Universidade Maxixe- Maxixe

English course

Subject: History of English

Topic: Sum up

Year-2, 2020

Lecture: MA. Carlos João Rafael

Student: Leonardo Teco

MAIN DIVISIONS OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN GROUP

Others Indo-European languages survive only in scanty remains. It is likely that others have
disappeared without living sign. Members of survived staid as living tongues. The Indo-
European languages either are satem languages or centum languages and they are respectively
the Avestan and Latin words for hundred. These two groups are differentiated by their
development of Indo-European palatal k. In Indo-European, palatal k was a distinct phoneme
from velar k.) In the satem languages—Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian—the
two k sounds remained separate phonemes, and the palatal k became a sibilant. In the other Indo-
European languages, the two k sounds became a single phoneme, either remaining a k, as in
Greek katon and Welsh cant, or shifting to h in the Germanic group, as in Old English hund. In
general, the centum languages tend to be spoken in the West and the satem languages in the East,
although Tocharian, the easternmost of all Indo-European tongues, belongs to the centum group.

Celtic
It illustrates such impressive exchange with Italic in its verbal system and inflectional endings
that the relevance between them must have been close, though not so close as that between Indic
and Iranian or Baltic and Slavic. Some scholars therefore group them together as developments
of a branch they call Italo-Celtic. Some scholars joined together as developments of a branch
they call Italo-Celtic. The Celts were diffused over a huge territory in Europe long before the
emergence in history of the Germanic peoples. Before the beginning of the Christian era, Celtic
languages were spoken over the greater part of central and western Europe. By the latter part of
the third century B.C. Celts had spread even to Asia Minor, in the region called for them Galatia
to whose inhabitants Saint Paul wrote one of his epistles. The Celtic language spoken in
Gaul gave way completely to the Latin spoken by the Roman conquerors, which was to develop
into French. Roman rule did not prevent the British Celts from using their own language,
although they borrowed a good many words from Latin. But after the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
arrived, British (Brythonic) Celtic was more severely threatened.
It outlived, however, and manufactured a differentiated literature in the later Middle Ages,
including the Mabinogion and many Arthurian stories. In impressive contrast to their wide
distribution in earlier times, today the Celtic languages are restricted to a few relatively small
areas abutting the Atlantic Ocean on the northwest coast of Europe.

Germanic
The Germanic group is privately significant for us because it contains English. Over many
centuries, certain radical developments occurred in the language spoken by those Indo-European
speakers living in Denmark and the regions thereabout. Proto-Germanic our term for that
language, was applicable unified and distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, accentual
system, and word stock. Unluckily nowadays those who spoke this particular development not
write. Proto-Germanic is to German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and English as Latin is
to Italian, French, and Spanish. But Proto- Germanic, which was probably being spoken shortly
before the beginning of the Christian era, must be reconstructed just like Indo-European, whereas
Latin is amply recorded. Because Germanic was spread over a large area, it eventually developed
marked dialectal differences leading to a division into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East
Germanic. The North Germanic languages are Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and
Faeroese. The West Germanic languages are High German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, and
English. Yiddish developed from medieval High German dialects, with many words from
Hebrew and Slavic. Before World War II, it was a sort of international language of the Jews,
with a literature of high quality. Afrikaans is a development of seventeenth-century Dutch
spoken in South Africa. Pennsylvania Dutch is now a High German dialect spoken by
descendants of early American settlers from southern Germany and Switzerland. The only East
Germanic language of which we have any detailed knowledge is Gothic. All Germanic
languages, aside from a few proper names recorded by classical authors, a few loanwords in
Finnish, and some runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia. Gothic disappeared a long time ago
without leaving a trace. No modern Germanic languages are derived from it, nor do any of the
other Germanic languages have any Gothic loanwords. Vandalic and Burgundian were
apparently also East Germanic in structure, but we know little more of them than a few proper
names. . The general eighteenth-century sense of the word was ‘barbarous, savage, in bad taste
the term was used for the type fonts formerly used to print German. Then it denoted a genre of
novel set in a desolate or remote landscape, with mysterious or macabre characters and often a
violent plot. More recently it was applied to an outré style of dress, cosmetics, and coiffure,
featuring the color black and accompanied by heavy metal adornments and body piercing in
unlikely parts of the anatomy. Thus the name of a people and a language long ago lost to history
survives in uses that have nothing to do with the Goths and would doubtless have both puzzled
and amazed them.

