor
of the Indo-European languages. Scholars have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
language on the basis o f data from its ten daughter branches, which are: Germanic. Italic.
Celtic, Greek. Baltic. Slavic, Albanian, Armenian. Indo-Iranian, and the two dead
branches Tocharian and Anatolian.

Slide 10. Proto-Germ anic

• Proto-Germanic becam e a separate language between the 15 th - 10th centuries

B.C.
• Proto-Germ anic was distinctive in many o f its sounds, inflections, stress patterns
and vocabulary.
• ancient Germans settled on the southern coast o f the Baltic Sea in the region o f the
Elbe.

Slide 11. Proto-G erm anic language developed from Proto-Indo-European

• IE tribes came to Europe in 3000-2500 B.C. (Northern part o f Europe)

• IE newcom ers mixed with this group and formed the tribes that later became
known as Germanic tribes. The Germanic group o f languages developed its
specific trades during the first millennium B.C.

Slide 12. Southern Scandinavia including Jutland is the probable homeland o f Proto-
Germanic. The Germ anic tribes came into contact with East European tribes, and the
languages later formed the Baltic and Slavonic groups. PG was fundamentally one
language, though dialectally coloured.

Slide 13. The Germ anic tribes also had contacts with Italian tribes that lived in southern
Europe. Latin language influenced the language o f Germanic tribes.

Slide 14.
 As it was m entioned, all the languages are descended from one parent language, a
dialect o f Indo-European, which we can call Proto-Germanic (PG). Round about the
beginning o f the Christian era, the speakers o f Proto-Germanic still formed a relatively
homogeneous cultural and linguistic set o f groups, living in the north o f Europe. We
have no records o f the language in this period, but we know something about the
people who spoke it, because they are described by Roman authors, who called them
the Germani. One o f the best-known of these descriptions is that written by Tacitus
in AD 98, called Germania.

Slide 15. № 3 W hat was the Early Germanic society?

And scientists are interested in what was the Early Germanic society?

Tacitus describes the Germani as living in settlements in the woody country of

north-western E urope. He says that they do not build cities and keep their houses far
apart, living in w ooden buildings. They keep flocks, and grow grain crops, but their
agriculture is not very advanced. Because o f the large amount o f open ground, they
change their lands, and distributing land to cultivators in order o f rank. The family plays
a large part in their social organization, and the more relatives a man has the greater is his
influence in his old age. They have kings, chosen for their birth, and chiefs, chosen for
their valour, but in m ajor affairs the whole community consults together. Chiefs are
attended by com panions, who fight for them in battle, and who in return are rewarded by
the chiefs with gifts o f weapons, horses, treasure and land. In battle, it is disgraceful for a
chief to be outshone by his companions, and disgraceful for the companions to be less
brave than their chief. (In peacetime, the warriors idle about at home, eating, drinking
and gambling, and leaving the work o f the house and o f the fields to women and slaves).

Slide 16. They are extremely hospitable, but their love o f drinking often leads to
quarrels. The physical type is everywhere the same: blue eyes, reddish hair and huge
bodies. The normal dress is the short cloak, the skins o f animals are also worn. Very few
o f the men have helmets, and they have very little iron. They worship Mercury,
sometimes with hum an sacrifices, and sacrifice animals to Hercules and Mars. Their only
form o f recorded history is their ancient songs, in which they tell o f the earth-born god
T uisto and his son M annus, which are ancestor o f the whole Germanic race; the various
sons o f M annus are the ancestors o f the different Germanic tribes. And Tacitus gives an
account o f each o f Germanic tribes, its location and peculiarities.

Slide 17. Earlier they had probably been confined to a small area o f southern
Scandinavia and northern Germany between the Elbe and the Oder, but round about 300
BC they had begun to expand in all directions, perhaps because o f overpopulation and the
p overty o f their natural resources.

Slide 18. In the course o f a few centuries they pushed northwards up the
Scandinavi into territory occupied by Finns. They expanded westwards beyond the Elbe,
into northwest Germ any and the Netherlands, overrunning areas occupied by Celtic­
speaking peoples.
 Slide 19. They expanded eastwards round the shores o f the Baltic Sea, into
Finnish or Baltic-speaking regions. And they pressed southwards into Bohemia, and later
into southwest Germany.

