System of vowels

Indo-European system of vowels included 5 short and 5 long ones (a, o, u, i, e). The first three were used in stressed syllables and are considered the basic ones.

The change of stress had a great influence on the vowel system. We observe the processes of Ablaut and Umlaut.

Ablaut

The process of ablaut (from German ab- «off» + laut «sound») is a vowel change accompanying a change in grammatical function. For example, the vowel change in English from i to a to u in sing (present tense), sang – (past), sung (past-participle).

Umlaut

The process of umlaut (from German um- «around», «transformation» + laut «sound») is a modification of a vowel which causes it to be pronounced more to the front of the mouth to accommodate a vowel in the following syllable. This process is found in many — especially Germanic — languages. Example – woman – women. Note that English, being a Germanic language, has preserved some of these changes in irregular inflected forms such as man/men, tooth/teeth, long/length, old/elders, etc., even though it has lost the suffixes that originally caused them, and has changed their spelling.

Вопрос 15

Nominal Parts of Speech in Ancient Germanic languages

The general characteristic Germanic languages morphological system

The oldest Germanic languages have the typical complex inflected morphology of old Indo-European languages, with four or five noun cases (the nominative, dative, accusative, genitive, and instrumental.); verbs marked for person, number, tense and mood; multiple noun and verb classes; few or no articles; and rather free word order. The old Germanic languages are famous for having only two tenses (present and past). There were three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Gothic verbs had a number of archaic features inherited from PIE that were lost in the other Germanic languages with few traces, including dual endings, an inflected passive voice, and a class of verbs with reduplication in the past tense.

Among the primary innovations in Proto-Germanic are the preterite present verbs, a special set of verbs whose present tense looks like the past tense of other verbs and which is the origin of most modal verbs in English; a past-tense ending (in the so-called "weak verbs", marked with -ed in English) that appears variously as /d/ or /t/, often assumed to be derived from the verb "to do"; and two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics and definite semantics.

Вопрос 16

Nouns

Nouns were declined -- that is, the ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in the sentence.

Cases

n The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence (eg " cyning " means "king").

n The genitive case indicated possession (eg the " cyninges scip" is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship ").

n The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence (eg "hringas cyninge" means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king").

n The accusative indicates the direct object of the sentence (eg "Æþelbald lufode cyning" means "Æþelbald loved the king", where Æþelbald is the subject and the king is the object).

n The instrumental case indicates the agency whereby something was done, eg " lifde sweorde", "he lived by the sword", where "sweorde" is the instrumental form of "sweord").

Gender and Number

There were different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (eg "hring", one ring) or plural (" hringas", many rings).

Nouns are also categorized by grammatical gender – masculine (cyning), feminine (cwene), or neuter (maegden). Masculine and neuter words generally share their endings. Feminine words have their own subset of endings

There were 9 classes of noun stems in Germanic languages according to the stem-forming suffix. These suffixes were lost long ago, so this division is a historical one. There were the following classes:

· with the stem in –o-, e.g. daeg (day);

· with the stem in -a-, e.g. giba (give);

· with the stem in -i-, e.g. gasts (guest);

· with the stem in -u –, e.g. handus (hand);

· with the stem in -n-, e.g. nama (name);

· with the stem in -r-, e.g. fadar (father);

· with the stem in -s-, e.g. agis (awe);

· without suffixes –, e.g. nahts (night);

· with the stem in -nt-, e.g. freond (friend);

Here we can see one example of Noun declension:

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