Answer the following questions
1. What alphabets employed in the history of Germanic languages do you know? Speak on the origin and structure of Germanic alphabets.
In their writings, the Germanic tribes used three types of characters: runes, the Gothic alphabet and the Latin alphabet.
Runes were the most ancient characters used by Germanic tribes. They date from as early as the second Century AD.
Primarily runes were marks of mysterious or magic significance. The word “rune'' meant “mystery”. Gradually it came to be used in the meaning of "a letter, a character". There were several types of runic alphabets. In the most widely used one there were 24 runes. They are supposed to have ap¬peared in the second century A.D. when the Goths lived on the shores of the Black Sea, and to belong to the ancient Indo-European alphabets of the Mediterranean area such as Hellenic and Latin, modified to suit carving. Runes were used by all Germanic tribes, especially by the Scandinavians who carved their inscriptions on rock, wood, bone etc. The runic alphabet was called FUTHARK.
2. Written records in OE.
The first OE written records are considered to be the runic inscriptions. To make these inscriptions people used the Runes/the Runic Alphabet – the first original Germanic Alphabet.
The Runes appeared in the 3rd – 4th c. A.D.; it was also called Futhark (after the first 6 letters of this alphabet); the word “rune” meant “secret, mystery” and was used to denote magic inscriptions on objects made of wood, stone, metal; each symbol indicated a separate sound (one symbol = one sound);
Another example is Ruthwell Cross, sited in a church Ruthwell, south – west Scotland, often said to be the finest surviving piece of sculpture from the Anglo- Saxon period. It’s date uncertain , but thought to be the 1st half of the 8th century.
3. The Indo-European family of languages. Features common to most of the Indo-European languages.
The term Indo European (IE) suggests the geographical extent of the family. They fall into 11 groups.
1) Balto-Slavic
2) Indian
3) Iranian
4) Hellenic
5) Germanic
6) Italic
7) Celtic
8) Armenian
9) Albanian
and 2 dead langs
10) Tocharian
11) Hittite (Хеттский)
At the beginning of our era the Celts formed one of the most extensive groups of the Indo European family. They were found in Gaul, Spain, Northern Italy, Western Germany and British Isles. They took the greater part of the Western Europe and today they can found in the remoter parts of France and the British Isles, where we see Gaelic, spoken in the highlands, Irish, spoken in Ireland, Welsh, spoken in Wales and Manx.
4. Classification of the modern Germanic languages.
The common point which the language of the Germanic group had had before they were differentiated is known as Proto-Germanic (PG) or Common Germanic. At that time the last few centuries BC the Germanic tribes inhabited the western coast of the Baltic Sea and the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsulas. The languages that descended from PG fall into 3 groups:
- East Germanic,
- North Germanic,
- West Germanic.
The East Germanic Languages
The major language is Gothic. By the 3d century of our era, it had left the region of Vistula and moved to the shore of the Black Sea. There in the 4th century they were christianized by a missionary called Ulfilas. For that purpose he translated into the Gothic language the gospels and some other parts of the New Testament. And our knowledge of the Gothic language is almost holy due to this translation.
5. Chronological division in the history of English.
The commonly accepted periodisation divides English history into 3 periods: Old English, Middle English and New English.
Old English begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th century) or with the beginning of writing (7th c.) and ends with the Norman conquest (1066).
ME begins with the Norman conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475). And this is the beginning of the Modern or New English period which lasts to the present day. A lot of subdivisions have been suggested.
Sweet suggested 3 main periods: early, classical and late. Schlauch preferred a division of history by centuries. Strang: into periods of 200 years. But we will study Rastorgueva’s division:
1) pre-written period or Early OE lasted from the 5th to the close of the 7th c. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians). The tribal dialects were used for oral communication, there was no written form of English
2) OE or Anglo-Saxon; also written OE from the 8th up to the 11th c. The tribal dialects changed into local or regional dialects, they are;Kentish, Mersian, Nothumbrian and West Saxon. In writing sphere West Saxon had gained the supremacy over the rest, it is connected with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex in political and cultural way.
Answer the following questions
1. What verbal and nominal categories existed in Germanic languages?
The verb in Germanic had two tense forms, the present and the preterit (the past).
To express an action in the future the Germanic lan¬guages used the present tense and lexical means (adverbs). In some Germanic languages certain verbs were apt to imply future meaning, such as Goth: skulan, wiljan.
