Volume 127, Issue 2

Various changes to the Common Germanic obstruent system, especially the Northwest Germanic realignment, the Partial Shift, degemination, and the reintroduction of final voice, characterize the development of the English obstruent system and that of its closest relatives in Modern Germanic. Of these, the pre-historic changes will be treated more in depth than the historical changes. The specifically English implementation of these changes will be compared to those in the other languages belonging to the ‘common type’. This type is relatively archaic rather than innovative within the Germanic group, not having undergone a full-fledged Second Consonant Shift or large-scale lenition. English is exceptional only in a few regards. Using the methods of dialect typology, it is found that the modern Germanic dialects with the obstruent systems closest to that of English are those of the majority of Low German, northeastern Dutch, and perhaps West Frisian.

Glide accretion, a type of regressive assimilatory sound-change by which a homorganic vocalic transition develops between a susceptible vowel and a following palatalized or labialized consonant (or consonant plus palatal or labial vowel), is discussed in this paper as found in the following four languages: (1) in Ubian, a Germanic language of the Lower Rhineland, transplanted by the Romans into a Celtic territory and there attested in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries, (2) in English, and (3) in Insular Celtic languages, namely (3.1) in Old Irish and (3.2) in British, especially Welsh. Since there is growing evidence for prehistoric and early historic substratal North Sea Celtic influence not only in Britain but also in the regions on the other side of the Channel, it is proposed that glide accretion both in English and in Ubian developed in contact with such Celtic substrates.

Beowulf is thought to preserve the oldest Germanic principles of versification and to therefore be an archetype of Germanic metrics. However, it deviates in systematic ways from the metrical patterns expected, a fact which is not only reflected in numerous publications in this field of research but also by irreconcilable results concerning the organisation of the meter. On the basis of epic formulae, different layers of versification in Beowulf are identified. The data are interpreted in terms of both an Old English productive and an older Germanic no-longer-productive linguistic basis. The conservative preservation of an older Germanic pattern in combination with contemporary language led to incongruent principles of versification and thus to the complex metrical organisation of Beowulf . It is claimed on the basis of a corpus that the metrical pattern is tetrametric, with measures and prosodic feet being identical at the oldest Germanic stage. Tetrametricity is kept in Beowulf , which results in positional metrical licences, because of morphonological change from Germanic to Old English. Sievers', Heusler's and Kaluza's approaches are classified with regard to natural versification and how they could have been implemented in practice, i. e. in actual performance. The final section offers a way of reconciling metrical licenses with respect to principles of performance.

Since its renaissance in a series of papers by Theo Vennemann, the concept of syllable cut has been applied to a variety of both synchronic and diachronic problems, especially in the Germanic languages. Further investigation has been able to clarify the phonetic realisation of syllable cut, and has also explored different typological manifestations. However, although this phonological concept has been particularly successful in explaining the motivation behind sound changes in the history of English and German, the questions of how and why syllable cut originated have so far only been touched upon. This paper investigates the genesis and the development of syllable cut in English. It is argued that due to phonological developments in Old English it was possible to generalise the structural and segmental properties of syllables with geminate consonants to all closed syllables with short vowels. This is supported by a quantitative pilot study, which shows that Old English actually possessed a considerable amount of words with geminates, which could have formed a basis for the proposed generalisation. Comparative evidence from Latin and German renders further support for this assumption.

This paper deals with the ways in which English and German have incorporated Latin and French loan words into their Germanic accentual systems. In their earliest attested stages, English and German assigned word accent in the same way. Accent was placed on the first syllable of the word or on the first syllable of the stem, and this Germanic initial accent was also applied to Latin loans and hybrids. But later on, under strongly increased Latin and French influence, both languages developed additional accent patterns which applied to a large number of foreign loans and loan formations. Many of these new patterns are suffix-oriented in both recipient languages. But whereas medieval and early Modern German basically adopted the foreign patterns, Middle English and early Modern English gradually adapted French and Latin loans and loan formations to newly-developed types of patterns which were neither Romance nor Germanic yet more Germanic-like than the Latin and French ones. These diverging reactions to strong foreign influences in English and German are shown to be due to the fact that in Germany, French and Latin influence remained largely restricted to the language of scholars and upper ranks of society for a long time, whereas in post-Conquest England, the strong superstratal French influence affected the basic vocabulary of a much larger proportion of the population.