№1.In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyses the internal development of a single language over time.^[1] Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages, to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language, to discover the development of phonological, morphological, and other linguistic systems, and to confirm or refute hypothesized relationships between languages. The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language was August Schleicher, in hisCompendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, originally published in 1861.

1. №2. The Indo-European verbal system was simplified. Indo-European distinctions of tense and aspect (indicates whether an action or state is viewed with regard to beginning, duration, incompletion, etc.) were lost except for the present and preterite (past) tenses. These two tenses are still the only ones indicated by inflection in Modern English; future and perfect tenses are expressed in phrases--e.g., I will have gone, etc.

2. Germanic developed a preterite tense (called weak or regular) with a dental suffix, -d or -t (e.g. fish, fished, etc.). Germanic languages thus have two types of verbs, weak (regular) and strong (irregular). Strong verbs indicate tense by an internal vowel change (e.g. swim, swam, swum). The weak form is the living method of inflection, and many originally strong verbs have become weak.

3. Germanic developed weak and strong adjectives. The weak declension was used when the modified noun was preceded by another word which indicated case, number, and gender. The strong declension was used in other situations. These declensions are no longer found in modern English, but compare these examples from Old English: þa geongan ceorlas 'the young fellows' and geonge ceorlas 'young fellows.' (The weak adjective ends in -an while the strong adjective ends in -e.)

4. The Indo-European free accentual system allowed any syllable to be stressed. In Germanic the accent (or stress) is mainly on the root of the word, usually the first syllable.

5. Several Indo-European vowels were modified in the Germanic languages. For example, Indo-European /a:/ became /o:/. Compare Latin mater and Old English modor.

6. Two consonant shifts occurred in Germanic. In the First Sound Shift (commonly known as Grimm's Law) the Indo-European stops bh, dh, gh, p, b, t, d, k, and g underwent a series of shifts. The Second Sound Shift (also known as the High German Sound Shift) affected the high but not the low Germanic languages, so English was not affected.

7. Germanic has a number of unique vocabulary items, words which have no known cognates in other Indo-European languages. These words may have been lost in the other Indo-European languages, borrowed from non-Indo-European languages, or perhaps coined in Germanic. Among these words are Modern English rain, drink, drive, broad, hold, wife, meat, fowl.

№3. Grimm's Law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift or Rask's rule), named after Jakob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration).Grimm himself already noticed that there were many words that had different consonants from what his law predicted. These exceptions defied linguists for a few decades, but eventually received explanation from the Danish linguist Karl Verner, in the form of Verner's law.

Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift.^[1] The phases are usually constructed as follows:

1. Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.

2. Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.

3. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).

№4.In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language that has significantly influenced the modern Indo-European languages. An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb sing, sang, sung and its related noun song.

№5. The English language belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Old English (450 - 1100 AD): During the 5th Century AD three Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) came to the British Isles from various parts of northwest Germany as well as Denmark. These tribes were warlike and pushed out most of the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants from England into Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. Middle English (1100-circa 1500 AD): After William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England in 1066 AD with his armies and became king, he brought his nobles, who spoke French, to be the new government. The Old French took over as the language of the court, administration, and culture. Latin was mostly used for written language, especially that of the Church. Meanwhile, The English language, as the language of the now lower class, was considered a vulgar tongue. Modern English (1500 to the present): Modern English developed after William Caxton established his printing press at Westminster Abbey in 1476. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany around 1450, but Caxton set up England's first press. The Bible and some valuable manuscripts were printed. The invention of the printing press made books available to more people. The books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English.

№6. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was the process, from the mid 5th to early 7th centuries, by which the coastal lowlands of Britain developed from a Romano-British to a Germanic culture following the Roman withdrawal in the early 5th century. The traditional view of the process has assumed an invasion of several Germanic peoples, later collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons, from the western coasts of continental Europe, followed by the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms across most of what is now England and parts of lowland Scotland. The arrival of a Germanic element in the history of Britain is also called the Advent of the Saxons (Latin: Adventus Saxonum), a term first used by Bede in about 731. The assumption that the Anglo-Saxon settlement developed from the invasion or migration of people from the Germanic coastlands, largely displacing the native people, has been challenged by those suggesting that the changes in material culture and language were caused primarily by a process of acculturation that followed the movement of a relatively small number of people.

№7. It is common to divide England into four dialect areas for the Old English period. First of all note that by England that part of mainland Britain is meant which does not include Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. These three areas were Celtic from the time of the arrival of the Celts some number of centuries BC and remained so well into the Middle English period. 

