ゲルマン語派における非印欧語的傾向 : 英語とデンマーク語の場合

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Given Chinese, Indonesian, English, German and French, any one who looks at the actual state of English without taking its historical background into consideration, will have no hesitation in grouping it with Chinese or Indonesian, not with German or French, if one is required to do so in terms of purely structural similarity. The same would apply to Danish though to a lesser extent. Indeed, it is the seemingly simple framework of the two languages that will lead one to make an attempt at such a grouping otherwise improbable. As is well-known, English and Danish are two members of Germanic, a subgroup of the Indo-European language family. The development of comparative linguistics has ventured to probe into the Indo-European prehistory and, at the same time, tried to presume the approximate date when, and the subsequent settlement to which, the race later to be called Germanic branched off and migrated from the aboriginal homeland. It was at this racial alienation that the character of the parent Indo-European language was subjected to a significant modification. Like other subgroups, proto-Germanic is responsible for introducing innovations of its own different from the ancestral legacy. Investigation has furnished positive proof for this in every part of the protolanguage reconstructed from all kinds of available material. 'Grimm's Law', for instance, is famed for the systematization of consonant shift from the parent language to Germanic. Succeeding historical ages see this earliest stage of the language gradually breaking up into many dialects, through which the so-called non-Indo-European tendency has been ever since accelerated to give up more of its inherited traits. What may be called a centrifugal drift is to be found at its best in the cases of English and Danish. This monograph aims to describe what innovations these two languages reveal to us by contrast with things as they stood originally. Last but not least are the words of Antoine Meillet, a brilliant French linguist, that have motivated the author to write the present treatise, making him feel a great obligation to quote: "Le terme extreme du developpement se voit dans l'anglais moderne. Les anciennes finales de mots sont si reduits qu'il n'en reste presque rien;la partie accentuee des mots subsiste a peu pres seule. Et des lors l'ancienne morphologie indo-europeenne est detruite. L'anglais actuel est une langue indo-europeenne en tant que...il se relie sans solution de continuite a l'indo-europeen. Mais, a ne considerer que le type linguistique en lui-meme, et en faisant abstraction de la continuite qui est en fait historique sans realite actuelle, rien est plus eloigne du type indo-europeen que l'anglais-ou le danois-d'aujourd'hui. Si l'on devait, en considerant l'anglais actuel et en en oubliant tout le passe, demontrer que l'anglais est une langue indo-europeenne, on y parviendrait qu'a peine." (Caracteres generaux des langues germaniques, p.17)
桃山学院大学の論文
1995-01-30

ゲルマン語派における非印欧語的傾向 : 英語とデンマーク語の場合

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