Divergent development vs. convergent development. The common Germanic diachronic typological constant.

Divergent Development Divergent development implies separation from a common point and movement in different directions Convergent Development Convergent development suggests coming together towards the same point. If languages tend to acquire more and more struc¬tural or other resemblances, which cannot be explained by gene¬tic relationships ,it is possible to speak of convergence-The emergence of characteristics testifying to convergent deve¬lopment is usually observed in languages of the same geogra¬phical area and is studied by areal linguistics. Convergence is often caused by multifarious 1inguo-ethniс contacts between communities . It may manifest itself in specific(for a certain region)innovations shared by the areal group of lan¬guages The lexical subsystem is the level of the language system most susceptible to areal innovations We shall have to take into account fact when we start analysing typological tendencies in the English vocabulary system. This is the convergent development of languages which neither form a single areal group nor display any genetic relationship. Their convergence does not derive from any contacts between communities. This is a typological con¬vergence. English, as we have already stated above, has changed its system to such an extent that it is approximating to the agglutinating and isolating types.This means that in some leading aspects modern English is structurally closer to Turkish or Chinese than to Latin or Icelandic, though Latin, English, and Icelandic belong to the Indo-European family, Ice¬landic (as a North Germanic language) being in close relation¬ship to English. But neither Turkish nor Chinese are Indo-Euro-pean languages The Common Germanic Diachronic Typological Constant The languages of the Germanic branch are considered to have di¬verged from the common form labelled Proto-Germanic. The descen¬dants of this protolanguage fall into three groups: East Germa¬nic, West Germanic, and North Germanic. All East Germanic languages are now dead. There is only a small number of Burgundian and Vandalic proper names at our disposal. Written records are unavailable excepting Gothic. By the third century, the Goths had spread from the Baltic Sea to the shore of the Black Sea. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea (until the 16th century). The North Germanic languages are spoken in Iceland, Scandinavia, and Denmark. The most popular modern North Germanic languages are Danish and Swedish. Danish is the language of Denmark and the written language of Norway. Another North Germanic language is Icelandic. English is a West Germanic language. Apart from English and German it comprises Netherlandish, Frisian( in Friesland), Afrikaans, and Yiddish(Jewish language). Afrikaans is one of the two official European languages (the other is English) in the Republic of South Africa. In 1925 it acquired the status of an official language together with English. Yiddish, and especially Afrikaans are relatively young. It is quite clear they are not direct descendants of the prщ to-Germanic tongue. Old Germanic languages (like other Indo-European tongues) used to be inflecting and synthetic. Such was their original type. There is no denying the fact that the Germanic languages have seen structural changes of different intensity in the course of their history. Some of them (such as English and Da¬nish) have practically changed their type altogether. The rest have undergone important qualitative changes in their subsystems at different levels, their quantity being still too small to cause any radical typological reconstruction of the overall sys¬tem. The evidence obtained from recent investigations into diachro¬nic typology and the history of the Germanic languages enables scholars to recognize the common diachronic typological cons-tant in the historical development of these tongues. This constant consists of the gradual decay of the former Inflecting, synthetic characteristics and stable tendency to¬wards analyticism, isolation and (or) agglutination. M.M.Guchman ri suggested the analogy with the pyramid to show the intensity of this process in the word-changing para- digms of the Germanic languages. We find it useful to inter¬pret the whole set of structural innovations in the system of the Germanic languages in the light of Guchmann's analogy. Ac-tually, in later volumes,we will try to show, by way of corrobo¬ration of her f undamental idea, some of the most significant manifestations of the above-mentioned constant at different le¬vels of the English language system throughout its history.For this purpose we shall have to break with the general practice of historians to confine the description of the emergence of analyticism to the morphological level only and underestimate or even ignore agglutinative and isolating tendencies altoge - ther. As a prelude to the analysis of the historical processes affecting the state of the English language system , we pro¬pose an illustration of the analogy with the pyramid.(See page 26). The base of the'pyramid is associated with the ori¬ginal inflecting type and synthetic technique: the top - with analyticism and the newly-acquired features of isolation and (or) agglutination. Afrikaans and English are approximating to the top» they nearly crown the pyramid. The rest of the lan¬guages are distributed further down in accordance with the in¬tensity of the manifestation (проявление) of the common typological constant in their systems.