Ok. The Germanic Language Family, as you probably know, is a branch of the very extensive Indo-European Language group, which encompasses everything from Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic in the north, to Armenian and Indic in the east, to Italic in the West, and Greek and Hittite in the South.
Going from archaeological data, it would appear that Indo-European speakers first entered the traditional homeland of the Germanic language group (Scania in the present day Sweden) sometime during the beginning of the Bronze Age. Archaeologists have identified three distinct cultures in the region of Scania between the Neolithic Era (Late Stone Age) and the Bronze Age. These three groups are coloquially referred to as "the food gatherers" - a group identified by their raising of domestic animals, cultivating grain and relatively extensive land clearing, particularly their technique of slashing bark of trees for controlled fires. Archaeologists have also found a number of large earthenware vessels which have been attributed to this group.
The second group is the megalithic builders. Understandably enough their name refers to their building of large communal graves using large, flat boulders arranged in the shape of a rectangle, topped off by a massive block of stone. This group also developed a separate style of pottery, referred to as
Bandkeramiker.
The third group entered the region some time around the beginning of the Bronze age. This group, referred to as "battle-axe people" initially appears in the archaeological record at the same time as the megalithic builders people. Unlike the builders, though, these axe-people weren't farmers, but stock breeders. They buried their dead in signle graves, and brought with them a new kind of pottery, called
Scnurkeramiker, and the weapon (the bronze battle-axe) for which they are named. This culture has been identified across a large portion of central and eastern Europe, although their origins are still up for speculation.
Most linguists and archaeologists, however, accept that these axe-peoples were in all likelihood the first speakers of the "Indo-European language", and it is from these people that the Germanic branches of the language group developed. However, again, it is important to note that there are no written or audible data to support this supposition, it's just the most likely hypothesis given the evidence we currently have.
Research from Lexico-Statistical Dating places the first emergence of the Germanic family sometime between 2000-1800 B.C., with the development of what linguists refer to as "proto-Germanic". It is very important when discussing linguistics to remember that when a language is ascribed the "proto-" prefix this means that there is no actual evidence to support the existence of this language. "proto-" languages are models which have been painstakingly reconstructed by linguists through in-depth analyses of related languages' vocabulary, syntax, and overall grammatical structures. We don't really know what "proto-Germanic" is, it is merely a place-holder which we know must have existed (owing to the existence of related present-day and historical Germanic language), but it does not refer to any specific language.
Anyway, "proto-Germanic" is believed to have emerged as an offshoot of Indo-European some time in the early 3rd millennium, having broken off from the Slavic languages around 2000 B.C.
So what makes proto-Germanic (hereafter referred to as PGmc.) what it is? Well there are a number of elements which linguists have identified which set it apart from its other early IE relatives. The first is the use of the Stress Accent. By this I mean in Germanic languages, the accent is always placed on the root syllable of a word. This is in stark contrast to many other IE languages, and Proto-Indo-European (hereafter PIE) itself, which actually uses the placement of accent to distinguish individual morphemes (the smallest unit of sound which contains semantic meaning in language. It doesn't necessarily refer to a word as, for example, -s is a morpheme in English which identifies the plurality of a noun). Anyway, the variable use of stress accent changed in Germanic. What this meant from a developmental standpoint is that Germanic languages tended to clip off phonetic elements on the ends of words. A good example of this would be the Latin
hostis, compared with the Gothic
gasts, the Old High German
gast, or the Old Norse
gastiR. In the Old Norse example, the
i is retained, in the Gothic, the i is clipped, however the language still retains the case ending (-s), and in Old High German the entirety of the element is removed. From all three of these examples we can see the full force of the change when the PGmc. version,
*gastiz, is produced. (Note: when a word is shown with an asterisk placed before it, this is a note to readers that the word is a reconstruction based on other closely related languages and doesn't necessarily refer to a word which exists in actuality).
