МИНОБРНАУКИ РОССИИ

ФГБОУ ВПО «Хакасский государственный университет им. Н.Ф. Катанова»

Институт филологии и межкультурной коммуникации

Кафедра английской филологии и теории языка

035700.62 Лингвистика. Теория и методика преподавания иностранных языков и культур

Б.3.В.1.1. История первого иностранного языка

Учебно-методический комплекс дисциплины

Конспект лекций

(на правах рукописи)

Абакан

1. Конспект лекций составлен в соответствии с рабочей программой Б.3. В.1.1 История первого иностранного языка по направлению подготовки 035700 Лингвистика, утвержденного 20 мая 2010 г.

2. Разработчик (и) элемента УМКД

доцент каф. АФ и ТЯ ____________ Чаптыкова А.А.

(подпись) (ФИО)

ассистент кафедры АФ и ТЯ ____________ Прохоренко М.В.

(подпись) (ФИО)

3. ПРИНЯТ на заседании кафедры АФ и ТЯ ___________ протокол №___

(дата)

Зав. кафедрой _______________________ __________________

(подпись) (ФИО)

Lecture 1. The Germanic languages. The main characteristics of the Germanic languages.

English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family of languages. The history of the Germanic group started with the Primitive Germanic language. It is an entirely pre-historic language. It was recorded in the written form. PG was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidence in the descendant languages. PG is supposed to have been one language though dialectally colored. Later the dialectal differences grew to such an extent that at the beginning of our era Germanic appeared to be divided into dialectal groups and tribal dialects. The dialectal differences increased with the migration of the Teutons.

The Germanic tribes of the time of J. Caesar were on the stage of primitive communal system. There were no great differences between the common people and the representatives of power. 150 years later the social life of the Germanic tribes was marked by a higher level of development. The tribal system began to decay.

Writing in the Germanic languages

At first all Germanic tribes used a common alphabet. The characters of the alphabet were known as runes and were usually engraved on horn, stone, wood and metal. After the introduction of Christianity the Germanic tribes used either Greek or Latin alphabet according to the variety of Christianity their missionaries adhered to. In both cases the alphabet had to submit to changes to render the peculiarities of Germanic pronunciation.

The main distinguishing features of the Germanic languages

The Germanic group acquired their distinctive features after the separation of the ancient Germanic tribes from other IE tribes and prior to their further expansion and disintegration, that is during the period of the PG parent-language. These PG features inherited by the descendant languages represent the common features of the Germanic group.

The word stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, it could fall on any syllable of the word. In late PG its position in the word was stabilized. It was fixed on the first syllable which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix.

Proto-Germanic consonant shift.

The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated in terms of a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19^th c. and are often called Grimm’s law. It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic consonant shift. By the terms of Grimm’s law voiceless plosives developed in PG into voiceless fricatives (Act 1); IE voiced plosives were shifted to voiceless plosives (Act II) and IE voiced aspirated plosives were reflected either as voiced fricatives or as pure plosives (Act III).

Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19^th c. by a Danish scholar, Carl Verner. They are known as Verner’s law. It explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm’s law and were for a long time regarded as exceptions. According to Verner’s law all the early PG voiceless fricatives which arose under Grimm’s law and also [s] inherited from PIE became voiced between vowels, if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless.

The Grammar System of the OG languages.

Like other old IE languages both PG and the OG languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, the relations between the parts of a sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words. In later history all the Germanic languages developed analytical forms and ways of word connection. In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion.

Vowel gradation (Ablaut) is an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions; different vowels appear in the same environment surrounded by the same sounds. Vowel gradation did not reflect any phonetic changes but was used as a special independent device to differentiate between words and grammatical forms built from the same root.

Most verbs of PG and the OG languages were divided into 2 big groups called strong and weak verbs. The terms were proposed by J. Grimm. He called the verbs strong because they preserved all the richness of form since the age of the parent language and from this point of view could be contrasted to weak verbs lacking such a variety of form. The main difference between the groups lay in the means of building the principal forms: the Present tense, the Past tense and Participle II.