- •2. The common features of Germanic languages.
- •1. The old Germanic languages, their classification and principal features.
- •3. The chronological division of the history of English. General characteristics of each period.
- •4. The Scandinavian invasion and its effect on English.
- •5. The Norman Conquest and its effect on English.
- •6. The dialectal situation of English from a historical perspective.
- •7. Principal Old English and Middle English written record.
- •8. Major spelling changes in me.
- •12. Consonant changes in the history of English
- •9. The oe sound system. Vowel and consonant changes in Old English.
- •Loss of Consonants:
- •10. Monophthongs in the history of English.
- •11. Diphthongs in the history of English
- •14. The oe noun system.
- •15. The simplification of the noun declension in English
- •30. The main trends in word formation in history of English
- •16. The development of personal pronouns in the history of English.
- •17. The development of the adjective in history of English
- •18. The development of demonstrative pronouns in the history of English.
- •13. Form-building means in the history of English
- •19. Oe verbal system.
- •20.Weak verbs in oe & their further development.
- •21. Strong verbs in oe and their development.
- •22. Oe preterite-present verbs and anomalous verbs and their further development.
- •26. The causes of changes in the morphological system in me & ne. The origin of modern English regular and irregular noun forms.
- •23 .Changes in the verb conjugation in the history of English.
- •27. The principal features of oe syntax.
- •24. The rise of analytical forms within the verbal system in the history of English.
- •Formation
- •25. Verbals in the history of English
- •Infinitive
- •28. The main trends in the development of English syntax.
- •29. Oe vocabulary & its etymological characteristics.
- •31. Borrowings as a source of the replenishment of e vocabulary in me & ne.
2. The common features of Germanic languages.
Principal features
German languages show differences in comparison with other European Lang on 3 main linguistic levels: grammatical, phonetic and lexical.
Grammatical level
1) the existence of a certain type of verbs – “weak”, past tense with the dental suffix –d-: open – opened, work – worked.
2) group of “strong” verbs, which used to build past tense with the help of vowel gradation (root vowel interchange): take-took-taken
3) double declension of the adj-s. The adj. has 2 declensions – weak, strong. The choice of the declension depends on:
- presence or absence of determiner (article, pronoun)
- degree of comparison
- the syntactical function (used attributively or predicatively.
Phonetic peculiarities – 1) accent (word stress) in IE was free and musical (луна, лунный, прилуниться); in protogerm. Accent become fixed on the root syllable and dynamic (white, whiteness, whitewash), 2) Grimm’s law.
Grimm’s law: The first Germanic consonant shifts took place in the V-II cent. BC. Jacobs Grimm’s Law. According to Grimm, he classified consonant correspondences between Indo-European and Germanic languages.
There are 3 acts of this law:
IE voiceless stops p, t, k correspond to G voiceless fricatives f, Ө, h. Eg: пламя – flame, пена – foam, колода – holt.
IE voiced stops b, d, g, →G voiceless fricatives p, t, k. Eg: бассейн - pool, дерево – tree, иго – yoke.
IE aspirated voiced stops bh, dh, gh →to voiced stops without any aspiration b,d,g. Eg: bhrāta – brother, rudhira – red, ghostis – guest.
The second consonant shift was Carl Verner’s law. According to C.Verner all the common germanic consonants became voiced in intervocalic position if the preceding vowel was unstressed and the following one – stressed.
p-f > v septem (L) – seofon (OE) – seven (NE)
t-Ө > đ, d сто – hund (OE)
k-x > j, g свекровь – sweзer (OE)
s-s > z/r auris (L) – ēare
Devoicing took place in early common germanic when the stress was not yet fixed on the root.
A variety of Verner’s law is rhotacism (greek letter rho). [s] →[z]→[r] we find traces of this phenomenon in form of the verb to be →was – were, is – are; ist – sind – war.
I-MUTATION took place in all Germanic languages in VI – VII cent, except Gothic. It is a case of regressive assimilation with –i- or semivowel ‘j’. Eg: kuning – cyning (король), fuljan – fūllan (fill – full), saljan – sellan (sell). The suffix j wasn’t preserved, only the mutated root vowel remainded. We find traces of i-mutation in NE, especially in irregular plurals: foot – feet, goose – geese, blood – bleed. After i-mutation we could observe the following correspondences:
1) |ǽ, a, o → e| |a: → ǽ| |ea, eo → ie| No new phonemes appeared because the sounds which appeared existed in the phonetic system before, they just started to be pronounced in different phonetic environment.
2) u → y Appeared the new phoneme Y, which has never existed before.
Lexical features
In Germ. lang-es there’s a layer of words, which are called “common Germanic”. They are the words with similar roots &, moreover, they didn’t occur outside the group.