NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Current Issue

Proto-Germanic *daw-ja-, the ultimate source of English to die, is here argued to have originally been a polysemous verb meaning ‘to run; to die’, corroborating its current etymological analysis as a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European root *d^heu̯- ‘to run’. The proposal is supported by both well-known and previously unnoticed reflexes of the verb *daw-ja-in Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Old English, as well as by further Germanic lexical items and figurative expressions. Further support is provided by a series of semantic parallels in several Indo-European traditions, which, together with the Germanic material, reflect a well-known conceptual metaphor rooted in universal human cognition.

Research on adverbs of degree in Old and Middle English has been largely self-contained and has paid little attention to developments that were happening in the neighbouring West Germanic languages. While research on these other languages is less extensive, “Middle” Germanic has been identified as a period of convergence for the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser 2023). The present study analyses the usage patterns of seven adverbs in both Old and Middle English using data from different corpora: swīðe/swīthe, ful, miċle/muchel, sāre/sǭre, ġearwe/yāre, fela/fę̄le, and hearde/harde. It is found that their development differs strikingly from their Continental West Germanic counterparts, and they appear to preserve more primary usage patterns.

I discuss an analysis of changes in the Scandinavian runic alphabet, or futhark, by Jørgen Rischel (1966). Rischel’s article accounts for some puzzling changes in the futhark by employing contrastive feature hierarchies represented as branching trees. Feature hierarchies can be traced back to the work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues. They enjoyed a brief period of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, but then disappeared from mainstream phonological theory. However, they were employed in a number of interesting studies of Germanic and other languages whose insights we can still profit from today. The goal of this paper is to bring attention to this largely forgotten approach to phonological analysis, and to spell out the principles that underlie it.

This article welcomes the recent proposal of Michael Schulte (2024) for a periodisation of early North Germanic, while pointing out problematic premises and criteria for the delimitation of the proposed subperiods. It is argued that in delimiting linguistic periods there is more to gain than lose for the clarity of scholarly argument if preference is given to linguistic rather than graphemic or socio-cultural criteria, even if it means that reconstructed, rather than ambiguously attested features, are given preference. The relevant chapter of a recent book by Nelson Goering (2023) is also reviewed to cast light on the syncope era. Elements and insights are proposed for a periodisation and labelling of early North Germanic suited for discussion on diachronic structural change.