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1. Gmc. Family 1 _______________________________________________________________________ Germanic as a Family 1.1 Introduction Germanic (Gmc.) is a member of a larger language family known as Indo-European. Other western descendants from Indo-European include Greek, Latin, and Celtic. Because of their common ancestry, the Germanic languages (Gothic, German, English, the Scandinavian languages, etc.) share many linguistic properties and structures. Early references to the Germanic tribes are made by the Romans, with whom the Germanic peoples had daily contact. Germanic mercenaries in the Roman army were numerous along the Rhine, where the Romans had established two provinces, Germānia īnferior ‘Lower Germania’ and Germānia superior ‘Upper Germania’. The Roman cities of Colōnia Agrippīna ‘the colony of (named after) Agrippa’ (Cologne / Köln) and Augusta Trēverōrum ‘imperial (city) of the Treveri’ (Trèves / Trier) were along major trade routes. Apart from the lower Rhine area (to Trier and Cologne), there was contact in Holland, Gaul, and Britain. Most of the early loans into pre-OE resulted from direct contact with the Romans west of the Rhine estuary, after the Anglo-Saxons had penetrated as far west as Flanders and Normandy (Green 1998: 216f.). Daily staples and their preparation were taken over from the Romans. Wine was a very early loan (L vīnum), as shown by loss of the final syllable everywhere in Germanic, e.g. Gothic wein, ON vín, etc. (Gmc. *wīnan HGE 467). Moreover, the Romans referred to the predilection of the Germānī for wine (Caesar, De bello gallico 2.15, 4.2; Tacitus, Germania 23). The very early date for the export of Roman wares (Green 1998: 204–11) is confirmed linguistically. Since Latin v [w] had become [v] already in c1, the w of OHG wîn, OE wīn, etc., points to a date of borrowing prior to the first century (Miller 2012: 22f., 55). All over Europe Latin was the language of government, commerce, and culture. Caesar (De bello gallico 4.2) and Tacitus (Germania 5) report that Germānī (‘Germanic 2 Germanic as a Family peoples’) on the frontier used Roman coins to buy wine and other items from Roman merchants. Deep into Germanic territory archaeologists have found Roman coins, silver and bronze vessels, wine sets, glass, brooches, ornaments, weapons, statuettes, and many other items (Green 1998: 220). Germanic is customarily divided into East and Northwest, the latter into West and North Germanic (cf. Kuhn 1955). This is complicated by the supposed emigration of the Goths1 from Scandinavia and the linguistic features Gothic shares with North Germanic. There are about 250 early Germanic inscriptions, mostly from Scandinavia, in the older runic script [c1-6] (Antonsen 1975, 1989, 2002). Some early inscriptions are closer to Proto-Germanic, while the later ones are more Nordic (Nielsen 2002b). Only some ten per cent of the old runic texts have more than two identifiable words. I. The Germanic family 1.2 Gothic According to tradition, in the middle of the second century the Goths moved south from Scandza (Pliny’s Scandia), and split around the Black Sea. The Ostrogoths occupied the area north of the Black Sea and in the Crimea. Visigoths occupied the area west of the Black Sea and north of the Danube, in the Roman province of Dacia. Wulfila [c.310–383] was charged in 325 with christianizing the Goths. In 341, he was made bishop of the Visigoths and in 348 led his followers across the Danube. In 369 (traditional date) he translated the Bible into the language of his own people, the Moesogoths, that is, the Goths of Moesia. As to surviving documents, Gothic (Goth.) is attested in (portions of) the Bible translation ascribed to Wulfila ‘Little Wolf’ [c.369], part of a later commentary, several land sale and debt settlement deeds from Italy, and a few other fragments. There is also 1 More correctly, Classical Gutōnēs, Gotī; cf. Götaland (ON Gautland) in south Sweden whose inhabitants called themselves *Gautōz ‘Gauts’ (ON Gautar, OE Gēatas, Sw. Götar), the island Gotland (older Gutland); Pietroassa ring Gutani ‘of Goths’ (but see §6.1). Germanic as a Family 3 a variety of Gothic that survived in the Crimea into the eighteenth century, from which roughly a hundred entries were recorded but handed down in poor shape. 