The Primitive Indo-European (PIE)

The Common Germanic (CG or Parent Germanic)

The factor of time

The factor of space

In any age or epoch, there are overlappings (переплетение) between the old (archaic) forms and the new forms (neologisms), which appear at this age. Even in the works of one and the same writer we may find such overlappings, which are due to his views of the language of the previous period and his own one.

The history of English helps us to explain different grammatical phenomena, especially the so-called exceptions in the grammatical system. For example, why in modern English some nouns make their plural not in the ordinary way, but by means of changing the root vowel. It can be accounted for by the facts of the history of English. The history of English is connected with other linguistic subjects, such as lexicology, grammar, phonetics, even stylistics.

 

It has been proved by historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence that before the Germanic languages formed separate branches, they constituted a dialectical unity or group of Indo-European family, its western division. It is generally supposed that the Germanic group of dialects developed the first specifically Germanic features during the first millennium before Christ (B.C.). This group of related dialects has not been preserved in their written form and it has been reconstructedby comparative philology from later written sources. It is commonly known as the common Germanic parent language, or Common Germanic. The CG period lasted approximately till the beginning of our era (A.D.).

The Germanic branch of languages has the number of peculiarities in the word stock, in the grammatical structure and phonetics as compared with other branches (groups) of the Indo-European family. To understand the interrelation (взаимосвязь) between the Germanic and other groups of languages, a general picture of the grammatical and phonetic structure of the Primitive Indo-European (PIE) language should be given/sketched.

The Primitive Indo-European parent language never was a uniform language in the modern sense; it consisted of closely related spoken dialects, which were very much alike. The migration of ancient Germans in the 2nd – 5th centuries led to the geographical separation of the tribal (племенные) groups, and consequently to the independent development of Germanic languages.

Grammatical structure of the PIE

Primitive Indo-European is supposed to have been a highly developed synthetical language, extremely complicated and full of irregularities. Its grammar was highly inflectional, the grammatical relations between words being expressed by means of adding inflexional suffixes and changing the stem rather than by word order or function words. Nouns and verbs had completely different endings which varied with the character of the stem they were added to. So, it was a synthetic language, in which various means of word form derivation and word inflection were employed, such as suffixation, morphophonemic alternation and even suppletion. In contrast to suffixes grammatical prefixes were hardly ever used. They may be found only in the system of the verb to make Participle II or Perfect forms, which is preserved in modern German.