English as a Germanic language

Main points:

Theory

Most common words tend to resist analogy: e.g. was, were

Basic content:

IE languages families: Greek, Italic, Celtic, Slavic

West/East divergence: *k

West: remained, e.g. Latin centum

East: *k->s (e.g. Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic)

Gmc one of the last to split off

-some archaeological evidence

-references in classical texts

Germanic innovations:

Lexicon: New words perhaps reflect

-change of culture: word for leader of large group of people

-words picked up along the way: Latin

Morphology: ’Weak’ verb conjugation: tense marked with dental suffix

-tense now distinctive parameter

‘Weak’ adjectives:

Loss of some case endings

Phonology: Transformation of IE stops

-obscures relationships among Germanic and other IE families

Word-initial stress

-alliterative poetry

Graphics: Runic alphabet: disagreement over origins

-Strang: more cosmopolitan and learned mind than ‘scratching in wood’ might imply

English as a Germanic language

From your reading of you’ll know that IE has been subclassified into different ‘families’, with a broad distinction between west and east. The distinction is epitomized by the different developments of IE *k-

§ East: *k -> s: epitomized by the word for ‘hundred’ in one of the languages, satem

o Eastern families include Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic

§ West: retained, and epitomized by Latin word centum ‘hundred’

o Families include Italic, Hellenic, Celtic, Germanic

§ Germanic one of the last to split off

Evidence for existence of the Germanic family

§ archaeological: around the third millennium BC in modern Denmark/southern Sweden, apparent arrival of an archaeologically distinct group called the ‘battle-ax’ culture

o some of them seem to have started to migrate out of this original homeland before about 300BC

§ North Germanic people stayed in Scandinavia

§ East Germanic people (Vandals, Goths, etc.) went east and south

o Italy, Spain, North Africa

§ West Germanic: ancestors of German, Dutch, English

§ textual: around 200 BC, writings of Greek and Roman historians

o Caesar c50BC, Tacitus 98AD

o Germanic tribes had a tendency to wander and invade: Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Nor(th)men

§ runic: after second half of second century, runic inscriptions of Germanic peoples themselves

And of course linguistic

Lexicon

Common core of IE words

• kinship terms, numbers, basic verbs, body parts
• tends to take something quite dramatic to provoke substitution

New words specific to Germanic culture

• words like sea, ship
• some picked up along the way from non IE languages?

Others plundered from Roman empire

• e.g. pound, pepper, peas etc.
• some OE words beginning with /p/ need to be explained!

Morphology

General trend

• loss of some of the inflections that IE had
• e.g. Gmc nouns had fewer case endings: e.g. not locative or ablative
• e.g. ‘dual’ kept in pronouns and verbs, but lost in nouns
• by OE, only around in 1^st and 2^nd person pronouns

Some innovations not always in the direction of ‘reduction’

Big development wrt to verbs

• IE ablaut forms like sing, sang, sung retained
• called strong verbs by early linguists

• but Gmc verbs have a suffix that make a simple distinction between past and not-past/present: in PDE, alveolar -(e)d or t
• called weak verbs by early linguists
• used with any new words, whether from wordformation or borrowing

Big development with respect to adjectives (though because it didn’t survive into EmodE seems like less of a big deal)

• IE adjective inflections probably same as noun inflections: e.g. Latin adjective bonus like noun dominus
• Gmc developed a second declension for adjectives that depended on the syntax of the noun phrase
• new declension used if the adjective had a determiner in front of it (this, my): þæt gōd-e scip
• called weak
• otherwise gōd scip (or, þæt scip is gōd)
• called strong

Phonology

Common Gmc phonology was very different from Common IE

o stress

o phonological system

Remember that IE had a lot of stops and not many fricatives (/s/ but not /f/ or /th/)

Gmc transformed the IE stops. Broadly,

• IE voiced aspirated stops (they were phonemic in IE) became voiced stops
• bh, dh, gh -> b, d, g, via voiced fricatives
• IE voiceless stops became Gmc voiceless fricatives
• p, t, k -> f, th, x (->h)
• e.g.: Latin pater but English father
• e.g. Latinate tenuous but English thin
• e.g. Latin cordial but English hearty
• IE voiced stops became voiceless stops
• b, d, g -> p, t, k
• e.g. Latinate dental but English tooth
• e.g. Latinate grain but English corn
• agriculture and ? (acre)
• genus and ? (kin)

Known as Grimm’s law, this explains systematic differences like the ones on your list of cognates

There were some exceptions:

o with the voiceless stops, the change was blocked by a preceding /s/

o so, *p->f in father, but not with spit (Latin spuo) or star (stella) or scalp (scalpo)

o others harder: IE /t/ sometimes became /θ/, but sometimes became /d/

o IE *BHRAter became OE broðor (there’s been subsequent voicing)

o IE *paTER became OE faeder (and mater became modor)

§ turned out to be corrlated with word stress

· if the consonant (here, /t/) was preceded by an UNSTRESSED vowel (like paTER)

· and if it’s surrounded by voiced sounds (any vowel)

o then it gets voiced

The changes all had to happen in a particular order

• give out handout

And it’s interesting to contemplate where some OE words beginning with /p/ came from

Another major change in Gmc was the shift in word stress to the first syllable of the word (unless it was a prefix)

• we now have word-initial stress on father and brother
• English has words from non-Gmc languages; sometimes we end up shifting stress to first syllable: OCcult, DEfence

Implications of stress shift

• tradition of alliterative poetry in many Gmc languages
• Syllic waes se sigebeam, and ic synnum fah
• also not surprising that word-final unstressed syllables, esp inflections, got reduced or disappeared
• e.g. OE noun stán had same form for N and A

Graphics

Distinctively Germanic alphabet called runes or (system) futhark

• primarily in Northern Europe
• from probably mid-first century on
• earliest surviving inscriptions date from second half of the second century

Each letter was named after a noun that began with the sound represented by the character

• so, <f> called feoh ‘moveable property’ (usually cattle)
• <u> called ur ‘bison’ (!)

Called futhark after the first letters (cf abcdef)

Disagreement over their origins/inspiration: Latin? Greek via the Goths? Etruscan?

• people have considered
• the letter forms
• the extent to which they match the phonology of
• source
• target
• someone’s postulated development by a single mind “with an acute ear for linguistic analysis” (Strang!) “who might well have lived far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, in present-day Denmark”
• Denmark quite cosmopolitan then: lots of luxury items from the Mediterrranean appearing

Designed probably for scratching into things: aren’t curved

• not much wood, bone has survived (you’d need a marsh)
• wooden lance shafts and boxes and bone scraping knives and combs
• found on stone, metal (marking weapons and other luxury items)
• moveable items include spear blades, combs, amules, boxes, rings, horns, medallions, and whetstones
• “immovable items include stone cliffs and large commemorative stones”

Relatively few early inscriptions:

• some more ornamental

Most of the meaningful ones name objects or owners:

• many just one or two words: “B cut me”, “Hnabud’s grave” “tester” (!)
• if you’re lucky, “I, Hlengist of Holt, made the Horn”
• but it’s got OV order (‘horna tawido’)
• often archaic morphology or free word order (“whenever there are enough words to make it out”)
• this is on the now-lost Golden Horn of Gallehus!!

Developed over time

• some phonological developments later in Scandinavia
• in England, 4 symbols added to reflect language change