COGNATE WORDS IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

Here the Words that belong to the same source are said to be cognate. Thus the verb roots
meaning ‘bear, carry’ in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Old English are cognate, all being
developments of Indo-European *bher-. Cognate words do not necessarily look similar because
their relevance may be disguised by sound changes that have affected their forms differently.
Some cognate words have been preserved in all Indo-European languages. These common
related words contain the numerals from one to ten, the word meaning the sum of ten tens words
for certain bodily part words for certain natural phenomena and certain cultural terms. Cognates
of practically all our taboo words—those monosyllables that pertain to sex and excretion and that
seem to cause great pain to many people—are to be found throughout the Indo-European
languages. Historically, if not socially, those ancient words are just as legitimate as any others.
There is no special training to perceive the correspondences between these words
Latin Greek Welsh English Icelandic Dutch
ūnus oinē1 un one einn ee
Comparison of the forms for the number ‘two’ indicates that non-Germanic [d] corresponds to
Germanic [t].

MAJOR CHANGES FROM INDO-EUROPEAN TO GERMANIC

One group of Indo-European speakers, the Germanic peoples, settled in northern Europe near
Denmark. Germanic differentiated from earlier Indo-European in the following ways:
First, Germanic has a large number of words that have no known cognates in other Indo-
European languages. The Germanic languages also share a common influence from Latin.
Second, Germanic languages have only two tenses: the present and the preterit. This
simplification of a much more complex Indo-European verbal system is reflected in English
bind–bound, as well as in German binden–band and Old Norse binda–band. Third, Germanic
developed a preterit tense form with a dental suffix, that is, one containing d or t in spelled form
alongside an older pattern of changing the vowels inside a verb. Fourth, All the older forms of
Germanic had two ways of declining their adjectives. The weak declension was used chiefly
when the adjective modified a definite noun and was preceded by the kind of word that
developed into the definite article. Fifth, the “free” accentual system of Indo-European, in which
the accent shifted from one syllable to another in various forms of a word, gave way to the
Germanic type of accentuation in which the first syllable was regularly stressed, except in verbs
like modern believe and forget with a prefix, whose stress was on the first syllable of the root. In
the Greek forms, the accent may occur on the suffix, the ending, or the root, unlike the Old
English forms, which have their accent fixed on the first syllable of the root. Germanic accent is
also predominantly a matter of stress rather than pitch; Indo-European seems to have had both
types of accent at different stages of its development. Sixth, Some Indo-European vowels were
modified in Germanic. Indo-European o was retained in Latin but became a in Germanic
Conversely, Indo-European ā became Germanic ō. And at last, the Indo-European stops bh, dh,
gh; p, t, k; b, d, g were all changed in what is called the First Sound Shift or Grimm’s Law.
These changes were gradual, extending over long periods of time, but the sounds eventually
appear in Germanic languages as, respectively, b, d, g; f, θ, h; p, t, k.

FIRST SOUND SHIFT

Grimm’s Law
Due to the fact that the First Sound Shift, represented by Grimm’s Law, is such an important
distinguishes between Germanic and other Indo-European languages, we illustrate it below by
reconstructed Indo-European roots or words corresponding words from a non-Germanic
language and corresponding native English words. Indo-European bh, dh, gh, represented
phonetically by a superscript became respectively the Germanic voiced fricatives β, ð, ɣ, and
later, in initial position at least, b, d, g. Stated in phonetic terms, aspirated voiced stops became
voiced fricatives and then unaspirated voiced stops. These Indo-European aspirated sounds also
underwent changes in most non-Germanic languages.

Verner’s Law
Others words in the Germanic languages show up to have an irregular development of Indo-
European p, t, and k. Instead of the expected f, θ, and x (or h), we find β, ð, and ɣ (or their later
developments). For example, Indo-European pətēr would have been expected to appear in
Germanic with a medial θ. Instead we find Gothic fadar, Icelandic fað ir, and Old English fæder.
It appears that Indo-European t has become ð instead of θ. This seeming anomaly was explained
by a Danish scholar named Karl Verner in 1875. Verner noticed that the Proto-Germanic
voiceless fricatives (f, θ, x, and s) became voiced fricatives (β, ð, ɣ, and z) unless they were
prevented by any of three conditions: being the first sound in a word, being next to another
voiceless sound.

The Sequence of the First Sound Shift

Here the consonant changes described by Grimm and Verner likely stretched over centuries.
Each set of shifts was completed before the next began and may have occurred in the following
sequence below:
1. Indo-European bh, dh, gh → Germanic β, ð, ɣ
2. IE p, t, k → Gmc f, θ, x
3. Gmc f, θ, x, s → Gmc β, ð, ɣ, z
4. IE b, d, g → Gmc p, t, k
5. Gmc β, ð, ɣ, z → Gmc b, d, g, r