The Common Germanic Diachronic Typological Constant

The languages of the Germanic branch are considered to have diverged from the common form labelled Proto-Germanic. The descendants of this protolanguage fall into three groups: East Germanic, West Germanic, and North Germanic.

All East Germanic languages are now dead. There is only a small number of Burgundian and Vandalic proper names at our disposal. Written records are unavailable excepting Gothic. By the third century, the Goths had spread from the Baltic Sea to the shore of the Black SeaGothic survived longest in the Crimea (until the 16th century).

The North Germanic languages are spoken in Iceland, Scandinavia, and Denmark.

The most popular modern North Germanic languages are Danish and Swedish. Danish is the language of Denmark and the written language of Norway. Another North Germanic language is Icelandic English is a West Germanic language Apart from English and German it comprises Netherlandish, Frisian( in Friesland), Afrikaans, and Yiddish(Jewish language).

Afrikaans is one of the two official European languages (the other is English) in the Republic of South Africa. In 1925 it acquired the status of an official language together with English.

Yiddish, and especially Afrikaans are relatively young. It is quite clear they are not direct descendants of the prщ to-Germanic tongue.

Old Germanic languages (like other Indo-European tongues) used to be inflecting and synthetic. Such was their original type. There is no denying the fact that the Germanic languages have seen structural changes of different intensity in the course of their history. Some of them (such as English and Danish) have practically changed their type altogether. The rest have undergone important qualitative changes in their subsystems at different levels, their quantity being still too small to cause any radical typological reconstruction of the overall system. The evidence obtained from recent investigations into diachronic typology and the history of the Germanic languages enables ncholars to recognize the common diachronic typological constant in the historical development of these tongues.

This constant consists of the gradual decay of the former Inflecting, synthetic characteristics and stable tendency towards analyticism, isolation and (or) agglutination.

M.M.Guchmanri suggested the analogy with the pyramid to

show the intensity of this process in the word-changing para-

digms of the Germanic languages. We find it useful to interpret the whole set of structural innovations in the system of the Germanic languages in the light of Guchmann's analogy. Actually, in later volumes,we will try to show, by way of corroboration of her f undamental idea, some of the most significant manifestations of the above-mentioned constant at different levels of the English language system throughout its history.For this purpose we shall have to break with the general practice of historians to confine the description of the emergence of analyticism to the morphological level only and underestimate or even ignore agglutinative and isolating tendencies altoge - ther. As a prelude to the analysis of the historical processes affecting the state of the English language system , we propose an illustration of the analogy with the pyramid.(See page 26). The base of the'pyramid is associated with the original inflecting type and synthetic technique: the top - with analyticism and the newly-acquired features of isolation and (or) agglutination. Afrikaans and English are approximating to the top» they nearly crown the pyramid. The rest of the languages are distributed further down in accordance with the intensity of the manifestation of the common typological constant in their systems.

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