Phonetic approach

Trying to explain the loss of inflections of E-sh. “The theory of young grammarians” (Prominent representatives: Herman Paul, Fortunatov). They used psycholinguistics & phonetic factors to account the loss of inflections. Originally in all Germanic languages the position & the stress of a word was free but ancient Germans understood that in the process of communication the root of the word was the most important because it contained the lexical meaning as a result it began to be pronounced more energetically than other parts of the words & the stress gradually became fixed on the root & the final inflections became unstressed & as a result they became weakly pronounced & finally they were completely dropped. These scholars connected the loss of inflections with the fixation of the stress upon the root. At first sight this theory seems to be quite logical but there are facts destroying this conviction. E.g. in Finno-Ugric languages the stress is also fixed on the root but there are 14 cases in Finish. Secondly the system of function words began to be used instead of lost of inflections had appeared in the O.E. period when inflections were still in full blossom. E.g. of stones—камня (род. п.). Due to these contradictions the theory of Young Grammarians is unsatisfactory.

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