5. The Earliest Period of Germanic History
The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of PG language. They spread and appeared dialects because of migrations and geographical expansion of the Germans caused by overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.
- East-Germanic (Vindili) - tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most numerous and powerful of them were the Goths (became Christians, alphabet, translation of Bible, “Silver Codex”, Кодекс Аргентиус).
- North-Germanic(Hilleviones) subgroup ( Old-Norse, Old-Scandinavian). Later it became Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.
The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages. Runic inscriptions were carved on objects made of hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic alphabet or the runes. sea voyages.The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Swedish date from the 13th c.
- West-Germanic(Ingveones, Istsevones and Hermino-nes) had many dialects: Anglian, Fresion, Saeson, English, German, Dutch, Jutish. Runes. "great migrations" of the 4th and 5th c. The Franconians, The Angles and the Frisians, the Jutes and the Saxons.
The first English written records have come down from the 7th c., which is the earliest date in the history of writing in the West Germanic subgroup.
6. Me phonetics. Developm. Of Old English diphthongs inМe
One of the most important sound changes of the ME period was the loss of OE diphthongs and the growth of new diphthongs, with new qualitative and quantitative distinctions.
period some of the diphthongs merged with monophthongs: all diphthongs were monophthongised.
7.Basic grammatical features of Germanic languages. Runes
In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic means: by means of inflections, sound interchanges, suppletion. The stress usually falls on the first or root syllable of a word.
All Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs; either by changing the root vowel in the case of strong verbs (German ringen, rang, gerungen) or by adding as an ending -d (or -t) or -ed in the case of weak verbs (as in English care, cared, cared; German fragen, fragte, gefragt).
- the formation of the genitive singular by the addition of -s or -es. Examples are English man, man's; Swedish hund, hunds; German Lehrer, Lehrers.
- the comparison of adjectives in the Germanic languages follows a parallel pattern, as in English: rich, richer, richest; German reich, reicher, reichst.
-2 two adjective declensions, a strong and a weak. (weak after articles, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive adjectives; strong are used independently).
-The eight cases of Indo-European nouns, adjectives, and pronouns were reduced to four.
The runic alphabet
The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic alphabet. The word rune originally meant ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. The runes were used as letters, each symbol to indicate separate sound. Straight lines are preferred, curved lines avoided - runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The main use of runes was to make short inscriptions on objects, often to show on them some special power or magic. The two best known runic: “Franks Casket”, the other is a short text on a stone cross near the village of Ruthwell known as the “Ruthwell Cross”.