4. Chief characteristics of the Germanic languages. Grammar. Alphabet.

Grammar:

Proto-Germanic had six cases, three genders, three numbers, three moods (indicative, subjunctive , imperative), and two voices (active and passive). This is quite similar to the state of Latin, Greek. It is often asserted that the Germanic languages have a highly reduced system of inflections as compared with Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. As an example, there are less than 500 years between the Gothic Gospels of 360 AD and the Old High Germanic Tatian of 830 AD, yet Old High German, despite being the most archaic of the West Germanic languages, is missing a large number of archaic features present in Gothic, including dual and passive markings on verbs, reduplication in Class VII strong verb past tenses, the vocative case, and second-position (Wackernagel's Law) clitics. Many more archaic features may have been lost between the Proto-Germanic of 200 BC or so and the attested Gothic language. Furthermore, Proto-Romance andMiddle Indic of the fourth century AD—contemporaneous with Gothic—were significantly simpler than Latin and Sanskrit, respectively, and overall probably no more archaic than Gothic.

Alphabet:

• The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic alphabet, not to be found in languages of other groups. The word rune originally meant ’secret’, ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. The runes were used as letters, each symbol to indicate separate sound. This alphabet is called futhark after the first six letters. Runic letters are angular; straight lines are preferred, curved lines avoided; this is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of Greek or Latin, other have not been traced to any known alphabet, and the order of the runes in the alphabet is certainly original. The number of runes in different OG languages varied. As compared to continental, the number of runes in England was larger: new runes were added as new sounds appeared in English (from 28 to 33 runes in Britain against 16 or 24 on the continent).

5.Old English. Outer history. Principal written records.

Outer history

The history of the English language begins in the fifth century AD when the ruthless and barbaric Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, who up to that time had lived in western Europe between the Elbe and the Rhine, started their invasion of the British Isles.

The Celtic tribes, whose languages, the same as Germanic, also belonged to the Indo-European family, were at one time among its most numerous representatives. At the beginning of our era the Celts could be found on the territories of the present-day Spain, Great Britain, western Germany and northern Italy. Before that they had been known to reach even Greece and Asia Minor. The Romans invaded Britannia as it was then called in 55— 54 when the troops of Julius Caesar and others conquered the isles. No centralised government was formed, instead there existed petty principalities under the control of local landlords. In 407 AD, with the departure of the last Roman emissary Constantine hostilities among the native tribes in England began anew. To normalise the situation the local chieftains appealed to influential Germanic tribes who lived on the continent inviting them to come to their assistance, and in 449 the Germanic troops Jed by Hengest and Horsa landed in Britain.

The principal written records that came to us through the centuries date from as far back as the 8th century. They were written with the help of the so-called "Runic Alphabet". This was an alphabet of some 26 letters, the shape of which is quite peculiar. We have already said that it is assumed the Runic alphabet was composed by Germanic scribes in the II—III centuries AD and their angular shape is due to the material those inscriptions were made on — wood, stone, bone — and the technique of "writing" — the letters were not written but carved on those hard materials. Among the first Old English runic inscriptions we generally mention two: the inscription on the so called "Franks' casket" — a small box made of whalebone containing a poem about it1, and the inscription on the "Ruthwell cross" — a religious poem engraved on a stone cross found in Scotland. In the 7^th century the Christian faith was introduced and with it there came many Latin-speaking monks who brought with them their own Latin alphabet.