What is the name of the first Germanic alphabet?
Who created the Germanic alphabet?
Who is Jacob Grimm? Carl Verner?
What English words are of Proto-Germanic origin?
DATA BASE - Peculiar Characteristics Of The Germanic Languages
Written records of the Germans
The Germanic tribes used runes, Gothic alphabet and Latin alphabet.
Runes were the most ancient characters used by Germanic tribes. They date from the 2nd century AD. At first runes were the marks of mysterious or magic significance. The word RUNE meant MYSTERY. Later it began to be used in the meaning of LETTER. There are several types of runic alphabets. In the most widely spread one there were 24 runes. Runes were used by all Germanic tribes, especially Scandinavians who made their inscriptions on the rock, wood and bone.
The Germanic runic alphabet is called FUTHARK after the first six letters.
The first Germanic alphabet is said to have been created by Ulfilas. It was based on the Greek characters with some Latin letters and some runes in addition.
The Latin characters were brought to the Germans by Roman monks who began to christi a nize the Germanic tribes in the 6th century. They set up schools and taught the Germans Latin. For this purpose they made translation of Roman church texts into the language of Germanic tribes writing the Germanic words in Latin characters. But some additions had to be done to the Latin alphabet because it was impossible to express all the sounds of the Germanic language by Latin letters.
The General characteristics of the Germanic languages
2. All the Germanic languages of the past and present have common linguistic features; some of these features are shared by other groups in the IE family, others are specifically Germanic. Read a passage below and fill in the chart.
| PIE | PG | |
| Word Stress | ||
| Consonants | ||
| Vowels | ||
| Grammar | ||
| Vocabulary |
Word Stress
It is known that in ancient IE there existed two ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, which means that it could fall on any syllable of the word – a root-morpheme, an affix or an ending – and could be shifted both in form-building and word-building. In Early PG word stress was still movable but in Late PG its position in the word was stabilized. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix; the other syllables – suffixes and endings – were unstressed.
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Consonants. Proto-Germanic consonant shift
The consonants in Germanic look ‘shifted’ as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic languages.
The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated in terms of a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19th c. and are often called Grimm’s Law.
It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic consonant shift.
Grimm’s Law had three acts:
1. The IE voiceless stops [p], [t], [k] became Germanic voiceless fricatives [f], [th], [x]
2. IE voiced stops [b], [d], [g] became Germanic voiceless stops [p], [t], [k]
3. PIE aspirated voice stops [bh], [dh], [gh] became PG voiced stops [b], [d], [g] without aspiration.
Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19th c. by a Danish scholar, Carl Verner. They are known as Verner’s Law. Verner’s Law explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm’s Law and were for a long time regarded as exceptions.
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