Subtheme 4. East, North and West Germanic languages.
Genetically, English belongs to the Germanic group of languages, which is one of the twelve groups of the I-E linguistic family. The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows:
English-in GB, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the South African Republic, and many other former British colonies;
German-in Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, part of Switzerland;
Netherlandish- in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Afrikaans- in the South African Republic;
Danish-in Denmark;
Swedish-Sweden and Finland;
Norwegian-in Norway;
Icelandic-in Iceland;
Frisian-in some regions of the Netherlands and Germany;
Faroese-in the Faroe Islands;
Yiddish –in different countries.
The Germanic languages are divided into three subgroups: East, North and West Germanic languages.
The East Germanic languages are dead nowadays. The most important East Germanic language was Gothic, which has left the oldest written monuments in the Germanic languages, referred to the 4-5th centuries. Records of a Germanic language not belonging to the northwest continuum have survived from the 4th century AD. Excepting a certain runic inscription, the Gothic language is first attested as the literary legacy of the Arian bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila). His fourth-century translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic -- which, notably, predates the Latin Vulgate of Jerome -- inestimably furthered the Christianizing mission to the pagan Goths. Wulfila rendered his work, not in runes, but in a new alphabet based primarily upon that of Greek. Of his complete translation we possess only extensive sections of the New Testament, and little aside from this remains of "Gothic" literature. After centuries of expansion and conquest, the fortunes of the Goths succumbed to disasters that saw their seats in Italy and Spain destroyed in turn by Justinian and the Umayyad Caliphate, making the Goths a historical non-entity in Europe by the mid-eighth century. In the East, a community of Goths apparently survived into the early modern era, dwelling in the region of Crimea. A letter has been preserved from the 16th century recording a brief list of words that seem to be Gothic: tentatively its final attestation.
Philologists have traditionally connected Gothic with two other Germanic languages, Vandalic and Burgundian, forming an East Germanic family. However, the latter are so marginally attested that there is not enough evidence to justify committing them to a particularly close relationship with each other or with Gothic. Regarding any association of the three, we may only say with certainty that they are "not Northwest Germanic."
The North Germanic languages are spoken in Scandinavia. They go back to Old Norse, which was the language of the Vikings. Nowadays the North Germanic languages are Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic. Linguistically the most important North Germanic languages are Icelandic which has left ancient written monuments – the Icelandic Sagas (11-12th c.c. A.D.) and Danish which has influenced other Scandinavian languages. The later runic inscriptions in Scandinavia reflect changes specific to Old Norse in its earliest attestations, whence derive the modern North Germanic languages of the region. By the High Middle Ages a dialect division had appeared, splitting Old Norse into East Norse, spoken in Sweden and Denmark, and West Norse, spoken in Norway and Iceland after it was colonized in the 9th century. A vast literature of poetry, histories, and sagas has been preserved in Old Norse, most of it composed by Icelanders. Modern North Germanic languages include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faeroese, and the extinct Norn.
The West Germanic languages are of social interest for us because English belongs here. These languages are represented by several ancient tongues such as Anglo-Saxon, Franconian and Old High Germanic. The modern West Germanic languages are subdivided into High: German & Yiddish, and Low: Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, Friesian and English. Relatively few runic writings were composed in West Germanic languages. North Sea Germanic is a dialect grouping which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. Old English is attested from the second half of the first millenium AD with a literature comparable in size to that of Old Norse. Old Frisian is most closely related to Old English but is not attested until the 13th century, eventually transitioning into modern Fries. Old Saxon is attested from the 9th century in such works as the Heliand, a Germanic poetic remix of the New Testament. This language interacted with Old Low Franconian (attested from the 10th century) and other dialects in the Low Countries to yield modern Dutch. Finally, Old High German is attested from the 8th century, giving rise to Middle High German by the High Middle Ages and modern German by the Early Modern Era.
English is the widely spread Germanic language in the world. It is spoken in numerous countries of Europe, America, and it’s the official language in Australia (as a student of English you should know these countries). After English the most important language is German.
