History of the English Language

BASIC FEATURES OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

All the Indo-European languages are inflective --that is, all are characterized by a
grammatical system based on modifications in the form of words by means of inflections (either
external variations produced by adding different endings to a root/stem, or else internal
vowel changes) to mark such grammatical functions as case number, tense, mood, person, aspect and
voice. The older inflectional system is very imperfectly represented in most modern Indo-
European languages. Likewise, the Indo-European languages share lexical elements which consistent
phonetic 'laws' allow to be traced back to a common stock. These cognates or words of common
origin do not necessarily look much alike: their resemblance may be disguised by sound shifts that
have occurred in the various languages of the groups. Thus, the original I.E. (Indo-European) *wergom
appears in Mod.E. as work and in classical Greek as ergon. On the basis of cognate words,
studying their formal correspondences we can reconstruct the sound system of Proto I.E. and we
can also infer a good deal about the state of culture attained by the Indo -Europeans.

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

The Germanic family of languages is distinguished from the other Indo-European

1. Germanic has a large number of words that have no known cognates in other I.E.
languages. These could have existed, of course, in Indo-European and have been lost;
it is also possible that they were taken from non -I.E. languages originally spoken in the
area occupied by the Germanic peoples. A few words that are apparently distinctively
Germanic, given in their Modern English forms are broad, drink drive, fowl, hold,
meat, rain and wife.
2. All I.E distinctions of tense and aspect were reduced in Germanic to a past/non-past
contrast. I.E. verbal voices and moods were also simpl ified. This simplification of the
more complex Indo-European verbal system is reflected in all the languages which
have developed out of Germanic. By the end of the migration period the Germanic
languages began developing their sharply reduced verbal system along periphrastic
lines.

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History of the English Language

3. Germanic developed a preterite tense form with a dental suffix, that is, one containing
/d/ or /t/. All Germanic languages thus have two types of verbs. Strong verbs form
their preterites and past participles by an internal variation of the root -syllable. The
tense structure of strong verbs is therefore based on the syst ematic modification of the
root-vowel (as in present-day English sing-sang-sung). Internal variation of this sort, is
called Ablaut or vowel-gradation. As well as being central to Indo -European strong-
verb morphology, ablaut patterns equally characterize many other sorts of semantically
related word-groups (compare, for example OE feorr 'far' --with e-grade-- with OE faru
'journey' and faran 'to travel' --with o-grade-- and fore or fram 'from' --with reduced
grades--). Weak verbs, on the other hand, use a completely different system of tense -
marking, with unchanged root-syllables modified for the preterite and pas t participle
by the addition of endings based on dental consonants (OE < -de, -te / -d,-t>; today <-
ed, -t, etc.). This use of dental suffixes was an innovation peculiar to the Germanic
languages; its origins remain uncertain, partly because it was already fully evolved
before the time of the earliest written records extant, but may have lain in the enclitic
use of the verb do.
4. All the older forms of Germanic had two ways of declining their adjectives. The weak
declension was used chiefly when preceded by a pronominal adjective, including the
demonstrative pronoun that developed into the definite article. The strong declensi on
was used otherwise. This distinction is preserved in present -day German. In the course
of its development English has lost all such declension of the adjective.
5. The "free" accentual system of Indo -European, in which any syllable of a word might
be accented, gave way to another type of accentuation in which the stress became fixed
on root syllables, normally the initial one of each word.
6. Indo-European vowels underwent a modification in Germanic. Indo-European short /o/
became /a/, compare the Latin (an I.E. language but from the Romance family) word
octo 'eight', with the Gothic (an I.E. language but Germanic) ahtau; On the other hand,
Indo-European long /a:/ became /o:/, compare Latin mater with OE modor. There were
also other minor changes which we shall not go into here.
7. The Indo-European stops /bh,dh,gh,p,t,k,b,d,g/ underwent a modification described by
the so called the First Sound Shift or Grimm's Law. Some anomalies of this shift are
explained by Verner's Law. Nowadays new research is questioning the evolution of
these I.E consonants as it was exposed by Grimm .

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History of the English Language

The Germanic subfamilies

It is customary to divide the Germanic branch into three subgroups — North, East and West
Germanic. The three subgroups are distinguished from one another by a large number of
linguistic features, of which we can mention six as typical:

1. The nominative singular of some nouns ended in -az in Proto-Germanic, for example,
*wulfaz. This ending appears as -r in North Germanic (Old Icelandic ulfr), as -s in East
Germanic (Gothic vu1fs). and disappears completely in West Germanic (Old High
German wolf, Old English vulf).
2. In North Germanic the ending for the second person singular in the present tense of
verbs came to be used also for the third person:
O LD I CELANDIC G OTHIC O LD E NGLISH
you bind→ bindr bindis bindest
he binds → bindr bindi þ binde þ

3. North Germanic developed a definite article that was suffixed to nouns, for example,
Old Icelandic ulfr 'wolf', ulfrinn 'the wolf'. No such feature appears in East or West
Germanic.
4. In East Germanic the /z/ that resulted fron Verner's Law appears as <s>, but in North
and West Germanic as <r>: Gothic auso, Old Icelandic eyra, Old English eare 'ear'.
5. North and West Germanic had vowel alternations called umlaut or mutat ions, for
example, in Old Icelandic and Old English, the word for 'man' in the accusative
singular was mann, while the corresponding plural was menn. No such alternation
exists in Gothic, for which the parallel forms are singular mannan and plural mannans.
6. In West Germanic, the /ð/ that resulted from Verner's Law appears as /d/ but remains a
fricative in North and East Germanic: Old English fæder, Old Icelandic faðir Gothic
/faðar/ (though spelled fadar).

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History of the English Language

The West Germanic group

West Germanic itself was divided into smaller subgroups. For example, High German and
Low German are distinguished by another change in the stop sounds —the Second or High
German Shift— which occurred comparatively recently as linguistic history goes. It was
nearing its completion by the end of the 8th century of our era. This shift began in the
southern mountainous part of Germany and spread northward, stopping short of the low-lying
northern section of the country. The high in High German (Hochdeutsch) and the low in Low
German (Plattdeutsch) refer only to relative distances above sea level. High German beca me
in time standard German, relegating Low German to the status of a peasant patois in Germany.
We may illustrate the High German shift in part by contrasting English and High German
forms, as follows:
- Proto-Germanic <p> appears in HG as <pf> or, after vowels, as <ff>: E. apple, HG apfel;
E. pepper, HG pfeffer.
- Proto-Germanic <t> appears as /ts/ (spelled <z>) or, after vowels, as <ss>: E. tongue, HG
zunge; E. water, HG wasser.
- Proto-Germanic <k> appears after vowels as <ch>: E. break, HG brechen
- Proto-Germanic <d> appears as <t>: E. dance, HG tanzen; E. drink, HG trinken.