Old English and its Closest Relatives

A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages

Orrin W. Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134848997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This accessible introductory reference source surveys the linguistic and cultural background of the earliest known Germanic languages and examines their similarities and differences. The Languages covered include: Gothic Old Norse Old SaxonOld English Old Low Franconian Old High German Written in a lively style, each chapter opens with a brief cultural history of the people who used the language, followed by selected authentic and translated texts and an examination of particular areas including grammar, pronunciation, lexis, dialect variation and borrowing, textual transmission, analogy and drift.

OLD ENGLISH AND ITS CLOSEST RELATIVES

1

THE GERMANIC LANGUAGE FAMILY

English and German

On the face of it, the educated speaker of English would have little reason to think of English and German as variant forms of the same language. There are enormous differences between the two systems of communication, involving pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and monolingual speakers of the two systems cannot understand each other at all. This fact, and other considerations of national identity, separate history, and the like, are indeed what lead us to characterize the two as separate languages.

It is also true, however, that there are startling points of similarity between the two languages on all levels. Thus in the lexicon, or vocabulary, one can see some very close matches between words in the two languages. The list below will illustrate the point:

Mann	man	grün	green
Maus	mouse	haben	have
singen	sing	Vater	father
Gast	guest

As the following list illustrates, there are also many words that correspond a little less obviously, either because the sounds in the two languages are farther apart, or because the words don’t mean exactly the same thing in both languages:

Pfeffer	pepper	Hund ‘dog’	hound
Herz	heart	Knecht ‘servant’	knight
liegen	lie	Weib ‘woman’	wife
lachen	laugh	Zeit ‘time’	tide (notice “eventide”)

We may also note numerous grammatical correspondences between German and English. For example, we can see a definite relationship be-tween the ways that English and German distinguish the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives:

dick	thick
dicker	thicker
(am) dickst(en)	thickest

It is interesting to note that not only the regular pattern, but also the irregularities, correspond surprisingly well:

gut	good
besser	better
(am) best(en)	best

The verb system, too, shows many examples of grammatical correspondence. In the following examples we see, first, that German and English have highly similar ways of forming the past tense of regular verbs:

lachen—lachte	laugh—laughed
hassen—hasste	hate—hated
lieben—liebte	love—loved

Again, they also have similar deviant items:

denken—dachte	think—thought
bringen—brachte	bring—brought

In the examples below we note that both English and German have a peculiar class of verbs that do not take the usual ending to show the past tense, but instead show a change in vowels:

singen—sang—gesungen	sing—sang—sung
geben—gab—gegeben	give—gave—given
fallen—fiel—gefallen	fall—fell—fallen

I could cite many other examples of grammatical and lexical correspondences between English and German, but perhaps these lists will suffice to show that even Modern English and German have many points in common. If we go back in history to the earliest texts available in the two languages, the similarities are even more pronounced, the differences far smaller. The question then arises: How do we account for these similarities? What possible explanations could we devise that would make sense of this widespread correspondence between the two languages? There are actually only two reasonable hypotheses.

The first hypothesis is that the two languages have, at some time in the past, borrowed very heavily from one another (or that both of them have borrowed heavily from some third language). We certainly know that this is a possible type of language interaction. In fact, we can point to other instances of it in the history of English.

One prime example of extensive borrowing is found in the past and present relationship between English and French. Ever since the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the English language has over the centuries borrowed massive numbers of words from French. A small sample is given here:

crown	country	people	baron	color	war
peace	officer	judge	court	crime	marry
religion	altar	virtue	beef	pork	joy

Now in this particular case, we know that the words in question were borrowed from French into English, because we have numerous records from English that predate the borrowings, and we can actually follow the borrowing process over several centuries in the documents.

There are several characteristics of the relationship between English and French that set it apart from the relationship between English and German. Most important, perhaps, is the fact that although English borrowed quite freely from the vocabulary of French, it did not in general borrow its grammatical patterns. Thus French has had little impact on the way English speakers form plurals, past tenses, and so forth, nor has French left any lasting impression on English sentence formation, word order, or the like. Note, for example, that the French pattern of adjective after noun, found in the borrowings “court-martial” and “governor general,” is still felt as strange in English. When we pluralize, we tend to act as if these borrowings were single words, as in “court-martials,” “governor generals,” rather than phrases, as they are in French. If we followed the French pattern, we would typically say “courts-martial” and “governors general,” which, though technically correct according to the grammar books, sound un-English.

It seems, in fact, that the influence of French on English can be characterized as relatively superficial, and far removed from the central core of the language.

The correspondences between English and German, by contrast, are fundamental, encompassing not only vocabulary but all features of language. Anyone attempting to claim that the similarities between the two languages are all due to borrowing must be prepared to explain how the process could have gone so far and so deep.

Even in the vocabulary alone, one can see differences between the correspondences of English and French on the one hand, and English and German on the other. Whereas the corresponding words in English and German are usually everyday words, of the sort that ordinary people use all the time, the words English has borrowed from French show a pecu-liar pattern: almost all of them deal with government, affairs of state, criminal justice, official functions, religion, fashion, high cuisine, and other aspects of the upper-class culture that the Norman conquest most affected. They do not, in general, deal with the pedestrian concerns of the common people.

If we reject borrowing as the explanation of the relationship between English and German, there is only one hypothesis left to us. Given that language changes in an inevitable, ongoing process, which we can observe occurring around us all the time, we may speculate that, at some time in the distant past, the ancestors of English and German were merely dialects of the same language, and that their present differences result from changes that affected one group of speakers without affecting the other. Or, to put it another way, English and German represent two divergent developments of some originally unified language.

The changes that could have brought about such a divergence are of several well-attested kinds. One obvious factor, already mentioned, is borrowing. One group of speakers can diverge in language from another group of speakers when the one, but not the other, borrows a new word from some outside source.

Another, more decisive type of change, known as sound change, involves a modification in the articulation of the distinctive sounds of the language. There is an interesting example from contemporary American English, whose speakers frequently confuse such words as “bitter” and “latter” with words like “bidder” and “ladder,” all of them (and in addition words like “hitter,” “fatter,” “fitting,” “later”) containing a d-like medial consonant. Now there is evidence that all the words written with a t were at one time pronounced with a genuine t sound. First, of course, we still write them with the letter t. Second, many of the words involved have a pronounced t sound when one leaves off the endings: thus “hi[t],” “fa[t],” “fi[t],” “la[t]e” (where square brackets indicate a phonetic transcription). Third, we can find many English dialects where the change hasn’t taken place, especially in Britain. Finally, many of us actually still pronounce the [t] in careful speech (“I said bitter, not bidder!”).

Nevertheless, the normal pronunciation of these words in American English is with a sound something like a [d]. This is one of the features that sets off American from British English, and, as such, illustrates how a sound change can cause a divergence between two varieties of a single language.

Changes may also occur on the other levels of language. Comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 THE GERMANIC LANGUAGE FAMILY
• 2 GERMANIC: A GRAMMATICAL SKETCH
• 3 GOTHIC
• 4 OLD NORSE
• 5 OLD SAXON
• 6 OLD ENGLISH
• 7 OLD FRISIAN
• 8 OLD LOW FRANCONIAN
• 9 OLD HIGH GERMAN
• 10 THE GROUPING OF THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES
• Appendix: Translations of Readings
• REFERENCE MATTER
• Index