Slide 20. № 4. Reconstruction of Old Forms. Internal reconstruction. External

reconstruction

Slide 21. The forms o f Proto-Germanic language can only be reconstructed. This was
done in the 19th century by methods o f comparative linguistics.

Slide 22. Internal reconstruction.

Reconstruction o f Proto-Indo-European text was made with the help of internal

reconstruction. Internal reconstruction is a method o f recovering information about
a language's past from the characteristics o f the language at a later date. Whereas the
comparative m ethod compares variations between languages, internal
reconstruction compares variant forms within a single language. For example, these
could take the form o f allomorphs o f the same m orpheme.

• The basic formula of internal reconstruction is that a meaning-bearing

elem ent that alternates between two or more sim ilar forms in different
environments w as probably a single form in the past, into which alternation
was introduced by the usual mechanisms o f sound changes and analogy.

Slide 23. Language forms reconstructed by means o f internal reconstruction are

denoted with the pre- prefix, similar to the use o f proto- to indicate a language
reconstructed by means o f the comparative method. So, an earlier form o f English
would be referred to as pre-English, intermediate between hypothetical Proto-
Germanic and the earliest attested OE.

• It is even possible to apply internal reconstruction to proto-languages

reconstructed by the comparative method.

Slide 24.

• Over the past 200 years, linguists have reconstructed the vocabulary and
syntax of the Indo-European proto-language. They have tried to depict the
paths by which the language broke into daughter languages that spread throughout
Europe and Asia, seeking at the origin o f those paths the homeland o f the proto­
language. The early investigators placed the homeland in Europe and posited
migratory paths by which the daughter languages evolved into Eastern or Western
branches. They indicated that the proto-language originated more than 6,000 years
ago in eastern Anatolia and that some daughter languages must have differentiated
in the course o f migrations that took them first to the East and later to the West.
• The reconstruction o f ancient languages may be likened to the method used
by m olecular biologists in their study to understand the evolution of life. So
does the linguist seek correspondences in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and
Slide 26. № 5. The Com parative Method

The com parative method

The comparative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the reconstruction of

an earlier language or earlier state o f a language on the basis o f a comparison o f related
words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived from it. The comparative
method was developed in the course o f the 19th century for the reconstruction o f Proto-
Indo-European and was subsequently applied to the study o f other language families. It
depends upon the principle o f regular sound change. Changes in the phonological
systems o f languages through time were accounted for in terms o f sound laws.

The existence o f the Proto-Indo-European language has been inferred by the

Com parative M ethod. The comparative method can be used to reconstruct languages
for which no written records exist. Thus, the Germanic languages can be compared to
reconstruct Proto-Germ anic, a language for which no records are preserved.

It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement o f linguistic

scholarship in the 18th century was the development o f the com parative method, which
comprised a num ber o f principles by which languages could be systematically compared
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 originated from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as
well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages o f Europe
and Asia had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or
Proto-Indo-European is very often applied. All the Germanic languages were
descended from Latin and constituted one "family" which had been known for centuries.
The existence o f the Indo-European family o f languages and the nature o f their
genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 18th- 19th-century comparative
philologists.

The com parative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the

reconstruction o f an earlier language or earlier state o f a language on the basis o f a
comparison o f related words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived
from it. The com parative method was developed in the course o f the 19th century for the
reconstruction o f Proto-Indo-European and was subsequently applied to the study o f
other language families. It depends upon the principle o f regular sound change. Changes
in the phonological systems o f languages through time were accounted for in terms of
sound laws.
But the scholars o f the 18 century, opened the question o f the original homeland of
the Indo-Europeans, were essentially confined to linguistic evidence. A rough
localization was attem pted by reconstructing the names of plants and animals
(importantly the beech and the salmon) as well as the culture and technology
(domesticated the horse).
 vocalization among known languages in order to reconstruct their original
tongue. Living languages can be compared directly with one another; dead
languages that have survived in written form can usually be vocalized by inference
from internal linguistic evidence. Dead languages that have never been written,
however, can be reconstructed only by comparing their descendants and by
working backward according to the laws that govern phonological change.
Phonology - the study o f word sounds - is all-important to historical linguists
because sounds are more stable over the centuries than are meanings.

Slide 24.

