•The major changes from Indo-European to Germanic
1. Germanic has a large number of words that have no known cognates in other Indo-
European languages. These could have existed, of course, in Indo-European and have been
lost; it is also possible that they were taken from non-Indo-European languages originally
spoken in the area occupied by thee Germanic peoples. A few words that are apparently
distinctively Germanic, given in their Modern English forms, are broad, drink, drive, fowl, hold,
meat, rain, and wife.
2. The "free" accentual system of Indo-European, in which the accent shifted from one syllable
to another in various forms of a word, gave way to another type of accentuation in which the
first syllable was regularly stressed. Exceptions were verbs like modern believe and forget, in
which the initial syllable was a prefix. None of the Germanic languages has anything
comparable to the shifting accentuation of Latin ‘ virī 'men,' vi’rōrum 'of the men' or of ‘habeō 'I
have/ ha’bēmus 'we have.'
3. All Indo-European distinctions of tense and aspect were lost in the verb save for the
present and the preterit (or past) tenses. This simplification of a more complex Indo-
European verbal system (though it was not so complex as what developed in Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit) is reflected in all the languages which have developed out of Germanic— in English
bind-bound, as well as in German binden-band, Old Norse binda-band, and all the rest. There is
in no Germanic language anything comparable to such forms as those of the Latin future,
perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect forms (for instance, laudābō, laudāvī, laudāveram,
laudāverō), which must be rendered in the Germanic languages by verb phrases (for instance,
English I shall praise, I have praised, I had praised, 1 shall have praised).
4. Germanic developed a preterit tense form with a dental suffix, that is, one containing d or
t. All Germanic languages thus have two types of verbs. Verbs that employ the dental suffix
were called weak by Jacob Grimm because, being incapable of the type of internal change of
rise-rose and sing-sang (which he called strong), they had to make do with suffixes, like step-
stepped and talk-talked. Although Grimm's terminology is not very satisfactory, it has become
traditional. An overwhelming majority of our verbs add the dental suffix in the preterit, so it has
become the regular way of inflecting verbs. Indeed, it is the only living way of doing so in
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English and the other Germanic languages. For exam ple, new verbs form their preterit so:
elbow-elbowed, televise-televised, and so forth. Furthermore, many verbs that were once strong
have become weak. Historically speaking, however, the vowel gradation of the strong verbs (as
in drive—drove, know-knew) was quite regular, and some of the weak verbs are quite irregular.
Bring, think, and buy, for instance, are weak verbs, as the dental suffix of brought, thought, and
bought indicates; the vowel changes do not make them strong verbs. The suffix is the real test.
No attempt at explaining the origin of this suffix has been wholly satisfactory. Many have
thought that it was originally an independent word related to do.
5. All the older forms of Germanic had two ways of declining their adjectives. The weak
declension was used chiefly when the adjective modified a definite noun and was preceded by
the kind of word that developed into the definite article. The strong declension was used
otherwise. Thus Old English had þā geongan ceorlas 'the young fellows (churls),' with the
weak form of geong, but geonge ceorlas 'young fellows’ with the strong form; the distinction is
preserved in present-day German, die jungcn Kerle, but junge Kerle. This particular Germanic
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characteristic can not be illustrated in Modern English, inasmuch as in the course of its
development English has lost all such declension of the adjective.
6. Indo-European vowels underwent Germanic modification. Indo-European o was retained in
Latin but became a in Germanic (compare Lat. octo 'eight/ Gothic ahtau). Indo-European ā
Old English – Features of Germanic languages