Another distinctive feature of PGmc., and, subsequently, its children, is the predisposition towards Alliteration. This preference comes as a direct result of the placing of stress on the root of all words. Germanic languages adore alliteration, and it became a formal prenciple in Germanic verse. Take this example from
Nibelungenlied: "ich will durch dinen willen wagen ere unde lip" Alligeration also played a hand in the types of Germanic family names which developed: Chlodwig, Chlothar, Chlodomer, Heribrant, Hiltibrant, Hadubrant, Gunther, Gernôt, Gîselher. It is reflected even in modern English and German, particularly in the delightful idioms of the two languages: black and blue, hearth and home, life and limb,
Wind und Wetter,
Nacht und Nebel, etc.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Germanic, and the most commonly cited one is that of the Germanic sound shift. The sound shift was notable for just how large and varied the shift was. In the first place the voiceless stops in other IE languages, that is
p, t, k in International Phonetic Alphabet (I know you aren't a linguist; I'll try my best to accommodate
), became voiceless fricatives,
f, θ, and χ (a fricative means that the mouth forms a partial close, however air still flows through the mouth. Voiceless means you don't use your vocal chords in formulating the sound. [f] is the classic fricative. Its voiced equivalent would be [v]. θ would be the
th in Pan
theism, as opposed to the th in
that, which is expressed in IPA by ð. Finally χ is the unvoiced uvual fricative. It's a bit harder to explain because there isn't really an equivalent in English. The easiest way to think of it would be the French r, as in
proche, or the ch in the German
Dach). This plosive to fricative switch is visible to this day, for example in the difference between father in Germanic and Romance languages. Latin, and thereby its descendants retained their plosives, so p remained p and thus [father] is expressed in the Spanish
padre, whereas German has
Vater (fatɹ
, and English has father.
You can see in direct examples when you compare Latin words to their Gothic equivalents:
pecu-
faíhu "cattle"
três-
þreis "three" (The letter thorn (þ) is an unaspirated dental fricative, and in some cases Germanic linguists use it in place of theta)
cornû-
haúrn "horn" (h in Gothic represents the sound χ
This sound shift also affected voiced aspirated stops bʰ, dʰ, and gʰ (basically these are the ordinary sounds b, d, and g, however they are aspirated, which means each sound is accompanied with a puff of air, more or less), became voiced fricatives, β, ð, and ɣ (β is the voiced bilabial fricative, basically make a b sound but keep air escaping from your lips. The classic example is the "spanish v" as in la
var. The ð is the voiced dental fricative. It's the th in
this and
that. And the ɣ is the voiced velar fricative. This one is really difficult to explain in English, particularly as most English speakers confuse it with χ. The easiest equivalent would be the g in the Portuguese a
gora, or the dh in the Irish
dhorn. In some Germanic languages these sounds emerged as the unaspirated b, d, and g.
None of the IE languages have retained aspirated stops with the exception of Sanskrit. In fact the question of whether or not PIE even had aspirated stops itself is a matter hotly debated among linguists. In these series Sanskrit examples are provided instead of Latin, with the exception of the final example, which uses PIE. As before, Gothic is used for comparison
bhárâmi-
baíran "carry"
mádhyas-
midjis "middle"
*ghóstis-
gasts "guests"
Finally, the Voiced unaspirated stops b, d, and g became voiceless unaspirated stops p, t, and k. Again, Latin and Gothic for comparison:
lûbricâre-
(s)liupan "slip"
decem-
taíhun "ten"
genu-
kniu "knee"
In addition to a sound shift, PGmc. also underwent a number of structural shifts. There was the above mentioned emphasis on the root of words, rather than a variable stress as in PIE. The resulting clipping brought about very distinct changes in the way Germanic languages carried out declensions. PIE had distinguished between ablative, dative, instrumental, and locative cases, but due to the lack of stress, most of these case distinctions were removed. An example would be the Sanskrit word for "god"
devás. Its case forms in the order listed above would be
devât,
devâya,
devéna, and
devé. Gothic, on the other hand, only has the dative form,
daga.
The final, and in many cases most striking aspect these changes brought about on the language is the wholesale change of Germanic languages from "synthetic" to "analytic". These terms are dated, however it does have some use in this context. "Synthetic" refers to the way the language synthesizes a large amount of morphemes into a relatively small amount of words. Latin is the archetypal synthetic language, seen in the word
portâbantur, which translates as "they were (being) carried. This one word contains 4 morphemes
portâ (the root verb),
-ba- (the imperfect tense),
-nt- (third person plural)
ur (passive voice). An analytical language, in contrast draws out each of these morphemes into its own discrete element. The archetypal analytic language is Mandarin, which carries this out literally, even down to its orthography. German, comparatively, however, became distinctly more analytic than the rest of IPA as a result of its defined stress structure, although this was a long time coming. Even into Old English there was still an instrumental case.