• Early studies o f Indo-European languages focused on those most familiar to

the original European researchers: the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and
Slavic families. Similarities between these and the "Aryan" languages spoken in
faraway India were noticed by European travelers as early as the 16th century.

While similarities are still visible between the modern descendants and relatives o f
these ancient languages, the differences have increased over time. Some IE languages
have moved from synthetic verb systems to largely periphrastic systems. The
pronouns o f periphrastic forms are in brackets when they appear. Some o f these verbs
have undergone a change in meaning as well.

• In Modern Irish beir usually only carries the meaning to bear in the sense o f
bearing a child, its common meanings are to catch, grab.
• The Hindi verb bharnä, the continuation o f the Sanskrit verb, can have a variety
o f meanings, but the m ost common is "to fill". The forms given in the table,
although etym ologically derived from the present indicative, now have the
m eaning o f subjunctive. The present indicative is conjugated periphrastically,
using a participle (etymologically the Sanskrit present participle bharant-) and an
auxiliary: таіГП bhartä hü/Jl. tü bhartä hai, vah bhartä hat, ham bharte hailjl, tum
bharte ho, ve bharte hairp (masculine forms).
• German is not directly descended from Gothic, but the Gothic forms are a close
to w hat the early West Germanic fonns o f 400 AD looked like. The cognate of
Germanic beranan (English bear) survives in German only in the compound
gebären, m eaning "bear (a child)".
• The Latin verb ferre is irregular. In French, the irregular Latin verb ferre "to
carry" has been changed by other verbs and ferre only survives in compounds such
as souffrir "to suffer" (from Latin sub- and fe rre ) and conferer "to confer" (from
Latin "con-" and "ferre).
• In Modern Greek, phero cpepco (modern transliteration fero) "to bear" is still
used but only in specific contexts not in everyday language. The form that is
common today is pherno cpspvco (m odem transliteration fern o ) meaning "to bring".
Additionally, the perfective form o f pherno (used for the subjunctive voice and
also for the future tense) is also phero.
• In M odern Russian брать (brat’) carries the meaning to take. Бремя means
burden, as something heavy to bear, and derivative беременность means
pregnancy.
 The main impact for the development o f com parative method came at the end o f
the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit shower a number of
resemblances to Greek and L atin.

Nineteenth century comparisons o f older languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit,

and Gothic showed that similarities among word forms with sim ilar meanings were so
systematic as to rule out chance or borrowing as an explanation. Such systematic
similarities, it was argued, could only have resulted if the speakers o f these languages
once formed a com m unity that then broke up as groups o f its speakers migrated to
different places. Because these languages ranged geographically from India to Europe,
their unknown prehistoric ancestor was called (Proto-)Indo-European or, in German, (Ur-
)Indogermanisch. The Indo-European (IE) Languages are divided into families, which are
traditional groupings o f the languages for which IE Texts survive.

Slide 27. Some important scientific events took place at the end o f the 18th century and
they are connected w ith the names o f such prominent scholars as W illiam Jones, August
Schleicher, Jacob Grim m , Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Ferdinand de Saussure and
others.

1) The discovery o f the genetic relationship o f the various Indo-European

languages goes back to an English philologist, W illiam Jones (who was not the first to
observe these resem blances) drew the attention o f the scholarly world in 1786 when
made an attempt to prove that three languages Sanskrit, Greek and Latin must have
"one common source, which perhaps no longer exists". He made his discovery on the
number o f texts and glossaries o f the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High
German, and Old N orse) which had been published by that time;

2) At the beginning o f the 19th century the German scholar Friedrich Schlegel first
stated the importance o f using the oldest possible form o f a language when trying to
prove its relationships. At first, the related languages were simply compared, with no
attempt at reconstruction. August Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a Proto-
Indo-European text W illiam Jones had predicted. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European language (PIE) represents the common language o f the Proto-Indo-
Europeans.

3) The next important scientific events came in 1822, when the German scholar
Jacob G rim m , following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask, in his comparative grammar
of Germanic pointed out that there were a number of systematic correspondences
between the sounds o f Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in
related words.

Slide 3 1 . 4 ) One more philologist Franz Bopp performed extensive comparative

work.

5) In the 20 th century, great progress was made due to the discovery o f more
language material belonging to the Indo-European family, and by advances in
comparative linguistics, by scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure.