1. Linguistic changes and their sources. Laws of language development

1. Replacement

• one-to-one replacement — occurs when a new unit merely takes the place of the old one (feet [e:] → [i:]);

• merging — two or more units may fall together and thus may be replaced by one unit (Common case = Nom + Gen + Acc);

• splitting — one unit splits into several ones ([k] → [k] and [ch]).

2. Pure innovations — borrowed to name new object or ideas (sputnik, Soviet).

3. Pure losses — disappeared because of their unnecessarity (poetic words denoting warriors, ships and the sea).

Mechanism of change:

1. The rise of synchronic variation.

2. Co-existence of several forms.

3. Change in frequency of occurrence.

4. The resulting change.

Laws of language development

1. Irregular development of language aspects (different levels change with different speed): vocabulary, phonetics, morphology, syntax.

2. Abstraction (formal elements of the language appear from concrete ones).

3. Concretizing (concrete elements develop into more concrete).

4. Analogy (language units change on the analogy of other elements).

5. Differentiation (several elements tend to be used in different functions or meanings): dialects tend to turn into independent languages.

6. Interpenetration (smaller language units contribute larger ones).

7. Compensation (when a language unit falls into disuse, other units may adopt its functions): OE category of definiteness-indefiniteness → ME articles.

8. Stability (any language rejects changes unless they are supported by the majority of speakers).

2. Classification of Germanic languages. Their principal features

	Old languages	Modern languages
East Germanic	Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian	—
West Germanic	Anglian, Saxon, Frisian, Old High German, Old Dutch	English, German, Yiddish, Afrikaans
North Germanic	Old Norse	Icelandic, Swedish, Faroese, Danish

Gothic is of the greatest importance for the study, because there are the earliest written records in Gothic which have come down to us. They are dated back to the 4th century A.D. This language preserves the earliest characteristic features of old languages.

Word stress: force (dynamic), in late PG — stabilized, fixed, could fall on one syllable, mainly on the root, only sometimes — on prefixes or suffixes, endings unstressed, could no longer move in form-building or word-building; stressed syllables were pronounced distinctly, unstressed were weak.

Vowels:

• qualitative — affect the quality of the sound,

• quantitative — make long sounds short and short sounds long,

• dependent — are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance, a sound may change under the influence of the neighboring sounds or the stress:

  • IE e → Germ i (if it is followed by i/j or cluster: nasal+consonant);

  • IE u → Germ u: (if it is followed by u or cluster nasal+consonant; otherwise it corresponds to Germ o);

• independent alterations — take place irrespective of phonetic conditions; it means they affect a certain sound in all positions:

  • IE o and a → Germ a;

  • IE o: and a: → Germ o:.

Long vowels tended to become closer and short vowels had a tendency to become open.

Consonants:

• Grimm’s Law (first consonant shift):

  • voiceless plosives developed into voiceless fricatives: [p, t, k] → [f, θ, h];

  • voiced plosives changed into voiceless plosives [b, d, g] → [p, t, k];

  • voiced fricatives changed into voiced plosives [bh, dh, gh] →[b, d, g].

• Verner’s Law:

  • voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g, *gʷ;

  • rhotacism (NE was, Germ war).

Grammar: syntactic languages (the relationships between the parts of a sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than their position in the sentence or by auxiliary verbs). Grammatical forms were built:

• by means of inflections (most productive one);

• by vowel interchange (ablaut — is an independent vowel interchange, not connected with any phonetic condition);

• by suppletion.

Verbs:

• strong (past tense is built by means of gradation of vowels or ablaut) — Inf, past sg, past pl, participle II;

• weak (by dental suffix) — 4 classes in Gothic, 3 in other Old Germanic languages;

• preterite-present (present — by ablaut, past — by dental suffixes);

• anomalous (suppletion).

Nouns: consisted of three parts: root, stem-suffix and ending. In late Germanic languages stem-suffixes lost their force and merged with the endings (because of the heavy word stress fixed on the root). According to the type of the stem, nouns can be divided into 4 declensions:

• strong declension (stem ends in a vowel – a, e, o, u);

• weak declension (stem ends in a consonant — n);

• consonantal declension (stem ends in different consonants — r, s);

• root declension (stem coincides with the root).

3. The First Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law). Verner’s Law

There are some correspondences in Germanic and European languages. They were firs studied and classified by German linguist Jacob Grimm in 1822. Grimm's Law explains regular correspondences between consonants in Germanic and other IE languages. They may be grouped into three acts.

However, not all the words show the correspondences classified by Grimm. The explanation was given in 1886 by Danish scholar Karl Verner. He proved that the change depends on the place of the stress. If the stress in IE languages was before [p, t, k], they changed according to Grimm's Law. If the stress followed the sounds [p, t, k], they became voiced occlusive.

Also the process of rhotacism was described: if the preceding vowel was unstressed, the sound [s] turned into [z] and then into [r].

4. The system of vowels in oe. Phonetic processes in oe vowels

Distinctive feature: there are symmetrical regularly opposed pares of long and short vowels.

Monophthongs: [a, a:, ae, ae:, e, e:, i, i:, o, o:, u, u:, y, y:].

Diphthongs: [ea, ea:, eo, eo:, ie, ie:, io, io:].

All the OE vowels are of the Germanic origin. Exceptions: phonemes [y] and [y:] which have appeared due to umlaut, which has not taken place in Gothic language.

Independent changes:

• PG [a] split into [ǽ], [o], [a]; [a:] → [ǽ:], [o:] (they were fronted). Gt. þata → þǽt (that); Gt. manna → mon (man).

• PG [ei, ai] changed into ME [i:]; [iu, au, eu] – [a:]. Gt. auso – eare (ear).

Dependent changes:

• Back mutation: the change of the root vowel under the influence of the back vowel in the inflection. In this case there developed a short glide between them, as the organs of speech prepared themselves for the transition from one sound to the other; and the glide together with the original monophthong formed a diphthong. The front vowels [i, e, æ] changed into diphthongs with a back glide [io, eo, ea].

• Breaking: the change of the root vowel to a diphthong before the combination of sounds [h], [ll] or [l] + other consonants, or [r] + other consonants: [e, æ, æ:] → [eo, ea, ea:].

• Diphthongization: caused by preceding palatal consonants: a glide arouse after palatal consonants as a sort of transition to the succeeding vowel. After the palatal consonants [k’], [sk’] and [j] short and long [e] and [æ] turned into diphthongs with a more front close vowel as their first element ([ie, ea, eo]).

• Palatal mutation: the fronting and raising of vowels through the influence of [i] or [j] in the immediately following syllable. The first vowel was fronted and made narrower to approach the articulation of [i]. The second vowel was usually lost or weakened to the neutral sound.

• Lengthening: took place before some groups of consonants: [ld, nd, mb]. When such consonant clusters were followed by one more consonant, the root vowel was not lengthened. Vowels were also lengthened when consonants immediately following them were dropped: [m/n + f, s, th, h].

• Contraction: the process of joining two vowels into one, mostly a diphthong after the loss of [h] between them.

• Narrowing: mid-open vowels turn into narrow ones before nasal consonants: [e, o, a, a:] → [I, u, o, o:].