LECTURE 1. English as a Germanic language.

1. The importance of the English language.

2. English as a Germanic language. Classification of Germanic lan­guages.

3. Characteristics of Germanic languages.

1. The importance of the English language.

English is generally acknowledged to be not only one of the ma­jor languages of the world, but the world’s most important language, the so-called lingua franca, i.e. the language serving as a common language between different peoples. At the beginning of the 19^th century, English was the native speech of 15 million people. Nowadays it is used regularly by more than 380 million and is second only to Chinese, whose world primacy in number of speakers is accounted for largely by the vast population of China. Next in size to English is Spanish, spoken by about 330 million people, and then comes Portuguese, spoken by 180 million. Russian is spoken by 175 million, German by 110 million, French by 80 million native speakers and a large number of second-language speakers, and at last Italian is used by 65 million people [see: Baugh, 2006 :4].

English is spoken in areas widely scattered over the globe. It is the native or official language of one fifth of the earth's land surface, being used throughout most of the North American continent and in the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Republic of South Africa. Of the languages of colonization it has been the most important in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the central and southern Pacific.

English is widely used as an international language of communication, i.e. in public affairs. It is the main language of politics, technology, science, commerce, and culture (especially literature). English is the language of three fifths of the world's radio stations and of three fourths of the world's mail.

In his article "Sociology of English as an Additional Language" Joshua A. Fishman makes the point that English is less loved but more used; French is more loved but less used; but in the world of 'econo-technical superiority' the real 'powerhouse' is still English. It doesn't have to worry about being loved because, loved or not, it works. It makes the world go round [Fishman, 1992:24].

Thus, the importance of English is not grounded on its qualities as a language (the size of its vocabulary, peculiarities of its grammar, etc) but is based on such objective criteria as:

• the number of speakers;

• the geographic distribution;

• the extent of its function load (i.e. the range of purposes for which the given language is used);

• the economic and/or political influence of the native speakers of the language.

2. English as a Germanic language. Classification of Germanic lan­guages.

English is a language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages. IE is the major linguistic family of the world, and languages belonging to it have the widest geographic distribution and are spoken by the greatest number of people.

The various IE languages are usually divided into two groups - eastern and western. The chief languages in the western group to which English belongs are:

1. Celtic, including the ancient tongue of the Gauls, whom Caesar con­quered; the modern non-English languages of Wales, Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, and the Isle of Man, and the language of Brittany in northwestern France;

2. Germanic;

3. Greek, including the ancient and modern Greek languages and dialects; and

4. Italic, consisting of Latin with its modern descendants - the Romance languages, the chief of which are French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Rumanian.

Germanic (or Teutonic) languages are divided into three groups: North Germanic, or Scandinavian, East Germanic, and West Germanic.

The group of East Germanic languages has no living (existing) languages at present. The only well known language of this group is Gothic, which was spoken by the Germanic tribes of Goths, who populated the island of Gothland and the lower Vistula - p. Висла at the beginning of our era. Gothic is now known chiefly from fragments of a 4^th century translation of the Bible by Ulfilas, the Arian bishop of the West Goths.

The North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group includes Norwegian, Swedish, Danish - датский, Icelandic, Faroese (spo­ken the Faroe islands which lie to the North of Scotland), and local dialects of Scandinavia.

To the West Germanic group of languages belong German, Dutch (голландский), Flemish (spoken in Flanders, a province of Belgium), Frisian (spoken in Friesland, along the coasts and islands of the North Sea between the Rhine ( p. Рейн) and the Ems ([ems] - p. Эльба), Yiddish and English.

In spite of the fact that the languages of the IE family are so different today that it seems hardly possible that they grew from the single source - the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, still these languages have a few common features to prove their relationship, namely:

• the binary division of syntactic structures into subject and predicate;

• the existence of the grammatical categories of nouns, adjective ad­verbs, verbs, numerals, etc.;

• morphological composition of words and similar ways of word-for­mation;

• cognate roots of base-words, i.e. lexical similarity.

Here are a few examples of lexical similarity:

English German Swedish French Latin Greek

mother Mutter moder mere mater meter

father Vater fader pere pater pater

fish Fisch fisk poisson pisces psaros

seven sieben sju sept septem hepta

star Stern stjarna etoile stella astron