One innovation of the Germanic languages was the tendency to distinguish between nouns and descriptive adjectives. Traditional IE languages such as Latin do not distinguish between the two elements, and decline both identically. For example, look at how Latin would declin the phrase "good friend"
Case | Singular | Plural
Nominative |
bonus amîcus
|
bonî amîcî
Genitive |
bonî amîcî
|
bonôrum amîcôrum
Dative |
bonô amîcô
|
bonîs amîcîs
Accusative |
bonum amîcum
|
bonôs amîcôs
Vocative |
bone amîce
|
bonî amîcî
Ablative |
bonô amîcô
|
bonîs amîcîs
In Germanic languages, this paradigm fundamentally shifted, however. For one thing, Germanic adopted a distinction between "strong" and "weak" adjectival declensions. The strong declension contains both nominal (as in the noun in the subject position, as opposed to an object or prepositional position) and pronominal elements, whereas the weak declension is purely nominal. Moreover, this trend was extended to the descriptive adjective, creating a new morphological category. Contrast the Latin table above with the Gothic phrase "holy day", and its various declensions. the word "holy" is declined as a strong adjective. The pronominal endings are bolded, and the case of the personal pronoun of the third person masculine is included in parenthesis where appropriate:
Case | Singular | Plural
Nominative |
weihs dags
|
weihái (eis) dagôs
Genitive |
weihis dagis
|
weiháizê (izê) dagê
Dative |
weihamma (imma) daga
|
weiháim (im) dagam
Accusative |
weihana (ina) dag
|
weihans dagans
The Germanic weak adjectival declension, by contrast, looks remarkably similar to the IE nominal, characterized by the n-suffix. Compare the Latin and Gothic declensions for the word "man"
Case | Singular | Plural
Nominative |
homô
|
hominês
Genitive |
hominis
|
hominum
Dative |
hominî
|
hominibus
Accusative |
hominem
|
hominês
Ablative |
homine
|
hominibus
Case | Singular | Plural
Nominative |
guma
|
gumans
Genitive |
gumins
|
gumanê
Dative |
gumin
|
gumam
Accusative |
guman
|
gumans
This plays heavily into the distinction between Latin as a synthetic language and Germanic as an analytic one. Take for example in Latin, the ability to impart nominal meaning onto adjectival quality. For example the Latin word
catus "sly" can be easily declined to
catô, to change the meaning to "the sly one". Germanic could do this with weak adjectives, for example Gthc
dwals "foolish" to
dwala, the fool. But in strong form adjectives and nouns were created as distinct entities.
Another major innovation in Germanic was the introduction of a regularized
Ablaut "preterite". By this it is meant that a regular and systematic alteration of the root verb is used to distinguish between past and present tense. We have this in English in the form of irregular verbs, such as sing-sang, or give-gave. While other IE languages had this, for example
factus-fêcî "made-I made", and
stâre-stetî "to stand-I stood", Germanic took it to an entirely different level For example, look at the conjugations of various verbs in Old High German:
Present | Preterite Singular | Preterite Plural | Past Participle
rîtan | reit | ritum | giritan
biogan | boug | bugum | gibogan
bintan | bant | buntum | gibuntan
nëman | nam | nâmum | ginoman
gëban | gaf | gâbum | gigëban
The final especially interesting aspect of PGmc. is its interesting blend of traditional IE words, such a
Fenster (Latin: fenestra), Kampf (Latin: campus), Küche (Latin coquîna), or Pfeffer (Latin: piper) and its own set of wholly new and unrelated words, particularly in the areas of agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, and warfare. Examples include in German,
Beere, Bohne, Wachs, Schaf, Kalb, Fleisch, Reiher, Bogen, Spieß, Schild, Helm, as well as Governmental and Seafaring words such as
Herzog, König, Volk, Ding, Dieb, Aal, Netze, Reede, Schiff, Kiel, Möwe, Lee, as well as the cardinal points of the compass, which all western Romance languages have inherited directly from Germanic languages (remember North, South, East, and West are
Borealis, Occidentalis, Orientalis, and Australis in Latin, respectively).
The Germanic Family Tree and the Disapora of the Germanic Language Family
Although the origins of Germanic as a language family distinct from Indo-European traces back to the early Bronze Age, no evidence of any kind emerges until the 2nd century, B.C., when we begin to get historical allusions to the Germanic tribes, and even then we don't get any written evidence from the Germanic speakers themselves until the 4th century, AD, when we begin to get testimony in the form of runes carved on bone, stone and metal.
