Classification of Germanic languages

1. Germanic group of languages within Indo-European family. Proto-Germanic

2. Pliny the Ender’s classification

3. Germanic family-tree

4. Traditional classificaion

5. Historical classification

Key-words: areal linguistics, areal classification, genealogical classification, typological classification, wave theory, isogloss, isolex, isophone, isomrph, proto-language, language family, language group, Vindili, Helleviones, Hermiones, Istaevones, Ingaevones, Peucini, Bastarnae, Goths, Gepides, Herulians, Lombards, Bavarians, Burgundians, Allemannians, Franks, Saxons, Westphalians, Frisians, Angles, Scandinavians.

Questions and tasks:

1. Dwell on the process of divergence of Germanic languages out of Indo-European group of dialects (Great Migrations period, geographical distribution of Germanic tribes and dialects).

2. What kind of relatedness is taken into account for the elaboration of different types of languages classifications?

3. What is proto-language and which stages of Proto-Germanic development do you know?

4. Find the information about the “wave theory”.

5. What does satem-centum division of IE languages account for?

Read the following citations of acknowledged linguists. Make your comments and remember:

1. Speaking about family tree model, R. Dixon remarked: “That a single ancestor language should split simultaneously into ten daughters is unlikely”. (Dixon R.M.W. The Rise and Fall of Languages. CUP. 1997. P.28).

2. “… family tree model, appropriate and useful in many circumstances, is not applicable everywhere and cannot explain every type of relationship between languages. We need a more inclusive model, which integrates together the ideas of family tree and of diffusion area”. (Dixon R.M.W. The Rise and Fall of Languages. CUP. 1997. P.29).

3. “A natural language is rather like an old garment that has been patched and mended. The overall outline is perceivable … but some parts have worn away and been replaced, one section may have been lost altogether, and in another place a bit from another source may have been tacked on. In contrast, a proto-language – as it is generally reconstructed – resembles a garment straight from the factory, every button in place, every zip working, every seam sewn neatly and evenly”. (Dixon R.M.W. The Rise and Fall of Languages. CUP. 1997. P.45).

4. “There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less inflectional over time and more isolating”. “Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of phonological reduction. Languages of agglutinating type tend to change towards the inflectional type by the process of morphological fusion (when twi originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word change in a way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable). Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to change to the isolating type, this process is called morphological reduction”. (Crowley T. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. OUP. 1994. P.136).

5. There is a second, not traditionally accepted technique for sub-grouping languages, called lexicostatistics. Lexicostatistics was developed by M.Swadesh (Swadesh M. The Origin and Diversification of Language. Chicago. 1971.). According to his idea, it allows to determine the degree of relationship between two languages simply by comparing the vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity between them. This method uses the notion of ‘core vocabulary’ which in historical linguistics is understood as the part of lexicon which is more resistant to lexical change. The method operates two assumptions -1) that core words are less likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms from other languages, 2) the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is more or less stable and is the same for all languages over time, that allows to calculate the average rate of change and therefore make conclusions concerning the ‘degree’ of genetic relatedness between languages by calculating the degree of similarity between core vocabularies of different languages. In this way the average time when they diverged could be defined. If they have a lot of similarities, they diverged quite recently and could belong to lower subgroup. If less similarities could be found, they diverged at earlier time and could belong to much higher level of sub-grouping.

6. “Proof of genetic relationship rests heavily on grammatical elements, including affixes”. (Dixon R.M.W. The Rise and Fall of Languages. CUP. 1997. P.41).