- •Contents
- •Unit 2: The Comparative Method ………………………..8 Unit 3: The First Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s Law ………………………10
- •Unit 1 The Indo-European Family
- •Centum and Satem Groups of ie Languages
- •Unit 2 The Comparative Method
- •Unit 3 The First Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s Law
- •Exceptions to Grimm’s law:
- •Unit 4 The Accent Shift and Verner’s Law
- •Rhotacism
- •The Palatal Mutation
- •Unit 6 The Early Germans
- •The Life and Social Organization of the Germans
- •The Great Migration
- •Unit 7 Ancient Germanic Tribes and Their Classification
- •The Proto-Germanic Language
- •Unit 8 The East Germanic Group The Goths
- •Ulfilas and the Gothic Bible
- •Unit 9 The North Germanic Group
- •Unit 10 Northern Mythology
- •The Joys of Valhalla
- •Thor and the Other Gods
- •The Death of Balder
- •Unit 11 The West Germanic Group
- •Unit 12 Old English
- •Three Periods of the History of English
- •Unit 13 Old English Alphabet and Pronunciation
- •Diphthongs
- •Consonants in Old English
- •Unit 14 Some Phonetic Changes of the Old English Period
- •Stressed Vowels
- •Oe Fracture, or Breaking
- •II. Unstressed Vowels
- •III. Consonants
- •Palatalization of Velar Consonants
- •Voicing and Unvoicing of Fricatives
- •Metathesis
- •IV. Word Stress
- •Unit 15 The Noun Grammatical Categories
- •Declensions
- •Unit 16 The Adjective
- •The Weak Declension
- •D. Other classes of pronouns
- •Unit 18 The Verb
- •Mutation or Umlaut
- •The Grammatical Forms and Categories of the Verb
- •Unit 19 Strong Verbs
- •Weak Verbs
- •To Class III belong only four verbs:
- •Preterite-Present Verbs
- •Irregular Verbs
- •Unit 20 The Middle English Period Early Middle English
- •Changes in the Orthographic System
- •Unit 21 Middle English Phonetic Changes
- •Consonants
- •Unstressed Vowels
- •Stressed Vowels
- •Quantitative Changes
- •Qualitative Changes
- •Monophthongs
- •New Diphthongs
- •Unit 22 Middle English Morphology Nouns
- •Articles
- •Pronouns
- •Adjectives
- •Unit 23 The Formation of the National English Language
- •The Great Vowel Shift (gvs)
- •Unit 25 The Mood
- •Conjugation of Strong Verbs
- •Conjugation of Weak Verbs
- •Unit 26 Development of the System of Verbids and Their Grammatical Categories
- •Unit 27 Syntactic Structure
- •Unit 28
- •Varieties of English
- •Unit 29 Etymological Composition of the English Vocabulary
- •Unit 30 The connection of the history of the English language with the history of the English people
Unit 7 Ancient Germanic Tribes and Their Classification
According to Pliny the Elder, Germanic tribes could be divided into the following groups:
The Vindili /ˈvindilai/. They inhabited the eastern part of Germanic territory (the Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, etc.).
The Ingaevones /'inʤi:vəunz/(or Ingvaeones). They inhabited the north-western part of Germanic territory, i.e. the shores of the North Sea (the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians).
The Iscaevones (or Istaevones). These inhabited the western part of Germanic territory, on the Rhine (the Franks).
The Hermiones (or Herminones). These inhabited the southern part of Germanic territory, i.e. what is now Southern Germany (the Alemans, Bavarians, Thuringians, etc.).
The Peucini and Bastarni. These lived close to the Dacians, i.e. close to what is now Rumania.
The Hilleviones, who inhabited Scandinavia.
In the 19th century linguists accepted Pliny’s classification, introducing only one amendment: Group 5 was excluded.
The relation between the classification of Germanic tribes based on Pliny’s work and that of Germanic languages based on analyses made by 19th-century linguists appears in the following form:
East Germanic (Vindili),
West Germanic (Ingaevones, Iscaevones, Hermiones),
North Germanic (Hilleviones).
In due course these groups of Germanic dialects, or languages, split into separate Germanic languages.
The traditional classification of Germanic languages was corrected in the 20th century. It has been discovered that Proto-Germanic originally split into two main groups and that the above-mentioned division represents a later stage of its history.
The earliest migration of the Germanic tribes from the lower valley of the Elbe river consisted in their movement north, to the Scandinavian peninsula, a few hundred years before our era. This geographical segregation must have led to linguistic differentiation and to the division of Proto-Germanic into the northern and southern, or continental, branches. At the beginning of our era some of the tribes, e.g. the Goths, returned to the mainland and settled closer to the Vistula basin, east of the other continental Germanic tribes. It is only from this stage of their history that the Germanic languages can be described under three headings: East Germanic, West Germanic and North Germanic [Rastorguyeva 1983].
The Proto-Germanic Language
The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic language (PG). It is the linguistic ancestor or the parent-language of the Germanic group of languages. It is supposed to have split from the other Indo-European languages between the 15th and 10th centuries BC.
As the Indo-Europeans extended over a larger territory, the ancient Germans (or Teutons /'tju:t(ә)nz/) moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. It is here that they developed their first specific linguistic features which made them a separate group in the Indo-European family.
Proto-Germanic is an entirely pre-historical language. It was never recorded in written form. In the 19th century it was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidence in descendant languages.
It is believed that at the earliest stages of history Proto-Germanic was fundamentally one language, though dialectally coloured. In its later stages dialectal differences grew, so that towards the beginning of our era the Germanic language appears divided into dialectal groups and tribal dialects. Dialectal differenciation increased with the migration and geographical expansion of the Germans.