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INTRODUCTION...2
2.1 Grammatical..8
2.2 Phonetic.9
2.3 Lexical.10
CONCLUSION.....11
REFERENCES..12
INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER 1. THE EARLIEST PERIOD OF GERMANIC HISTORY
The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what
is known as the Proto-Germanic (PG) language. It is supposed to have split
from related IE tongues sometime between the 15th and 10th B.C. The
would-be Germanic tribes belonged to the western division of the IE speech
community.
The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned
from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most numerous and
powerful of them were the Goths.
The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records
of the 4th6th The Goths were the first of the Teutons to become Christian.
The other East Germanic languages, all of which are now dead, have
left no written traces. Some of their tribal names have survived in placenames,
which reveal the directions of their migrations: Bornholm and Burgundy go
back to the East Germanic tribe of Burgundians; Andalusia is derived from the
tribal name Vandals; Lombardy got its name from the Langobards, who made
part of the population of the Ostrogothic kingdom in North Italy.
The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths
gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages. The speech of the
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North Germanic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and is
regarded as a sort of common North Germanic parent-language called Old
Norse or Old Scandinavian. It has come down to us in runic inscriptions dated
from the 3rd to the 9th c. Runic inscriptions were carved on objects made of
hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic alphabet or
the runes. The runes were used by North and West Germanic tribes. The
disintegration of Old Norse into separate dialects and languages began after
the 9th c., when the Scandinavians started out on their sea voyages.
The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old
Swedish date from the 13th c. In the later Middle Ages Danish and then
Swedish developed into national literary languages. Nowadays Swedish is
spoken not only by the population of Sweden; the language has extended over
Finnish territory and is the second state language in Finland.
The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and Its
variant m Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treated as a single
languuge, Netherlandish. Netherlandish is spoken by almost 20 million
people.
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About three hundred years ago the Dutch Language was brought to
South Africa. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West
Germanic language, Afrikaans. Today Afrikaans is the mother-tongue of over
four million Afrikaners and coloured people and one of the state languages in
the South African Republic
The first English written records have come down from the 7th c.,
which is the earliest date in the history of writing in the West Germanic
subgroup (see relevant chapters below). The Frisians and the Saxons who did
not take part in the invasion of Britain stayed on the continent. Frisian has
survived as a local dialect in Friesland (in the Netherlands) and Ostfriesland
(the Federal Republic of Germany). It has both an oral and written form, the
earliest records dating from the 13th c. In the Early Middle Ages the
continental Saxons formed a powerful tribe. Together with High German
tribes they took part in the eastward drive and the colonization of the former
Slavonic territories. Old Saxon known in written form from the records of the
9th c. has survived as one of the Low German dialects.
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CHAPTER 2. PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Germanic adjectives had two types of declination: weak and strong. The
choice of the declension depends on:
Germanic verbs are divided into 2 principal groups: strong and weak.
Depending on the way they formed their past tense forms. The past tense of
strong verbs was formed with the help of ablaut. Group of strong verbs, which
used to build past tense with the help of vowel gradation (root vowel interchange):
take-took-taken.
Weak verbs expressed past tense with the help of the dental suffix d/t.
The Germanic verb had a well-developed system of categories including the
category of person 1st, 2nd, 3rd; category of number singular/plural. Also Germanic
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verb had tense: past and present. They also had mood: indicative, imperative,
optative.
The existence of a certain type of verbs weak, past tense with the
dental suffix d-: open opened, work worked.
The grammatical forms of the word were built by means of suppletion the
usage of two or more different roots as forms of one and the same word) (I, my,
mine, me) (ich, mich, mir).
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According to this interpretation, the first consonant shift is formulated in
the following manner: IE p becomes Germc. f, IE t becomes Germc. p, etc..
Verner's Law
e.g.: Lat. pater, Greek pater, Sanscr. pitar, Goth. fadar, OE fder.
Substratum Theory
Germanic Fracture
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following sound. The earliest manifestation of this principle has been termed
fracture or breaking. It concerns two pairs of vowels: e/i and u/o.
Gradation, or Ablaut
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1) accent (word stress) in IE was free and musical (, ,
); in protogerm. Accent become fixed on the root syllable and
dynamic (white, whiteness, whitewash),
2) Grimms law.
Grimms law: The first Germanic consonant shifts took place in the V-II cent.
BC. Jacobs Grimms Law. According to Grimm, he classified consonant
correspondences between Indo-European and Germanic languages.
The second consonant shift was Carl Verners law. According to C.Verner all the
common germanic consonants became voiced in intervocalic position if the
preceding vowel was unstressed and the following one stressed.
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Devoicing took place in early common germanic when the stress was not yet
fixed on the root.
A variety of Verners law is rhotacism (greek letter rho). [s] [z][r] we find
traces of this phenomenon in form of the verb to be was were, is are; ist
sind war.
Lexical features
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