What we do know, however, is that during the Bronze Age (roughly 1500-500 BC), Germanic speakers could be found east to the Oder River, and by 800 B.C. northern Germany to the Vistula was inhabited by Germanic speakers, comprising an area roughly equivalent to the historical boundaries of Low German. Around 600 BC, Germanic speakers from around the mouth of the Elbe began to follow the river southwards into Upper Saxony. In the 1st Century BC, it is believed that the tribes comprising the Vandals, Burgundians, and Goths left Scandinavia and began their movements eastward.
The result of these movements is that by the time of the birth of Christ, the Germanic-speaking peoples had developed into 5 distinct, archaeologically identifiable groupings. The first group were the Germanic-speakers who remained in the ancestral homeland in Scandinavia. These are referred to as the
Nordgermanen. The second group constitutes the groups which moved Eastward into the region between the Oder and Vistula Rivers. This group is known as the
Ostgermanen or
Oder-Weichsel-Germanen. The other three groups are normally lumped together into
Westgermanen and are the group residing in Northern Europe between the modern day Low Countries and the Elbe. These three groups are the
Nordsee-Germanen,
Weser-Rhein-Germanen, and
Elb-Germanen. Going from Tacius'
Germania, it would seem that the
Elb-Germanen correspond roughly to the "Suebi", encompassing specifically the Alemanni, Langobardi, Hermunduri, Marcomanni, and Quadi. The Alemanni in the 3rd century AD spread out into southwestern Germany until they were expunged by Chlodwig of the Franks, after which they moved farther south. The Hermunduri settled in Thuringia, the Langobardi moved through the Hungarian plains before settling in Italy as the Lombards in the later sixth century. The Marcomanni and Quadi were settled along the Eastern bank of the Main River. The Quadi moved eastwards into Hungary where they subsequently vanished from the historical record, while the Marcomanni, after being defeated by a Roman army in 9 BC, moved into the forest of Bohemia, before ultimately moving into southern Bavaria in the 6th century. Due to their resultant movements, the Alemanni, Bavarians (Marcomanni) and Langobardi are often referred to collectively as
Alpengermanen.
The Weser-Rhine Germans emerged later as the Franks and Hessians, residing in the present day Franconia, as well as in the Low Countries of Netherlands, Belgium, and even as far west as Northern France. Parts of this group merged with the North Sea Germans, that is the Frisians, Angles, Saxons, and later Anglo-Saxons, Saxons (
Niedersachsen), and Frisians.
The
Nordgermanen stayed in Scandinavia, eventually emerging as the Norwegians and Swedes of Viking fame. The
Ostgermanen, on the other hand, undertook the most extensive migrations of the Germanic speaking peoples. The Goths moved eastwards, hitting the Black Sea sometime in the 4th century, moving into Bulgaria in 348, before moving further west into France and Spain. Apparently remnants of the Goths survived in Crimea as late as the 16th century, with accounts from a Flemish nobleman living in Constantinople at that time recording some words and phrases from a dialect of of Gothic now called
Krimgotisch.
The Vandals left their homeland in northern Hungary at the beginning of the 5th century, embarking on a fabled and oft-repeated series of migrations and conquests that took them through Germany, France, and ultimately Spain, before they famously crossed the straits of Gibraltar, establishing an empire in Africa in 429 under Gaiseric. This empire had a long and interesting relationship with the Western Roman Empire, several times over expounded upon in this thread, so I don't feel this needs further exploration.
The Burgundians settled in upper Main, and moved eventually upriver to Worms. After defeat at the hands of the Huns in 437 they relocated into Southeastern Gaul before being famously conquered by the Franks.
Problems with "West Germanic"
We find in the concept of "West Germanic Tribes" one of the common issues facing linguists; that when the archaeological and historical evidence available doesn't match up particularly well to linguistic analyses which have been carried out. The first and most pressing issue linguists run in to in this division of Germanic into "North" "South" and "West" is that there really is no written evidence of any Germanic languages to speak of until Bishop Ulfilas' translation of the Bible into Gothic in the 4th century, and a few runic inscriptions of Old Norse from the century. Other than that (and a few dubious inscriptions of Vandal found in Africa) there is quite literally nothing of "West Germanic" languages aside from some Latin transcriptions of some Germanic words.
The assumption, based particular on Germanicus' division of the "German" tribes (based, according to him, on their own definitions) into
Ingaevones,
Herminones, and
Istaevones. Based on these distinctions it would be assumed that Old High German and Old English (two of the most well-documented offspring of "West Germanic") would have more in common with each other than their North or East Germanic cousins. However, although Old High German and Old English do have much in common with one another (as do their modern variants today), they contain an equal, or in some important cases even greater amount in common with North and East Germanic languages.