The verb in Germanic had two numbers: the singular and the plural. Only Gothic preserved the dual in the first and second persons.
There were three persons but the plural personal inflections became uniform for the second and third persons and later for the first person as well.
Mood. The verb had three moods: the Indicative, the Im¬perative, and the Subjunctive.
The Indo- European verb had an active voice and a voice that combined reflexive and passive functions (medio passive). Of the latter only Gothic still possessed a paradigm. Other Germanic languages later developed compound forms of the passive voice consisting of the auxiliary “wesan” or "weorSan” and Participle II.
According to the formation of the preterit all verbs fell into two principal types: strong verbs that formed the preterit by means of gradation (changing the root vowel), and weak verbs that formed the preterit by adding a dental suffix.
2. Enumerate the grammatical categories of nouns, adjectives. Into what types of declensions did the OE nouns fall?
In Germanic, the Noun had the following grammatical categories: Case, Number, and Gender. Nouns were divided into classes according to the stem-forming suffixes.
There were stems ending in a vowel (a, o, i, e, u,...) and those ending in a consonant ( n, p, r, s…), the n.-stem being a characteristic feature of the Germanic languages.
The declension of the noun depended on the Gender and the stem-forming suffix.
The majority of OE nouns belonged to the a-stems, ō-stems and n-stems. Special attention should also be paid to the root-stems which displayed specific peculiarities in their forms and have left noticeable traces in Mod E.
a-stems included Masc. and Neut. nouns. About one third of OE nouns were Masc. a-stems, e. g. cniht (NE knight), hām (NE home), mūþ (NE mouth); examples of Neut. nouns are: lim (NE limb), hūs (NE house), þin (NE thing).
3. Degrees of comparison of adjectives in OE and their further history (MidE, NewE).
Most adjectives distinguished between 3 degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, superlative. The regular means to form the comparative and the superlative from the positive were the suffixes –ra and -est/ost. Sometimes suffixation was accompanied by an interchange of the root-vowel. Eald-ieldra-ieldest(old), lon3-len3ra-len3est(long). The mutation of the root-vowel was caused by i-umlaut in Early OE. At that stage the suffixes were either –ira, -ist or –ora, -ost. In the forms with –i the root-vowel was fronted and made narrower, later –i was lost and weakened to –e. In ME the degrees of comparison could be built in the same way as in OE, only suffixes had been weakened to-er, -est and the interchange of the root-vowel was less common than before. Since most adj. with the sound alternation had parallel forms without it, the forms with the interchange soon fell into disuse.(Long, lenger, lengest & long, longer, longest.)
4. Assimilative vowel changes in OE: breaking and diphthongization, palatal mutation.
Under the influence of succeeding and preceding consonants some Early OE monophthongs developed into diphthongs. If a front vowel stood before a velar consonant there developed a short glide between them, as the organs of speech prepared themselves for the transition from one sound to the other. The glide, together with the original monophthong formed a diphthong.
The front vowels [i], [e] and the newly developed [æ], changed into diphthongs with when they stood before [h], before long (doubled) [ll] or [l] plus another consonant, and before [r] plus other consonants, e.g.: [e]>[eo] in OE deorc, NE dark. The change is known as breaking or fracture.
Breaking produced a new set of vowels in OE – the short diphthongs [ea] and [eo]; they could enter the system as counterparts of the long [ea:], [eo:], which had developed from PG prototypes.
5. The verbal grammatical categories in OE, morphological classification of verbs in OE. Weak and strong verbs and their classes in OE.
The verb in Germanic had two tense forms, the present and the preterit (the past).
To express an action in the future the Germanic lan¬guages used the present tense and lexical means (adverbs). In some Germanic languages certain verbs were apt to imply future meaning, such as Goth: skulan, wiljan.
The verb in Germanic had two numbers: the singular and the plural. Only Gothic preserved the dual in the first and second persons.
There were three persons but the plural personal inflections became uniform for the second and third persons and later for the first person as well.
Mood. The verb had three moods: the Indicative, the Im¬perative, and the Subjunctive.
The Indo- European verb had an active voice and a voice that combined reflexive and passive functions (medio passive). Of the latter only Gothic still possessed a paradigm. Other Germanic languages later developed compound forms of the passive voice consisting of the auxiliary “wesan” or "weorSan” and Participle II.
