English as a germanic language

1. The structure, the subject-matter and aims of the general theoretical course of English.

1. The importance of the English language.

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

3. Characteristics of Germanic languages.

I. The general theoretical course of the English language is intended for senior students of the department of foreign languages who study English us their second specialization. The main aim of the given course of lectures is to supply students with necessary linguistic terminology, which is widely employed in such important philological sciences as grammar, stylistics, lexicology, history of the language, etc., thus to enable students - future philologists - to work with scientific literature in English.

The structure of the course of lectures is determined by the aims of the latter. The course will include lectures on 1) the History of the English language (in brief, just an outline); 2) fundamentals of English lexicology; 3) stylistics and fundamentals of text analysis; 4) peculiarities of the grammatical system of English and general trends in grammar researches.

II. 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 (In 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 Chi- tut 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 180 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 use throughout most of the North American continent and in the British Isle 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 the 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 language (the size of its vocabulary, peculiarities of its grammar, etc) but 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.

3. 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 Highland 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 (['vistfula] - 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 (['deinij] - датский), Icelandic, Faroese (['fearouiiz] spo­ken on the Faroe ['fearou] 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 (['fri3an], 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, adjectives, 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	mère	mater	meter
father	Vater	fader	père	pater	patër
fish	Fisch	fisk	poisson	pisces	psaros
seven	sieben	sju	sept	septem	hepta
star	Stern	stjäma	étoile	stella	astron

4. The Germanic group of languages has its own individual characteristics. They are:

• the development of a weak verb conjugation along with the strong conjugation;

• the twofold declension of the adjective ( as strong and weak);

• a fixed stress accent; and

• a regular shifting of consonants.

Let us consider each of the items in brief.

First. English verbs are of two classes: the weak and the strong. The weak class comprises the majority of verbs and is therefore called “regular” A verb of this class forms its past tense and past participle by adding -ed, -d or -t to the present or infinitive stem. The strong class includes verbs which form their tenses by an internal change of the vowel (e.g. drink, drank drunk). This vowel gradation is also known as ablaut ['æblaut].

Second. Though Modern English does not distinguish between the weak and the strong forms of the adjective, in Old English (OE) as well as in Modern High German this twofold declension of the adjective is but norm. When a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun, or the definite article preceded the adjective, or when the adjective was used substantively (i.e. as a noun), it was declined in one way called "weak". Otherwise, it was declined in another way called "strong". Compare the OE forms: Wise menn (MnE wise men):: Pas wisan menn (MnE these wise men)

Third. Formerly, in IE languages the stress was free and was used to express grammatical forms (like in Modern Russian: руки -руки, глаза глаза, ноги - ноги, etc). But in the Germanic languages even in most archaic times the stress was always on the first syllable, generally the root syllable.

The fixation of the stress on the root syllable was of great importance for the development of the grammatical system of Germanic languages in general, and of English, in particular - the singling out of the root of the word and (lie weakening of unstressed affixes led to the gradual leveling of unstressed endings and, finally, to their loss in English, which in its turn, contributed to the appearance of numerous prepositional phrases and analytical forms.

In Modern English (MnE) we can generally recognize native words, as distinguished from those borrowed from some non-Germanic languages, by observing the stressed syllable when affixes are added in forming new words. Compare, for instance, MnE 'friend, 'friendly, 'friendship, 'friendliness, un’friendly with 'pure, puri’fy, purifi’cation and 'cinema, cinema’tography, cinemato’graphic. The native word friend keeps the accent on the root syl­lable, but pure (borrowed from Latin) and cinema (borrowed from Greek) shift the stress as affixes are added.

The fourth distinctive feature of the Germanic languages is the almost regular shifting of consonants, according to a certain pattern that particular II' consonants underwent in these languages.

In 1822 the famous German linguist Jacob Grimm formulated an explanation of the correspondences between certain consonants in the Germanic languages and those found in other IE languages of non- Germanic group. His law is subdivided into three acts.

The first act of Grimm's Law has it that IE consonants p, t, k (=voiceless stops) correspond accordingly to the labial f, the dental Ɵ and the velar h in Germanic languages.

According to the second act of Grimm's law the original IE voiced соnsonants b, d, g correspond to the voiceless ones p, t, k in the German languages.

By the third act of Grimm’s law, the ancient IE aspirated voiced stops bh, dh, gh correspond to Germanic unaspirated stops b, d, g.

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