1.3 North Germanic The main representative of North Germanic is Old Norse (ON) and its derivative Old Icelandic (OIce). Since Iceland was settled from Norway [c.874], there are few archaic differences between Icelandic and Norwegian.2 The most extensive literary texts are from Iceland, e.g. Skaldic poetry and Edda poems from the Viking age [c9]. Some sagas date to c10, but the earliest manuscripts from Norway and Iceland date to c.1150 (1250 in Denmark and Sweden). The only earlier manuscripts [c.1117] are legal texts. For details see Haugen (1976: 185–90), Vikør (2002), and other contributions to Bandle et al. (2002). Following is the Scandinavian family tree (Torp 2002: 19): Ancient Nordic West Nordic East Nordic Icelandic5 Faroese Norwegian Danish Swedish Old Nordic is the term applied to the totality of Medieval North Germanic. Technically, Old Norse is Old West Nordic. North Germanic survives in the modern Scandinavian languages: Icelandic (Ice.) and Faroese (Far.) in the west, Danish (Dan.), Swedish (Sw.), and (originally West Norse) Norwegian (Norw.) in the east.3 Vikings also secured Normandy in 911 and infused 2 Since most of the manuscripts are from Iceland, some scholars prefer Old Icelandic. We will refer to non-specific or reconstructed Old West Scandinavian as Old Norse, in contrast to attested forms in Old Icelandic, sometimes given in parentheses after a designation Old Norse. 3 At the time of the Viking conquests, there were few linguistic differences between East and West Norse / Nordic. Suffice it to mention here that when differences existed, they support the (extralinguistic) evidence that northeast England was settled primarily by Danes and northwest by Norwegians. 4 Germanic as a Family their adopted dialect of Norman (cf. OIce Norðmenn ‘Norsemen’) French with North Germanic elements. One of the best-known recent borrowings from Icelandic is geyser (Ice. Geysir ‘gusher’ [*ǵheu- ‘pour’], the name of a hot spring, an old word but not mentioned by early writers). While Vīking/Wīcing [EGloss 598+] was used in Old English mostly in the sense of ‘pirate’ (Fell 1986), viking does not reappear until 1807 in the Icelandic form vikingr, first fully anglicized by Longfellow in 1840 (Fell 1987). 1.4 West Germanic West Germanic comprises lowland (Ingvaeonic) and highland dialects, with consonant distinctions since c1 BCE (Vennemann 1994). 1. The continental group. The highland area is represented by Old High German (OHG) with copious texts in many different dialects [c.750–1050]. The Ludwigslied [882] is in Rhine Franconian (Brosman 1999: 11) from the Weser-Rhine branch (Istvaeonic). From Elbe German (Herminonic), there are religious texts [c8/9] in Alemannic and Bavarian, and Notker from St. Gall [c10/11]. The traditional Hildebrandslied [c8] is in upper German mixed with Old Saxon (OS). Ingvaeonic includes Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Dutch (Du.), Old Frisian (OFris), whose oldest records are legal documents [802+; mss. c13–17] (Markey 1981: 16–45), and Old English. 2. Old English (OE), less correctly Anglo-Saxon, is known primarily from literature [c.700–1100]. There are also some sixty-five runic inscriptions (none in West Saxon: Fisiak 1990: 109ff.), the oldest of which [c.400] is on a deer’s ankle bone from Caistor-by-Norwich (Page 1999: 18f.): raihan (or raæhan §5.2) ‘roe(-deer)(’s)’ > OE rā(ha) ROE. There are also 158 inscriptions of diverse dates, mostly from the north. Old English was traditionally divided into three main dialects: (West) Saxon, Kentish (texts c.800–1000), and Anglian, itself subdivided into Northumbrian (texts since c10) and Mercian, with scanty texts since c.750. This political abstraction has little relevance to the bulk of the texts with ‘mixed’ dialect features (Ångström 1937: 23ff.; Hogg 1992: 4ff.; Kitson 1995). Kitson concludes (p. 100) that (i) territories of Anglo-Saxon Germanic as a Family 5 expansion were settled by peoples from other areas, (ii) the southeast had more in common with Anglian than with West Saxon, and (iii) Thames Valley Saxon was the most innovative dialect. 3. Middle English (ME) [c.1100–1450] is arbitrarily said to start with the Norman conquest [1066], but it is difficult to make fine linguistic decisions as to when Old English ends and Middle English begins (see Malone 1930; Fisiak 1994; Lutz 2002). Lass (2000) reviews the problem of periodization and concludes that, on the basis of ten diagnostics, Middle English probably was a real entity, and the earliest text that qualifies for Middle English status is the Peterborough Chronicle [c.1080–1154]. Another very early text in Middle English is the 183-line prose homily Sermo in Festis Sanctae Mariae Virginis [c.1108–15] (Magoun 1937). Modern English (MnE) conventionally begins c.1500. 1.5 Characteristics of the Germanic family Following is a short list of innovations that characterize the Germanic languages and set them apart as a family from their Indo-European ancestor language as well as from their sister languages Latin, Greek, etc. (Meillet 1949; Harbert 2007: 6f.): 1. The fixing of the accent on the root or first syllable of the word. 2. A sound shift known as Grimm’s Law (e.g. PIE *p, t, k > PGmc. *f, þ, χ/h). 3. The grammaticalization of one type of verbal noun as infinitives and several verbal adjectives as participles. 4. Retention of the PIE temporal opposition between past and non-past, with subsequent development of periphrastic formations to express passive voice in the past, a perfective system, and futurity (limitedly in Gothic: Coleman 1996).
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