Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Seminar LVP 2
Seminar LVP 2
1
- The original voiced stops (b, d, g) changed to voiceless ones (p, t, k) in the Germanic
languages, so that Latin cannabis = English hemp, Latin decem = English ten, Latin
genu = English knee.
- In High German some of these consonants underwent a further change, known as the
Second or High German Sound-Shift. It accounts for such differences as we see in
English open and German offen, English eat and German essen.
The formulation of all these correspondences is known as Grimm’s Law. The cause of
the change is not known. It must have taken place sometime after the segregation of the
Germanic from the neighbouring dialects of the parent language. There are words in Finnish
borrowed from Germanic which do not show the change, and which therefore must have
resulted from a contact between Germanic and Finnish before the change occurred. There is
also evidence that the shifting was still occurring as late as about the fifth century B.C. It is
often assumed that the change was due to contact with a non-Germanic population. The contact
could have resulted from the migration of the Germanic tribes or from the penetration of a
foreign population into Germanic territory. Whatever its cause, the Germanic sound-shift is the
most distinctive feature marking off the Germanic languages from the languages to which they
are related.
Certain apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law were subsequently explained by Karl
Verner and others. It was noted that between such a pair of words as Latin centum and English
hundred the correspondence between c and h was according to the rule, but that between t and
d was not. The d in the English word should have been a voiceless spirant, that is, a þ. In 1875
Verner showed that when the Indo-European accent was not on the vowel immediately
preceding, such voiceless spirants became voiced in Germanic. In West Germanic the resulting
ð became a d, and the word hundred is therefore quite regular in its correspondence to centum.
The explanation was of importance in accounting or the forms of the preterite tense in many
strong verbs. Thus, in Old English, the preterite singular of cweþan (to say) is ic cwæþ but the
plural is we cwǽdon. In the latter word the accent was originally on the ending, as it was in the
past participle (cweden), where we also have a d. The formulation of this explanation is known
as Verner’s Law, and it was of great importance in vindicating the claim of regularity for the
sound changes which Grimm’s Law had attempted to define.
Old English possess a “weak” as well as a “strong” declension of the adjective and a
distinctive type of conjugation of the verb – the so-called weak or regular verbs such as
fill, filled, filled, which form their past tense and past participle by adding –ed or some
analogous sound to the stem of the present. It shows the adoption of a strong stress
accent on the first or root syllable of most words (this is obscured in Modern English by
the large number of words borrowed from Latin). This is a feature of great importance
in Germanic languages, since it is chiefly responsible for the progressive decay of
inflections in these languages. In the second place it means that English belongs with
German and certain other languages because of features which it has in common with
them and which enable us to distinguish a West Germanic group as contrasted with the
Scandinavian languages (North Germanic) and Gothic (East Germanic). These features
have to do mostly with certain phonetic changes, especially the germination or doubling
of consonants under special conditions, matters which we do not need to enter upon
here. And it means, finally, that English, along with the other languages of Northern
Germany and the Low Countries, did not participate in the further modification of
certain consonants, known as the Second or High German Sound-Shift. In other words
it belongs with the dialects of the lowlands in the West Germanic area.
2
main periods. Like all in history, the periods of the English language are matters of
convenience and the dividing lines between them purely arbitrary. There is no break in the
process of continuous transition. But within each of the periods it is possible to recognize
certain broad characteristics and certain special developments that take place.
1. The period from 450 to 1150 is known as Old English. It is sometimes described as the
period of full inflections, since during most of this period the endings of the noun, the
adjective, and the verb are preserved more or less unimpaired.
2. From 1150 to 1500 the language is known as Middle English. (Some of the
developments which distinguish Middle English begin as early as the tenth century, but
a consideration of the matter as a whole justifies the date 1150 as the general line of
demarcation.) During this period the inflections, which had begun to break down
towards the end of the Old English period, become greatly reduced, and it is
consequently known as the period of leveled inflections.
3. The language since 1500 is called Modern English. By the time we reach this stage in
the development a large part of the original inflectional system has disappeared entirely
and we therefore speak of it as the period of lost inflections. The progressive decay of
inflections is only one of the developments which mark the evolution of English and its
various stages.
3
Practical exercises
Grimm’s and Verner’s laws
HIDDEN ROOTS
Some Indo-European roots have been highly productive in the various Indo-European
descendant languages. Through subsequent borrowing, English has occasionally acquired dozens
of words from the same Indo-European root. However, the original root may be difficult to spot
because it has undergone so many phonological changes in the various languages and because it
had different affixed forms in the original Indo-European. Among the more prolific Indo-
European roots is *bhā- “to speak”. One Latin form of this root has given us affable, fate, (in)effable,
infant, infantry and preface. Other Latin forms are responsible for banish, contraband, fame, infamous,
confess, profess. Greek versions of IE *bhā- give Modern English aphasia, prophet, euphemism,
blasphemous, blame, and the highly productive phone (as in telephone, phonetics and symphony). From Old
English itself we have ban and banns, from Old Norse boon, from Old French abandon and banal,
and from Italian, bandit.
In most of these derivatives, the core meaning “to speak” is obvious. For example,
blasphemous means ‘speaking badly of something holy’, ineffable means ‘unable to be spoken or
expressed in words’ and a telephone ‘let us speak at a distance’. In other instances, the semantic
connection is harder to detect, but it can usually be ferreted out with a little effort and imagination.
An infant is someone unable (too young) to speak. Both a ban and banns were ones spoken publicly.
Bandit comes from an Italian verb meaning ‘to band together’, that is ‘to have been summoned by
speaking’.
PRACTICE:
Give the PDE reflex (descendant) of the following reconstructed Indo-European (IE) roots.
Every example includes at least one application of Grimm’s Law or Verner’s Law or both. Because
the development of vowels from IE to PDE is extremely complex, you will have to ignore the
vowels for this exercise. Concentrate on consonant correspondences. The part-of-speech category
may have changed, and the meaning may be slightly different.
If we know that grain in IE is *gr -no-, why are we certain that grain is a borrowed word and not a
native word in English?