Grammatical peculiarities of Germanic languages

Old Indo-European languages were synthetic, i.e. they showed grammatical relations by adding inflections rather than by means of function words or word order (which are employed to express grammatical relations in languages with analytical structure). The Common Germanic and the Old Germanic dialects were also synthetic. In Common Germanic various means of form-building were employed.

As shown above, in Common Germanic sound alternation within the root-morpheme (ablaut and umlaut) were extensively used in form-building. Sound alternations were usually combined with other means of form-building. In Primitive Indo-European ablaut and umlaut were confined only to verbs, but later, in Old Germanic dialects they came to be used in other parts of speech. Grammatical suffixes (endings) were by far the most extensively used means of form-building in all parts of speech. In PIE the word had a three-fold structure: the root, the stem-forming suffix and the inflection (ending). In early Common Germanic period inflectional suffixes (endings) must have been still distinctly separated from the preceding stem-forming suffix. But later, towards the end of the Common Germanic period, the inflectional suffix descending from the Indo-European either fused with the original stem-forming suffix or was altogether dropped. This resulted in the simplification of the word-structure. The word in Common Indo-European had two- element-structure: the root (which usually coincided with the stem) and the inflection.

Unlike inflectional suffixes prefixes were hardly ever used in Common Germanic. This is still a common feature of the Germanic languages. Grammatical prefixes were confined to the verb system. In the written monuments prefixes are used as markers of participle II or to express perfective meaning associated with the category of aspect.

e.g. OE l æ ran (to learn, to teach, an incomplete action); ʒe-l æ ran (to learn, to teach, выучить, a completed action); ʒe-l æ red (learned, выученный – Participle II).

Another means of form-building inherited from Indo-European is suppletive forms. This means was inherited by different languages of the Indo-European family but in Germanic languages it was restricted to such parts of speech as pronouns, adjectives and verbs.. T. A. Rastorguyeva in her book on history of the English language compares some suppletive forms of pronouns from languages of different groups. (Rastorguyeva 1969 page 63)

All these means of form-building passed from Common Germanic into the dialects and languages of the Germanic group to be preserved in them to a various extent in the process of further development: analytical forms developed in addition to synthetic ones, the tendency to analytical form-building was very strong. Analytical forms are preserved in all the subgroups of the Germanic group and this is an essential differentiating feature of the group. In Common Germanic this feature was not strong enough and not equally intensive in all Germanic languages. Nowadays the proportion of synthetic and analytical forms in different languages of the Germanic group varies. In modern English the number of analytical forms prevails over that of synthetic forms and the English language is referred to the type of languages with analytical structure.

Making a group of the Indo-European family Germanic languages possess the similar division of words into parts of speech with other groups. The following parts of speech are found in the Germanic group: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral (declinable parts of speech or nomina); the verb, the adverb, the conjunction and the preposition make the second group. All the inflected parts of speech, i.e. those having inflectional forms of declension and conjugation, possess certain grammatical categories. The number of the categories and the paradigms of different parts of speech differ with different languages of the Germanic group.

The most essential and the most complex issue of the common Germanic grammatical structure is presented by the verb. On the one hand, we observe the simplification of the Indo-European verb system in the process of passing from the Primitive Indo-European (PIE) to Common Germanic (PG) languages and the process of disintegration of the Common Germanic into separate Germanic languages. On the other hand, we see essential complications in the system of the verb.

The finite forms of the Indo-European showed agreement with the subject of the sentence through the categories of number and person. In this respect the loss of such an agreement testifies to some simplification in the system of the verb.

On the other hand,, the number of the verbal categories and the number of the forms expressing certain categories grew. The verb in Common Germanic inherited fron the Indo-European the category of mood showing the relation of the action to reality (Indicative, Imperative and Conjunctive or Subjunctive moods). Modern Germanic languages show a more complicated system of moods Within the Indicative and the Subjunctive moods the time of the action was shown by the category of tense (the Present and the Past, there was no future tense in the Old Germanic dialects).

There was no regular expression of aspect distinctions in the Old Germanic dialects, the latter being expressed by lexical rather than by grammatical means. Thus, aspect can hardly be regarded as a grammatical category at the stage of Common Germanic.

The category of voice did not exist in Common Germanic in the form known today, there was no strict opposition of the active and passive forms. In different Germanic languages the development of the category of voice proceeded in different ways: Gothic, for instance, developed the forms of the so-called medio-passive showing that the subject of the sentence was not the active doer of the action (cf. Gothic wasja – “I dress” and Gothic wasjada – “I am dressed”). The North Germanic sub-group developed the so-called reflexive voice forms opposed to the active voice. In the languages belonging to the Western subgroup voice distinctions were expressed by the descriptive passive constructions consisting of the auxiliary verbs beon/wesan and Participle II of the notional verb; the category of voice developed much later parallelly with the development of analytical forms.

The development of the so-called weak verbs, forming their past tense and participle II by adding the dental suffix –t /-d can undoubtedly be considered as simplification: the former Indo-European verbal inflections gradually wore off. They were not in themselves sufficient indicators of differences in tense. As a result of it ablaut (gradation of root vowels) was felt more and more as a real indication of tense.But neither gradation, nor the remaining endings were fit to make patterns for the formation of tenses in new verbs. Consequently we see very few additions to the wordstock of strong (the prototype of modern irregular verbs) verbs. A new type of weak verbs is constantly gaining ground: the dental suffix forming the past tense of the weak verbs was very extensively used in Old Germanic languages. This suffix is indeed one of the characteristic features of inflectional system of all Germanic languages

In Proto-Germanic reconstructed forms we observe a considerable simplification of the earliest Indo-European morphological system: the Common Germanic preserves only some relics of the dual number, the system of the Indo-European eight cases (see PIE and PG) is reduced to 4 or 5 (with the pronouns) cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental).

Thus we come to the conclusion that the grammatical system of the Germanic language group in the process of separation from the Indo-European language community and further disintegration of the Germanic group into separate languages the Germanic languages inherited a number of traits from the IE and the PG ancestors and developed their own specific features: the features that distinguish them from other languages of the IE family, on the one hand, and the distinctive features that characterize each of the Germanic languages within its subgroup and within the Germanic group. Thus,, each of the Germanic languages developed in the late common Germanic period in its own way, preserving the Common Germanic traits and parallelly acquiring its own specific features that distinguish it from cognate Germanic languages.

English, as well as other Germanic languages, in the process of its development showed a tendency towards analytical grammatical structure, but in it the tendency to analyticity was stronger than in other cognate languages due to the peculiar internal and external conditions of its development. In the process of its evolution the English language underwent more cardinal changes at every level of its structure (phonological, grammatical, lexemic) than any other Germanic language. It has dramatically changed in terms of linguistic type: from a highly synthetic language with developed systems of declension and conjugation it turned into an analytical one.

With respect to its relationship with other Germanic cognate languages it should be mentioned that the English of today is in more intimate relations with the languages of West Germanic subgroup (Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, German) than with those of the Northern subgroup. On the other hand, some modern languages of the Northern subgroups have preserved up to the present day a lot of grammatical peculiarities characteristic of the Western subgroup. Thus, in Modern Icelandic there has been preserved some grammatical peculiarities 1000 years before lost in Modern English. This accounts for the fact that Icelandic has more similarities in respect of its grammar with English than with any other language of the Germanic group.