Вопрос 25

Stylistic stratification of Ancient Germanic lexicon.

Main stylistic layers of old Germanic lan-guages were:

- common, neut-ral words, used by all people, e.g. stan, geiz, aex, iss

- poetical terms: metaphors, epi-thets,  synonyms etc) which were widely used in literary texts, in Beowulf first of all. For example:

Beado-swat – battle sweat = blood;

- bookish vocabulary: Latin   words, connected with the church service, terms etc., for example creda (I believe), regol (rule);  werlic, wiflic (masculine, feminine) etc.

Вопрос 26

Stratification of Ancient Germanic lexicon according to its origin.

• Indo-European words denoted 

• natural phenomena (sunna);

• animals (wulf);

• plants (boc);

• birds (aened),

•  peoples (eare),

• relatives (modor),

• activity (feoh) etc.

Words of I. – E. origin. E.g. fæder "father", nāma "name", fót foot, niht "night", riht "right", sittan "sit", beran "to bear"

Common Germanic word

Common Germanic words mainly denoted the objects of  nature, flora, fauna etc.

handus, giefen, land

Words of Germanic origin. E.g. eorþe           "earth", earm     "arm", eald "old",          fīndan "find", sinʒan "to sing", slǣpan "to sleep", etc.

Latin word

There were a great deal of Latin words in Germanic languages, among them the days of the week, military terms, everyday words like butter, cup, wine etc.  

For example, the word Friday was loaned from Latin where it was Veneris dies, and in Germanic this day was devoted to the goddess Freia - Frige-daeg

Вопрос 27

The basic sources of borrowings

The words were borrowed into Germanic from many languages, first of all, from Latin. A large percentage of the educated and literate population were competent in Latin.

The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. These tend to be everyday words, and those which are concerned with Danelaw - the area of land under Viking control.

Celtic loanwords

The number of Celtic loans is of a much lower order than ei-ther Latin or Scandinavian. Most are names of geographical features, espe-cially rivers.

Вопрос 28

Linguists reconstructed a family tree for the Germanic languages. It has three main groups:

• Eastern (now extinct and represented only by texts in Gothic)

• Northern (the Scandinavian languages)

• Western, which in turn has two main groups: German and Anglo-Frisian

Distribution of Germanic Languages

West Germanic

• English – about 443 Million Speakers (Great Britain, Ireland, The United States. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Philippines)

• German – 118 Million Speakers (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, parts of Alsace-Lorraine)

• Dutch (including Flemish) – 21 Million Speakers (Netherlands and Belgium)

• Afrikaans – 10 Million Speakers (South Africa)

• Yiddish – 5 Million Speakers (East and South Europe, the United States)

• Frisian - ½ Million Speakers (North Sea Coast-Holland to Schleswig-Holstein)

North Germanic

• Swedish – 9 M.Sp. (Sweden, Finland)

• Danish – 8 M.Sp. (Denmark)

• Norwegian – 5 M.Sp. (Norway)

• Icelandic – 251,000 Sp. (Iceland)

• Faeroese – 47,000 Sp. (Faeroes Islands)

East Germanic

• Gothic

• Vandalic

• Burgundian

• Rugian

• Heruler