Vowel Gradation with Special Reference to Verbs

Form-building Means

GRAMMAR

Like other old IE languages both PG and the OG 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.

In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion.

The suppletive /sə'pli:tiv/ way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE, it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

Compare the following forms of pronouns in Germanic and non-Germanic languages:

L	Fr	R	Gt	ОIcel	OE	NE
ego mei mihi	je mon me, moi	я	ik	ek	ic	I
меня	meina	min	min	my, mine
мне	mis	mer	me	me

The principal means of form-building were inflections. The inflections found in OG written records correspond to the inflections used in non-Germanic languages, having descended from the same original IE prototypes. Most of them, however, were simpler and shorter, as they had been shortened and weakened in PG.

The wide use of sound interchanges has always been a characteristic feature of the Germanic group. This form-building (and word-building) device was inherited from IE and became very productive in Germanic. In various forms of the word and in words derived from one and the same root, the root-morpheme appeared as a set of variants. The consonants were relatively stable, the vowels were variable (Consonant interchanges were also possible but rare. They appeared in PG due to voicing of fricatives under Verner's Law but were soon levelled out).

Table 6 shows the variability of the root *ber- in different grammatical forms and words.

Table 6

Variants of the Root *bef-

	Old Germanic languages	Modern Germanic languages
Gt	О Icel	OE	Sw	G	NE
forms of the verb bear	bairan bar berum baurans	bera bar barum borinn	beran b r b ron boren birp	bära bar buro buren	gebären gebar — geboren	bear bore (sg) (pl) born bears
other words from the same root	barn baur	barn burðr byrð	bearn ʒbyrd	barn	Geburt	barn (dial. 'child') birth

Vowel interchanges found in Old and Modern Germanic languages originated at different historical periods. The earliest set of vowel interchanges, which dates from PG and PIE, is called vowel gradation or ablaut /'æblaut/. Ablaut is an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions; different vowels appear in the same environment, surrounded by the same sounds (all the words in Table 6 are examples of ablaut with the exception of the forms containing [i] and [y] which arose from positional changes.

Vowel gradation did not reflect any phonetic changes but was used as a special independent device to differentiate between words and grammatical forms built from the same root.

Ablaut was inherited by Germanic from ancient IE. The principal gradation series used in the IE languages – [e~o] – can be shown in Russian examples: нести~ноша. This kind of ablaut is called qualitative, as the vowels differ only in quality. Alternation of short and long vowels, and also alternation with a "zero" (i.e. lack of vowel) represent quantitative ablaut:

Prolonged grade Normal or full grade Reduced grade (zero grade)

(long vowel) (short vowel) (neutral vowel or loss of vowel)

ē e

L lēgi 'elected' lego 'elect'

R – e~o

беру – сбор брал

The Germanic languages employed both types of ablaut – qualitative and quantitative, – and their combinations. In accordance with vowel changes which distinguished Germanic from non-Germanic the gradation series were modified: IE [e~o] was changed to [e/i~a]; likewise, quantitative ablaut [a~a:] was reflected in Germanic as a quantitative-qualitative series [a~o:]. Quantitative ablaut gave rise to a variety of gradation series in Germanic owing to different treatment of the zero-grade in various phonetic conditions.

Of all its spheres of application in Germanic ablaut was most consistently used in building the principal forms of the verbs called strong. Each form was characterised by a certain grade; each set of principal forms of the verb employed a gradation series. Gradation vowels were combined with other sounds in different classes of verbs and thus yielded several new gradation series. The use of ablaut in the principal forms of 'bear' was shown in Table 6. The Gothic verbs in Table 6 give the closest possible approximation to PG gradation series, which were inherited by all the OG languages and were modified in accordance with later phonetic changes.

Table 7

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