The dialect areas of England can be traced back quite clearly to the Germanic tribes which came and settled in Britain from the middle of the 5th century onwards. There were basically three tribal groups among the earlier settlers in England: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The Angles came from the area of Angeln (roughly the Schleswig-Holstein of today), the Saxons from the area of east and central Lower Saxony and the Jutes from the Jutland peninsula which forms west Denmark today. The correlation between original tribe and later English dialect is as follows:Germanic tribes and regions in England where they mainly settled

Saxons    —    South of the Thames (West Saxon area) Angles    —    Middle and Northern England (Mercia and Northumbria), including lowland Scotland Jutes       —    South-East of England (Kent)

№8. in the 7th century. The period preceding this date is called pre-written. The Old English written monuments represent two types of script – the so called runic alphabet and Latin alphabet. The Runic alphabet was adopted by Anglo-Saxons on the continent before coming to the Island. It is a special type of script used by all Germanic tribes before they became Christians. They adopted Christianity in the 7th century. In the year England was Christianized.

The conversion resulted in supplanting the Runic alphabet by the Latin one. But so far as the Old English phonetic system differed greatly from that of Latin, the Latin alphabet appeared somewhat defective to convey the Anglo-Saxon sounds. The Old English scribes (писцы) filled this want by borrowing several symbols from the Runic alphabet. Besides, some ligatures used in Latin were adopted and finally some letters of the Latin alphabet were used to designate two or more different sounds.

13. The Noun Grammatical categories. The use of cases

The OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. Also, nouns distinguished three genders, but gender was not a grammatical category; it was merely a classifying feature accounting for the division of nouns into morphological classes. The category of number consisted of two members: singular and plural. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

The Nom. can be defined as the case of the active agent, for it was the case of the subject mainly used with verbs denoting activity; the Nom. could also indicate the subject characterized by a certain quality or state; could serve as a predicative and as the case of address.

The Gen. case was primarily the case of nouns and pronouns serving as attributes to other nouns. The meanings of the Gen. case were very complex and can only be grouped under the headings “Subjective” and “Objective” Gen. Subjective Gen. is associated with the possessive meaning and the meaning of origin. Objective Gen. is associated with what is termed “partitive meaning” as insum hund scipa ‘a hundred of ships’.

Dat. was the chief case used with prepositions, e.g. on morзenne ‘in the morning’

The Acc. case was the form that indicated a relationship to a verb. Being the direct object it denoted the recipient of an action, the result of the action and other meanings.

15. Before you read any farther, download the “Magic Sheet” (a one-page summary of Old English inflections) and print it out on the best color printer you can find. Keep this sheet by your side as you read Old English.

The pronouns you will meet with most often are the personal pronouns (with the closely related possessive adjectives) and the demonstratives.

5.1.1. Personal pronouns

You will find the personal pronouns easy to learn because of their resemblance in both form and usage to those of Modern English.

Table 5.1. First-person pronouns
	singular	plural
nominative	iċ ‘I’	wē ‘we’
accusative	mē, mec ‘me’	ūs ‘us’
genitive	mīn ‘my’	ūre ‘our’
dative	mē ‘me’	ūs ‘us’

The first-person pronouns (table 5.1) are quite similar to those of Modern English, especially in prose, where you will generally see accusative singular mē rather than mec.

The second-person pronouns, on the other hand, have changed radically since the Old English period (table 5.2). Modern English does not distinguish number or any case but the possessive; in fact there are now only two forms of the pronoun, you and your. By contrast, the second-person pronouns of Old English look a lot like the first-person pronouns, distinguishing number and at least three of the cases.

Table 5.2. Second-person pronouns
	singular	plural
nominative	þū ‘you’	ġē ‘you’
accusative	þē, þec ‘you’	ēow ‘you’
genitive	þīn ‘your’	ēower ‘your’
dative	þē ‘you’	ēow ‘you’

Old English does not use the second-person singular as a “familiar” form, the way Middle English, French and German do: þū is simply singular. Like mec, accusative singular þec is mainly poetic.

The third-person pronouns, unlike the first- and second-person pronouns, are inflected for gender, but only in the singular (table 5.3).

Table 5.3. Third-person pronouns
	masculine	neuter	feminine	plural
nominative	hē ‘he, it’	hit ‘it’	hēo ‘she, it’	hīe ‘they’
accusative	hine		hīe
genitive	his		hire	hira
dative	him			him