X-Nico

9 unusual facts about Germanic languages

Danish grammar

The definite e-form is historically identical to the so-called weak declension of the Germanic adjective, cf.

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The definite article, -en, -et, -(e)ne, is postpositive as in the other Scandinavian languages save the West Jutlandic dialect of Danish, which has the prepositive æ (inflexible).

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Like in other Germanic languages, the conjugation of verb tenses is divided into two groups: The first group, the so-called weak verbs, indicates the past tense by adding the suffixes -ede or -te.

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Like the other Scandinavian languages, Danish has a special inflection for the passive voice with the suffix -s, which is historically a reduced enclitic form of the reflexive pronoun sig ("himself, herself, itself, themselves"), e.g. han kalder sig "he calls himself" > han kaldes "he is called".

Germanic languages

The earliest coherent Germanic text preserved is the 4th century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas.

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This is no longer present in modern English except in a few relic sentences such as "Over went the boat" or "Boom goes the dynamite," but is found in all other modern Germanic languages.

Germanic Parent Language

Germanic Parent Language (GPL) is a term used in historical linguistics to describe the chain of reconstructed languages in the Germanic group referred to as Pre-Germanic Indo-European (PreGmc), Early Proto-Germanic (EPGmc), and Late Proto-Germanic (LPGmc).

Latin Americans

Dutch is the official language of some Caribbean islands and in Suriname on the continent; however, as Dutch is a Germanic language, these territories are not considered part of Latin America.

U-mutation

U-mutation, or u-umlaut, can refer to various processes that occurred in the history of some Germanic languages.

Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns

Sometimes the distinction is neutralized in the plural, as in most modern Germanic languages (examples of gender-neutral third-person plural pronouns include English they and German sie), and also in modern Russian (where the equivalent pronoun is они oni).

Harald Bjorvand

His fields of specialty are general comparative language history, general Indo-Germanic linguistics, all archaic Germanic languages (Old West Norse, Gothic, Old High German etc.), and Germanic linguistics in general, including runes, morphology and etymology.

Northwestern Europe

However there's no longer a sharp distinction as Germanic languages or Romance Languages have at least co-official status in all of the traditionally Celtic polities and the region has a history of Protestantism that differentiates it from its Mediterranean Latin or Eastern European Slavic neighbors.

Paul Kempeneers

In 1982, he was promoted to doctor in the philology of Germanic languages, with an essay on the hydronymy of the rivers Dijle and Nete.

Sugrue

It is the reduced anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Siochfhradha descendant of Siochfhradh, a personal name representing a Gaelicized form of an Old Norse cognate of Germanic Siegfried.

Wasserstein metric

Most English-language publications use the German spelling "Wasserstein" (attributed to the name "Vasershtein" being of Germanic origin).

Witta of Büraburg

Witta of Büraburg (also known as Albuin or Vito Albinus, a close Latin translation of his Germanic name) (born in Wessex; died 747) was one of the early Anglo-Saxon missionaries in Hesse and Thuringia in central Germany, disciple and companion of Saints Boniface and Lullus.

A-umlaut

Germanic a-mutation, a historic sound change in Northwest Germanic languages.

Ana Cartianu

In 1936, she co-founded the School of English Language and Literature at the University of Bucharest, where she would later be dean of the School of Germanic Languages (1948-1970).

Danish phonology

Danish is a Scandinavian language related closely to Swedish and Norwegian, and more distantly to Icelandic and Faroese as well as to the other Germanic languages.

Germani cisrhenani

While it well known that in later imperial times Germanic speaking "Germani" made there way to the Rhine, and across, in the time of Caesar the evidence for the presence of Germanic languages is limited to placename analyses such as those of Maurits Gysseling and not universally accepted.