Gramatyka historyczna 07.12.2012

Indo-European to Proto-Germanic

1. Its own lexical stock – different form of words

   1. Broad, drink, drive, fowl, hold, meat, rain wife – similar words in German, but not in Italian i.e.

2. All Indo-European distinctions of tense and aspect were lost in the verb save for (except from) the present and preterit (past) tenses. – conjugation of the verb only for present and past tenses, for future they were lost (morphologically). Nothing in the verb itself that refers to future (in present –s ending, in past-ed).

Indicative Mood, Active voice.

Indicative mood, passive voice

Subjunctive mood, active voice

Subjunctive mood, passive voice.

1. Germanic developed a preterit tense form with dental suffix containing d or t. Apart from all the way of showing past tense (ablauted [grammatical change of the vowel – sing-sang])developed a way with ending d or t (like-liked, walk-walked). V’s are divided into strong and weak verbs. Weak takes d or t, strong changes its vowel.

   1. Weak verbs: step-stepped, talk – talked

   2. Strong verbs: rise – rose, sing – sang (historically speaking they were regular, but there were 7 classes of them. They were predictable like drink0drank-drunk, sing-sang-sung – they are still regular. There are some verbs that there is no way of predicting – like the verb “to be”, “to do” – they are IRREGULAR.

   3. Bring, think and buy – brought, thought, bought? – vowel changes and –t is added – they are weak verbs, because dental suffix is the TRUE TEST – IS THERE IS DENTAL SUFFIX IT’S A WEAK VERB !!!. DOESN’T MATTER THAT THE VOWEL CHANGES. Strong verbs are those which form past tense only by change of the vowel.

2. All the older forms of Germanic had two ways of declining their adjectives: weak and strong. Adj are used in NP – a nice girl. NP can be preceded by DET. In Germanic languages it mattered if the NP was preceded by the DET or not.

   1. The weak declension: …………………………….. “the young fellows”(churls)

   2. The strong declension: geonge ceorlas ‘young fellows’

Adjectives in English take inflectional forms of comparative and superlative, so in present English we won’t find strong and weak. In Polish, declension of adj is difficult. They are inflected by gender, number and case. It occurred in Old English. There is no strong declension in Polish, because the form doesn’t change – that’s because Polish is not a Germanic language.

1. The ‘free” accentual system of I-E gave way to another type of accentuation in which the 1^st syllable of the root was regularly stressed. – In Proto-Indo-European the accent(stress) was free, it could go in any syllable of the word, 1^st , 2^nd, couldn’t predict, we had to learn. When Germanic language developed they decided to stress the first syllable of the root.

   1. Latin: v’iri’ men; vir’orum ‘of the men’ – the stress moved to the 2^nd syllable. More or less like in Polish – panie – paniami. There are some rules in Polish – penaltiment? syllable is stressed.

   2. Russian -

   3. In English stress in forgive, today, believe is on 2^nd syllable, because prefix is not the part of the root, so 1^st syllable of the root is stressed.

2. I-E vowels underwent Germanic modification

   1. I-E o was retained in Latin but became a in Germanic (L octo ‘eight; Gothic ahtau).

3. The First Consonantal Shift or Grimm’s Law (2000-500 BC).

   1. What is important when describing consonants – place of articulation (velar, alveolar etc.), manner of articulation (plosives, affricates etc. ), nasality, voicing (voiced and voiceless of course).

Voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives. Voiced stops became voiceless stops.

They became fricatives. Change of b,d,g into p,t,k. (1^st p,t,k into f, O(th), H(fricative), and then into b,d,g. If d changes into t it stays t, doesn’t go further, this is a separate process. In P-I-E there were aspirated sounds (pronunciation of the consonants). Aspirated sounds in English are not separate phonemes. Apirated sound in English: p,t,k. In English voiceless stops are not phonemes – they are allophones of p,t,k sounds. (allophone is practical realisation of phoneme, depending on the context. Complimentary distribution – only one version of sth can be used in particular context. We can’ aspirate final syllable - non audable release. In the beginning of the stressed syllable we aspirate, at the end we can’t.

In P-I-E there were sounds like voiced aspirated stops, and they became voiced stops. In the process described, they lost their voicing. Voiced aspirated stops phonemically still exist in Hindi.

Voiced aspirated stops became voiced stops.

IE*/p/>PG*/f/>OE/f/ IE*/plnós-/ (pełny)> OE ‘full’

IE*/pet-ro-/ (pióro)> OE fe(p)er (dzwine pb) ‘feather’

IE*/ped-/> OE fót

IE*/t/ > PG */(th sound)/ IE*/treies-/ (trzy) > OE ‘three’

IE*/k/ >PG * /h/ > OE /h, ……?

Initially - /h/ IE*/kerd-? (serce)> OE heorte, ‘heart’

Medially – IE*/dekm/ (dziesięć) > OE tien, ‘ten’

Before a voiceless consonant or finally.

IE*/b/ > PG * /p/ > OE /p/ IE* /abl-/ (jabłko) > OE aepp(e)l ‘apple’

IE*/leb-/> OE lippa “lip”

IE*/d/ > PG * /t/ > OE /t/ IE*/duo(u)-/ (dwa) > OE twa, two

IE*/g/ > PG */k/ > OE /k/ IE*/genu-/> OE cneow ‘ knee’

Agro – acre

IE*/b^h/ > PG */b/ > OE /b/ IE*/b^heb^hrus/ (bóbr) > OE beofor ‘beaver’

/d^h/ /d/ /med^hu/ (miód) OE medu, mead

/g^h/ /g/ /g^hans/ goose

Polish still keeps the original sounds.