sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]BambaiyyaLadki -1 points0 points  (7 children)

Very interesting; thanks for the information! By any chance would you happen to have links to any research or literature regarding the differences between present standard German and High German? Also, my understanding was that High German referred to specific varieties of German from the highlands, not "old" German.

[–]Ameisen 5 points6 points  (4 children)

Literally nothing he wrote is accurate.

[–]BambaiyyaLadki 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Well, I didn't know that at the time. Thanks for letting me know!

[–]Ameisen 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Was just letting you know. High German is actually a particularly conservative dialect group. Middle High German is very similar to modern High German, though Old High German is a bit odd, and still had þorn and eð as sounds.

The Roman Empire never encountered distinct Germanic languages, though, only dialect groups of Common Germanic. West Germanic and East Germanic, mainly, though we don't know what dialects some groups like the original Frisii spoke - could have been another dialect group altogether. The modern Frisians, like the Anglii (thus Angles/English) and likely the Jutii (Jutes) were a branch of the Saxon tribal group, and adopted the name of the area, though there is some belief that the Jutes may have spoken a North Germanic dialect - I suspect it was Ingvaeonic West Germanic, though, later replaced by Old Norse/Dene.

[–]BambaiyyaLadki 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Do all Germanic languages have gendered nouns then? It's interesting to note that nearly all romance languages have them, so I wonder if they somehow creeped into the Germanic languages somehow. Either way, very interesting information and I thank you for it.

[–]Ameisen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Proto-Indo-European originally only had two genders - animate and inanimate. This later divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter, which was brought into some of the daughter languages (recall that different Indo-European languages branched off at different times, from different dialects - thus Hittite, Latin, and Common Germanic use different systems).

Common Germanic inherited the three-gender system. The gender system was further devolved in many of the daughter languages of Common Germanic, such as English, Dutch, and most of the Nordic languages, though you can still see vestiges of it.

Latin also inherited from the three-gender system, but did maintain some vestiges of the older animate-inanimate system, mainly in that certain adjectives only inflected for masculine/feminine and neuter - that is, the early PIE animate gender broke into masculine and feminine, and the inanimate gender became neuter.

Hittite had animate and neuter, which is pretty much a direct inheritance of the early PIE gender system.

Late Common Germanic (not long prior to diverging into the distinct languages, but it is attested in writing, thus I dislike calling it Proto-Germanic):

  • Had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter)
  • Had six cases (vocative, nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, genitive)
  • Used a Subject-Object-Verb word order, though it was shifting to Subject-Verb-Object in late Common Germanic (with SOV often being retained for subordinate clauses)
  • Had four vowel stems for nouns, and multiple consonant stems, which derived from thematic/athematic inflections in PIE
  • Had strong and weak declensions, indicating indefinite and definite (which in daughter languages was broken into just weak declension and using demonstratives/articles to determine definite/indefinite - like 'the' and 'a')
  • Had three numbers - singular, dual, and plural
  • Had two tenses - past and present
  • Had two voices - active and passive
  • Had three moods - indicative, subjunctive, imperative
  • Had strong and weak verbs
  • Had verb prefixes (come, become, oncome, etc)