The Germanic languages developed into a separate branch due to specific properties which were acquired by these languages in the course of their development and which do not occur in the rest of the Indo-European languages. Such properties can be found in all the spheres of the language.
The vocabulary of Germanic languages is characterized by a set of words which are called Common Germanic. This group includes the words which originated from the same root of the Proto-Germanic parent language. Cf., for instance:
| English | German |
| hand | Hand |
| house | Haus |
| old | alt |
| make | machen |
One of the most vivid properties of the Germanic grammar is the division of the verbs into two classes: weak and strong. Weak verbs build their past by adding dental suffixes (-ed in English, -te in German); strong verbs, with the help of vowel gradation (e.g.: English - come, came, come; German - kommen, kam, gekommen).
It should be borne in mind that many specifically Germanic features were neutralized during the evolutionary development of Germanic languages. Thus, the English language of today cannot demonstrate weak and strong declension of nouns and adjectives, though in older times this feature was common for all the Germanic languages.
The specifically Germanic features of the sound system may be best of all illustrated by the so called the First Consonant Shift (or the Germanic Consonant Shift). This phenomenon was first observed by the Danish scholar Rasmus Rusk, and later on it was described by the German linguist Jacob Grimm (hence one more name of this phenomenon, «The Grimm’s Law»).
Grimm’s Law states the correspondences between the consonants of the Germanic languages on the one hand and all the other Indo-European languages on the other hand.
According to this law certain Indo-European consonants underwent changes in the Germanic languages and appeared in them as quite different sounds. J. Grimm singled out three stages in the development of these consonants.
First. Indo-European voiceless stops [p], [t], [k] developed in the Germanic languages into voiceless fricatives [f], [0], [h].
| Indo-European | Germanic |
| Russ. приятель | NE friend |
| Russ. пята; L.pedis | NE foot; G.fuβ |
| Gr. kardia; L.cordis | NE heart; G. Herz |
| Russ. кров | OE hrōf (NE roof) |
| Russ. три; L.tres | NE three |
| Russ. тысяча | NE thousand |
| Russ. терновник | NE thorn |
Second. Indo-European voiced stops [b], [d], [g] developed in the Germanic languages into voiceless stops [p], [t], [k].
| Indo-European | Germanic |
| Russ. болото; Lith. bala | NE pool; G. Pfuhl |
| Russ. два; L.dua | OE twa (NE two) |
| Russ. еда; L.edere | NE eat |
| L. ego | OE ic (NE I) |
| Russ. горе | NE care |
Third. Indo-European voiced aspirated stops [bh], [dh], [gh] developed in the Germanic languages into voiced non-aspirated stops [b], [d], [g].
This stage of Grimm’s Law cannot be illustrated by many examples as the voiced aspirated stops can be found only in Sanskrit.
| Indo-European | Germanic |
| Skr. bhratar | NE brother |
| Skr. vidhava | NE widow |
| Skr. madhu | NE mead |
The above treatment of specifically Germanic features is by no means exhaustive. Such features are much more numerous. And here we have given only a few examples in order to define the place of English among the other Indo-European languages.
All the Germanic people nowadays use the Latin alphabet.
The Germanic substrate hypothesis is an attempt to explain the distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European language family. It postulates that the elements of the common Germanic vocabulary and syntactical forms that do not seem to have an Indo-European origin show Proto-Germanic to be a creole language: a contact languagesynthesis between Indo-European speakers and a non-Indo-European substrate language used by the ancestors of the speakers of the Proto-Germanic language. The theory was first proposed by Sigmund Feist in 1932, who estimated that roughly a third of Proto-Germanic lexical items came from a non-Indo-European substrate and that the supposed reduction of the Proto-Germanic inflectional system was the result of pidginization with that substrate. Which culture or cultures may have contributed the substrate material is an ongoing subject of academic debate and study. Notable candidates for possible substrate culture(s) are the Maglemosian and Funnelbeaker culture but also older cultures of northern Europe like the Hamburgian or even the LRJ (Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician).