A. Drout's Lecture 5: "Sound Shifts and History", is a much fuller treatment of these important sound shifts than can be found in Van Gelderen:
Grimm's Law
Verner's Law. This is a refinement of Grimm's Law.
I-Mutation, or "Umlaut" (as it is called in German)
Breaking of short vowels in certain consonantal environments.
If you are interested -- and I hope you are -- you can download Verner's famous article from 1875-1877 from the Wikipedia page on Verner's Law. It's also available on Google Books. The whole Wikipedia page on Verner's Law is very useful.
There's an excellent, brief English discussion at the top of this University of Texas page. (Archived) The rest of this page is a translation into English of Karl Verner's original article, "Eine ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung" (= "An exception to the first sound change" -- by which Verner meant Grimm's Law), originally published in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen 23, 2 (1877), 97-130.)
Anyway, be sure to watch this short, very amusing, and yet very informative, YouTube video on Verner's Law: Part One; Part Two; Part Three.
Study Drout's account of these four sound shifts. Make sure you understand them. We will discuss them in class.
It also discusses "three great achievements" by Eduard Sievers; Ferdinand de Saussure (the same linguist who invented the langue and parole terminology); and J.R.R. Tolkien. The first two, by Sievers and Saussure, are of more interest to us than the third. Sievers and de Saussure made discoveries that helped to show that comparative historical linguistics could lay claim to the status of a science, in that it can have predictive value.
B. Drout's Lecture 8, "The History of the English Language", covers material also covered somewhat differently in Van Gelderen, Chapter 3.
Read Lecture 8 several times. Be sure you are familiar with this information.
C. Drout's Lecture 9, "From Germanic to Old English", is especially interesting and important for us. In it, we learn about
the change from Primitive Germanic to Old English
cognates
We also study the Lord's Prayer in both Gothic (East Germanic, 300-400 A.D.) and Old English (ca. 1000 A.D.)
Written HW: Study the Gothic Lord's Prayer (Lecture 9, pp. 65-66).
Read
this
page, analyzing the Gothic Lord's Prayer to find cognates in
English.
NOTE: When you read (= try hard to decipher) the Gothic text on this page, note
that the letter "y" stands for the letter þ (Old English "thorn"), which is the
way the θ or "th" sound is written in Gothic (and also in Old English).
Identify 15 cognates in your written HW. Use full sentences; write about 300 words.
Email to me, NOT to your group.
NB: As always, bring your text to class with you.