Lecture 1 Germanic Languages and Their Common Features

List of questions under discussion

1. Proto-Germanic (PGmc) as the common ancestor of Germanic (Gmc) languages

2. Classification of Germanic languages

   1. East Germanic languages

   2. North Germanic languages

   3. West Germanic languages

   4. Germanic languages nowadays

3. Common features of Germanic languages

   1. Phonetics

   2. Grammar

   3. Lexicon

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1. Proto-Germanic as the common ancestor of Germanic Languages

The English language belongs to the group of Germanic (Gmc) languages, which form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a single earlier parent-language, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic (PGmc) and which is believed to have broken from the other cognate Indo-European languages as early as 2000 B.C. PGmc is supposed to have been spoken in southern Scandinavia and Jutland Peninsular. It was never written down, but its existence and much of its vocabulary and structure can be confidently inferred from the many systematic correspondences in words and grammatical structures shared by its descendants and in the works of Roman writers as Julius Caesar, Tacitus and Pliny.

2. Classification of Germanic languages

A bout 300 BC the Germanic-speaking peoples began migrating en masse in all directions, perhaps under pressure from invading Asian people and/or overpopulation and the poverty of the natural resources. It was called the great German tribal migration of the 4th century AD. In the course of a few centuries they settled on a vast territory in Western Europe. When subgroups of the original speech community became separated, there happened the break-up of PGm. 500 to 1000 years of independent changes first produced divergent dialects, and then these became separate Gmc languages.

As a result of this expansion, there appeared different Gmc languages. Geographically, the descendants of PGmc are divided into three groups.

2.1. East Germanic languages

T he East Gmc languages were spoken by the tribes that expanded East of the Oder around the shores of the Baltic. The group included Gothic, Vandalic and Burgundian. However, the oldest surviving literary text of any Germanic language is in Gothic. It is a translation of the Bible made by the bishop Ulfilas in the middle of the 4th c. The translation is known under the name of THE SILVER CODEX (it is written on red parchment with silver letters).

2.2. North Germanic languages

The North Gmc languages stem from one parent-language, known as Old Scandinavian, or Old Norse, which was spoken in Scandinavia and northern Denmark. The oldest attested forms of this language are found in runic inscriptions from the 3^rd c. Old Norse remained uniform for a relatively long period: it was until the Viking era, from about 800 to 1050 AD that Old Norse began to break up into the dialects that developed into separate languages: Old Swedish, Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic.