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PHONETICS
Word Stress
The peculiar Germanic system of word accentuation is one of the most important distinguishing features of the group; it arose in PG, was fully or partly retained in separate languages and served as one of the major causes for many linguistic changes.
It is known that in ancient IE, prior to the separation of Germanic, there existed two ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, which means that it could fall on any syllable of the word-a root-morpheme, an affix or an ending - and could be shifted both in form-building and word-building Both these properties of the word accent were changed in PG. Force or expiratory stress (also called dynamic and breath stress) became the only type of stress used. In Early PG word stress was still as movable as in ancient IE but in Late PG its position in the word was stabilized. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix; the other syllables - suffixes and endings were - unstressed. The stress could no longer move either in form-building or word-building.
These features of word accent were inherited by the Germanic languages, and despite later alterations are observable today. In Mod E there is a sharp contrast between accented and unaccented syllables due to the force of the stress. The main accent commonly falls on the root-morpheme, and is never shifted in building grammatical forms. The following English and German words illustrate its fixed position in grammatical forms and derived words:
English: be'come, be'coming, over'come; 'lover, 'loving, be'loved,'
German: 'Lie be, 'lie ben 'liebte, ge'liebt, 'lieberhaft, 'Liebling.
(Cf. these native words with words of foreign origin which move the stress in derivation, though never in form-building: exhibit v, exhibition n).
The heavy fixed word stress inherited from PG has played an important role in the development of the Germanic languages, and especially in phonetic and morphological changes. Due to the difference in the force of articulation the stressed and unstressed syllables underwent widely different changes: accented syllables were pronounced with great distinctness and precision, while unaccented became less distinct and were phonetically weakened. The differences between the sounds in stressed position were preserved and emphasized, whereas the contrasts between the unaccented sounds were weakened and lost. Since the stress was fixed on the root, the weakening and loss of sounds mainly affected the suffixes and grammatical endings. Many endings merged with the suffixes, were weakened and dropped. Cf., e.g., the reconstructed PG word 'fish', with its descendants in Old Germanic languages:
PG *fiskaz, Gtjisks, 0 Icel jiskr, OE jisc.
(The asterisk * is placed before reconstructed hypothetical forms which have not been found in written records; the words may be pronounced exactly as they are written; spelling in Old Germanic languages was phonetic).
Vowels
Throughout history, beginning with PG, vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g.: [o>a] or [p>fl; quantitative changes make long sounds short or short sounds long, e.g.: [i>i:],;dependent changes (also positional or combinative) are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance, a sound may change under the influence of the neighboring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable; independent changes - also spontaneous or regular - take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, i.e. they affect a certain sound in all positions.
From an early date the treatment of vowels was determined by the nature of word stress. In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and new distinctive features were introduced, so that the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened or lost; the distinction of short and long vowels was neutralized so that by the age of writing the long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. As for originally short vowels, they tended to be reduced to a neutral sound, losing their qualitative distinctions and were often dropped in unstressed final syllables.
Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is commonly regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. The contrast of short and long vowels is supported by the different directions of their changes. While long vowels generally tended to become closer and to diphthongize, short vowels, on the contrary, often changed into more open sounds. These tendencies can be seen in the earliest vowel changes which distinguished the PG vowel system from its PIE source. IE short [0] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a] and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE [a]; in other words in PG they merged into [0: ]. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [0:] and merged with [0:]. The examples in table illustrate the resulting correspondences of vowels in parallels from Germanic and non-Germanic languages (more apparent in Old Germanic languages than in modern words, for the sounds have been modified in later history).
In later PG and in separate Germanic languages the vowels displayed a tendency to positional assimilative changes: the pronunciation of a vowel was modified under the influence of the following or preceding consonant; sometimes a vowel was approximated more closely to the following vowel. The resulting sounds were phonetically conditioned allophones which could eventually coincide with another phoneme or develop into a new phoneme.
The earliest instances of progressive assimilation were common Germanic mutations; they occurred in Late PG before its disintegration or a short time after. In certain phonetic conditions, namely before the nasal [n] and before [i] or [j] in their next syllable the short [e], [i] and [u] remained or became close (i.e. appeared as' [i] and [u], while in the absence of these conditions the more open allophones: were used: [e] and [0], respectively. Later, these phonetic conditions became irrelevant and the allophones were phonologised.
After the changes, in Late PG, the vowel system contained the following sounds:
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