Germanic languages.

Historical outline.
Phonetics.
Grammar.
Vocabulary.

1. The genealogical classification groups languages according to their origin. English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family of languages. The Germanic languages today are the following: English (spoken in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the South African Republic), German (Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, part of Switzerland), Netherlandish (the Netherlands, Belgium), Afrikaans (the South African Republic), Danish (Denmark), Swedish (Sweden, Finland), Norwegian (Norway), Icelandic (Iceland), Frisian (some regions of the Netherlands and Germany), Faroese (the Faroe Icelands), Yiddish (spoken in different countries).

The Germanic branch of Indo-European is characterized by systematic change in initial stops, a stress accent on the first syllable of the root, by the productive use of ablaut in verbs, by the use of a dental suffix in verb morphology, and by the use of strong and weak adjective conjugations.

Proto-Germanic (or Common Germanic) is the common ancestor (proto-language) of all the Germanic languages. The Proto-Germanic language is not preserved in any surviving texts, but has been reconstructed using the comparative method. However, a few surviving inscriptions in a runic script from Scandinavia dated to c. 200 are thought to represent a stage of Proto-Norse or Late Common Germanic immediately following the "Proto-Germanic" stage. Some loan-words from early Germanic which exist in neighbouring non-Germanic languages are believed to have been borrowed from Germanic during the Proto-Germanic phase; an example is Finnish and Estonian kuningas "king", which closely resembles the reconstructed Proto-Germanic kuningaz. Proto-Germanic descended from Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Germanic had only two tenses (preterite and present), compared to the six or seven in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Some of this difference is due to deflexion, featured by a loss of tenses present in Proto-Indo-European, for example the perfect tense. However, many of the tenses of the other languages (future, future perfect, probably pluperfect, perhaps imperfect) appear to be separate innovations in each of these languages, and were not present in Proto-Indo-European.

The Germanic languages were those of the barbarian tribes: Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Frisians, Teutons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Scandinavians. Their languages had distinctive characteristics of structure and pronunciation which are reflected in their descendants.

The Germanic tribes are firstly mentioned by the Greek historians of the II and I cc. BC, then by the Roman ones (I and II cc. AD). According to the Roman historians, the Germanic tribes inhabited the areas of Central Europe between the Odre and the Elbe; to the east of the Odre were the Gothic tribes who later moved southwards. During their expansion the Germanic tribes, who spoke an Indo-European language, mixed with other European tribes (the so-called Streitaxe- or Battle-axe people), who spoke another, unknown, language.

The Germans were occupied mainly in cattle farming but also started crop-growing. The land belonged to the kin and was cultivated by all the members of the kin. The most important decisions were taken by people’s council (þing), while the council of elders was there to solve less important problems. A military leader was chosen to head the troops at war time. Later on military leader’s power became heritable and turned into king’s power.

In our era there were distinguished three groups of Germanic languages: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. It is the classification of the written languages which have been preserved in records. The relations between the groups are represented in Picture 2. The tree in the picture shows the traditional division of Germanic into East, North, and West, however the

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