GRAMMAR.
Form-building means. Like other old IE languages both PG and the OG languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words. In later history all the Germanic languages developed analytical forms and ways of word connection.
In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of infections, sound interchanges and suppletion.
The suppletive way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE; it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.
The principal means of form-building were infections. The infections found in OG written records correspond to the infections used in non-Germanic languages, having descended from the same original IE prototypes. Most of them, however, were simpler and shorter, as they had been shortened and weakened in PG.
The wide use of sound interchanges has always been a characteristic feature of the Germanic group. This form-building (and word-building) device was inherited from IE and became very productive in Germanic. In various forms of the word and in words derived from one and the same root, the root-morpheme appeared as a set of variants. The consonants were relatively stable, the vowels were variable. Vowel Gradation with Special Reference to Verbs.
Vowel interchanges found in Old and Modem Germanic languages originated at different historical periods. The earliest set of vowel interchanges, which dates from PG and PIE, is called vowel gradation or ablaut. Ablaut is an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions; different vowels appear in the same environment, surrounded by the same sounds (all the words in Table 6 are examples of ablaut with the exception of the forms containing [i] and [y] which arose from positional changes.
Vowel gradation did not reflect any phonetic changes but was used as a special independent device to differentiate between words and grammatical forms built from the same root.
Ablaut was inherited by Germanic from ancient IE. The principal gradation series used in the IE languages- [e-o] - can be shown in Russian examples: Hecmu-HoUla. This kind of ablaut is called qualitative, as the vowels differ only in quality. Alternation of short and long vowels, and also alternation with a "zero" (i.e. lack of vowel) represent quantitative ablaut: The Germanic languages employed both types of ablaut - qualitative and quantitative, - and their combinations. In accordance with vowel changes which distinguished Germanic from non-Germanic the gradation series were modified: IE [e-o] was changed to [e/i-a]; likewise, quantitative ablaut [a-a: ] was reflected in Germanic as a quantitative-qualitative series [a-o: ] Quantitative ablaut gave rise to a variety of gradation series in Germanic owing to different treatment of the zero-grade in various phonetic conditions.
Of all its spheres of application in Germanic ablaut was most consistently used in building the principal forms of the verbs called strong. Each form was characterized by a certain grade; each set of principal forms of the verb employed a gradation series. Gradation vowels were combined with other sounds in different classes of verbs and thus yielded several new gradation series. The use" of ablaut in the principal forms of 'bear' was shown in table. The Gothic verbs in Table 6 give the closest possible approximation to PG gradation series, which were inherited by all the OG languages and were modified in accordance with later phonetic changes.
The use of ablaut in the sphere of grammar was not confined to the root-vowels of strong verbs. The gradation series [e/i-a] accounts for the interchange of vowels in some grammatical endings in the noun and verb paradigms. This gradation series is found, e.g. in the following noun-endings: PG Nom. sg - *-az, Gen.sg -*eso/-iso (the vowels represent different grades of ablaut of the suffix -a -). The same series [e/i-a] is found in the endings of many verbs (called thematic in contrast to athematic verbs, which did not contain any vocalic element).
