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Germanic languages

The principal East Germanic language is Gothic. It was, however, soon replaced by Latin, and did not live for long. However, the oldest surviving literary text of any Germanic language is in Gothic.

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia and Denmark.

West Germanic is the group of languages to which English belongs. In early times we distinguish Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and constitute a special Anglo-Frisian subgroup.

Germanic tribes spoke a range of dialects and interacted with speakers of other varieties of their own language, as well as with people speaking quite different languages, namely the Celtic languages of the native British population, and the form of Latin which many of those people seem to have used under the recently ended Roman governance of Britain.

2. Germanic alphabets

Germanic tribes used three different alphabets for their writings: Runic, Gothic and Latin.

1. The most ancient alphabet was Runic, in which each separate letter was called a Rune.

Runes were not written but carved or cut on wood, metal, stones, so they were not round but angular. The word “rune” meant “mystery”, and those letters were originally considered to be magic signs known to very few people, mainly monks, and not understood by the vast majority of the illiterate population.

The runic alphabet is called futhark after the sounds of the initial letters, originally had 24 characters. The Runic alphabet was used by different Germanic tribes: Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. Eventually the Runic alphabet underwent changes: new letters were added, some of the original ones were dropped.

The Celts (first settlers of the British Isles) also used an alphabet of runes. Runic inscriptions have been found all over Western Europe, the greatest concentrations are in England and Scandinavia.

The first known written English sentence, which reads "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman", is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480 AD.

2. The Gothic alphabet is believed to have been invented by the Gothic bishop Ulfila, so it is often referred to as the Ulfilian alphabet.

It was based chiefly on the Greek alphabet, with a number of Latin and Runic letters added, and was only used by the Goths. That alphabet was used in the translation of the Bible made by Ulfila for the Goths who lived in the lower reaches of the Danube. The Gothic alphabet consisted of 27 characters: 25 modified Greek symbols and 2 runes to express unique phonological features of Gothic.

As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. Two letters, (90) and (900), have no phonetic value.

3. The latest alphabet to be used by Germanic tribes was the Latin alphabet. Introduction of the Latin alphabet accompanied the spread of Christianity.

The Latin alphabet was not suitable to represent all sounds of Germanic languages, so it had to be adapted to the peculiar needs of the languages. The Latin alphabet could not denote, for example, the sounds [w], [θ] in Old English. For that purpose some runes were preserved — , , or some Latin letters were slightly altered, e.g. ð to denote the sounds [θ], [ð] together with the rune . Later became "uu" and, still later, "w".

Main characteristics of the Germanic languages:

1. Phonetic features of the Germanic languages: