Tree of Germanic Languages

East Germanic. The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most powerful of them were Goths. Around 200 A.D. they moved south-east and reached the basin of Danube /'d?njub/, where they made attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium /bi'z?ntiem/.The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records of the 4th-6th c. The Goths were the first to become Christians. In the 4th c. Ulfillas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. A manuscript of about two hundred pages made in 5th-6th c. has been preserved and is kept now in Sweden. Ulfillas" Bible is the earliest example of the text in the language of the Germanic group. It represents a form of language very close to PG.
North Germanic. The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of Goths gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages. They didn't take part in the migrations and were relatively isolated. The speech of these tribes showed little dialectical variation until the 9th c. and is regarded as Old North language. It has come down to us in runic inscriptions dated from the 3rd to the 9th c. The runes were used by North and West Germanic tribes.
Runes. Runes are also called Futhark, which actually is an analogue to our "alphabet", in that f, u, th, a, r, and k are the first 6 Runic letters, while alpha and beta are the first 2 Greek letters. Why this order? It must have had some mneumonic function that was not preserved. (Just like why aleph, beth, and gimmel are the first 3 letters in Phoenician/Ugaritic). Runes have always been seen as possessive of mystical properties in the popular culture. One possible etymology of the word rune is the Germanic word *run-, meaning "to conceal", "a secret". This meaning can be explained the following way: at first runes were used as a sacred writing system, and later became not only the magic, but also the civilian script. The first Runic inscriptions appeared around 200 AD, but its origins may lie much deeper in the pre-history of Northern Europe. For the next thousand years it was used in Germany, Scandinavia, England, and Lowlands, and only in late Middle Ages it was replaced by the Roman script everywhere in Northern Europe. This alphabet was used in ancient Rome and was later adopted practically everywhere in Western and Central Europe. It is also called Latin, for it was first introduced by Latin tribes who founded Rome.Runes usually were inscribed on metal, stone or wood boards, this is the reason for their strange sharp forms. The most ancient of the inscriptions found is the one from Norway written on the edge of the spear in about 200 AD. Since the alphabet, which was probably invented in Scandinavia, was spreading to the British Isles and to continental Europe, its symbols changed somehow, as well as the number of them. Modern science makes a distinction between the Elder Runes (up to the 9th century), and the later Younger Runes, or Scandinavian Runes. A speacial variety existed in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th to the 10th century. The Elder Runes, used mostly for magic purposes, contain many personal names and their lexicon is sometimes hard to understand, though the language is clear. We know about 150 runic inscriptions of this period, and some of them contain just one or two symbols. The Younger inscriptions are more numerous (about 3500), and are mostly documents written in particular Germanic languages. There is the Anglo-Saxon variety of Scandinavian Runic alphabet. The Runic poem written in alliterative style explains the meaning of each rune.