voiceless plosives developed into voiceless fricatives (щелевые) – Act 1

Act 1

t > θ L tres – Gt Þreis- OIcel Þrir – ME three

k > x L cor- Gt hairto – OIcel hjarta – ME heart

Act 2

d > t L decem – Gt taihun – OIcel tiu- ME ten

g > k L iugum – Gt juk – OIcel ok – ME yoke [jouk] иго, рабство

Act 3

dh > ð ( or d) OIcel rudhira – Gt raūÞs – OIcel rauðr – ME red

gh > g L hostis – Gt gasts – OIcel gestr – ME guest

Another important series of changes were discovered in 19^th century by a Danish scholar Carl Verner. They are known as Verner’s Law. These changes seemed to contradict Grimm’s Law and were regarded as exceptions. According to Verner’s Law all the Early PG voiceless fricatives f, θ, x, and PIE s became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless.

PIE p > PG f>v pa’ter > Early PG fa’θar/ fa’ðar - > Late PG ‘faðar ME father

PIE k > PG x > g L so’crus- Gt swaihro- German schwager ( свекровь)

PIE s > PG z ( r ) L au’ris- Gt auso- OIcel eyra ME ear

PIE t > PG θ > ð,d OInd sa’tam – Gt hund – OIcel hundrað

The Old Germanic languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words. In later history all the Germanic languages developed analytical forms and ways of word connection.

The grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion.

The suppletive way was inherited from ancient IE, was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

L Fr R Gt OIcel OE NE

ego je я ik ek ic I

Inflections were the principal means of form- building and they corresponded to the inflections used in non-Germanic but most of them were shorter and simpler.

The wide use of sound interchanges has always been a characteristic feature of the Germanic group.

OE ME German

beran bear gebären

bær bore (sg) gebar

bæron (pl) -

boren born geboren

bīrÞ bears -

The bulk of the verbs in PG and in the OG languages fall into two large groups called strong and weak. Grimm proposed these terms and called the verbs strong because they had preserved the richness of form since the age of the parent language when weak verbs lacked such variety of form.

The strong verbs built their principal forms with the help of root vowel interchanges plus grammatical endings. The weak verbs built the tense by inserting a special suffix between the root and the ending.

It was believed that the Germanic languages had a large number of words which have no parallels in other groups of the IE family. But it appears that Germanic has inherited many IE features in lexis. The Germanic vocabulary is made up of words shared by most IE languages. They are plants and animals, verbs denoting basic activities of a man, some pronouns and numerals. They include word-building affixes and grammatical inflections.