In the first part West Germanic has a lot in common with North Germanic which North Germanic does not have in common with East Germanic (Old Norse and Gothic are presumed to be more closely related to one another than either of them is to West Germanic). For example in both West and North Germanic ê appears as â, where Gothic does not manifest this change, as demonstrated in the table below:
Gothic | Old Saxon | Old Norse
(manna-)sêþs
"mankind" |
sâd
"seed" |
sâd
"seed"
gêbum
"we gave" |
gâƀum¹
|
gâfum
¹The ƀ, or "b with a stroke" is a Germanic representation of the bilabial fricative (represented by a β in IPA)
Another good example of the similarities between North Germanic and West Germanic would be that the Gmc.
þl- corresponds to WGmc. and NGmc.
fl-
Gothic | Old Saxon | Old Norse
þliuhan
"flee" |
fliôhan
|
flyja
Finally there are a significantly large amount of words which exist in both NGmc. and WGmc. but not in EGmc. such as
Kohle, sagen, Segel, and
sterben
Moreover, Old High German in many cases has more in common with its EGmc. cousin Gothic than it does with its WGmc. brethren Old Saxon and Old English. For example in the cases of personal pronouns:
Gothic | Old High German | Old Saxon | Old English
is
|
er²
|
he
|
he
weis
|
wir²
|
wi
|
we
mis
|
mir
|
mi
|
me ² The
r of OHG is a standard development from the voiced alveolar fricative in PGmc. (z). In Gothic this voiced z would become an unvoiced s when occurring in the final position of a word. In OHG this changed to an
r. This process is called a
rhotacism
All tenuousness of the classifications aside, the distinctions of the three groups of Germanic languages is still retained, although as has clearly been show it is certainly at this point a misnomer. Many attempts have been made over the last century or so reconcile the linguistic and archaeological with the historical, most notably by Ferdinand Wrede with his
Ingwäonentheorie and later Friedrich Mauer's theories about the influences of Gothic on continental Germanic, but both of these arguments for various reasons have been found insufficient. However regardless of how you fall on the use or misuse of "Western Germanic" it is quite clear that by the 5th century the German language had begun to take shape through the blending of three dialectic groups: the North Sea Germans (i.e. the Saxons)m, the Weser-Rhine Germans (Franks) abnd the Elbe Germans (Alemannians, Bavarians, and Longobardians).
Vulgar Latin in Roman Gaul
Before we turn to the entrance of the Franks and Burgundians to Gaul and analyze these peoples' influences on what would come to be the French language, it would be prudent to look at Vulgar Latin, that is, the Latin of the peoples in the Roman province of Gaul prior to the introduction of the Germanic Frankish language so as better to understand its influence.
The interesting aspect of Vulgar Latin, or rather, what we know of Vulgar Latin is that it appeared to be fairly homogeneous throughout the Roman Empire. The most important distinguishing factors of Vulgar Latin are that [h] (that is, the glottal fricative) has no phonetic value, and the diphthongs [æ] (aɪ in IPA; as in "eye") and [] (ɔɪ in IPA; roughly equivalent to the oi in "coil") were reduced to the IPA [ɛ] and [e] (the e in "dress" and the ay in "play" in American English) respectively. The classical neuter plurals in
-a are reexpressed as the feminine singular, while masculine and neuter substantives (
-us and
-um, respectively) are commonly confused. Synthetic passives are rarely used, a new compound tense involving the very
habere with a perfect participle (seen in modern Spanish as the perfecto tense) begins to be used. Vulgar Latin tends to make less use of the complex case system of Classical Latin, replacing it with heavier use of prepositions. Vulgar Latin was also heavily influenced by the early Church, notably in the form of the introduction of numerous Greek words, such as
angelus (angel),
ecclesia (church)
(église),
diaconus 'deacon'
(diacre),
episcopus 'bishop' (
évêque), etc. (For the record, Germanic languages experienced the same process when they came into contact with the early Christian church.
It is important to note that until the 5th century Gaul remained in fairly close contact with Rome and thereby the rest of the Roman empire and thus it is understandable that beyond dialectical and pronunciation differences, the Latin of Gaul would not be too different from, say, the Latin of Rome. The one distinct difference, however, lay in the vocabulary of Gaulish Latin, which maintained a number of Gaulish loan words, most having to do with agriculture and the herding of animals.
