9. Functional styles & their definition.

10. Old English. Inner history.

The commonly accepted traditional periodisation of the development of the English language consists of three main periods of Old (450-1066), Middle (1066-1475) & New English (1475-the 20^th cent.), which are divided into seven less periods. The history of Old English falls under Early or pre-written OE (5-8 c.) & OE or written OE (8-11 c.). It begins with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5th c. Before the Germanic invasion the British Isles must have been in­habited for at least fifty thous& years by the Celts - a tribal society. Celtic languages were spoken over extensive parts of Europe before our era but later they were absorbed by other IE languages. Then in 43 A.D. Romans invaded Britain & remained there about 4c. As a result of Roman invasion many words of Latin origin have come to the language (street, port, wall). So, the first pre-written or pre-historical period or Early Old English, lasts from the West Germanic invasion of Britain in the 5^th c. till the beginning of writing in the 7^th c. cause there was no written form of the language before. It is the stage of tribal dialects of the West Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes & Frisians), which were used for oral communication & gradually losing contacts with the related continental tongues. The dialect of the Angles of Mercia became predominant & later gave the name of the English lang. The conversion of the Angles, Saxons & Jutes who were pagans to Christianity began at the end of the 6^th cent. & enlarged the word-stock by the words of Greek (arithmetic, theatre, geography) & Latin (paper, c&le, school) origin & Many Sc&inavian words appeared after the Danes invasion started at the end of the 8^th cent (sky, skirt, happy, ill, law, leg). The English language of the second period lasted from the 8^th c. till the Norman invasion at end of the 11^th c. is Old English or Anglo-Saxon or Written OE period. The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects. In the language of this period the word order was more or less free & the relations between words were mainly expressed by inflections. So, it was an inflected or "synthetic" language with a well-developed system of morphological categories, es­pecially in the noun & adjective which had the same cat-ries (2 numbers, 4 cases, 3 genders), but adjectives had also twofold declination (week/strong). The verb had Indic., Imper., Subjun. moods, Present & Preterit tenses, was strong or week. The Old Eng. alphabet of 24 letters (19 Latin letters & 2 runic symbols) was very similar to the one still in use. Its vocabulary was purely Germanic with a few foreign borrowings. It was a "period of full endings".

11. Common characteristics of Germanic languages.

All of the Indo–European languages are inflectional & have a common word-stock. But the Germanic subgroup has individual characterizes. (Sc&., Danish, Norwegian, German, English etc.). 1) The development of a week verb conjugation along with a strong conjugation. In all Germanic languages the verbs are divided into strong (irregular) & week (regular). Irregular (strong) verbs form their basic forms (past , Participle II) by means of internal change of the root vowel (do/did/done) & regular (week) verbs - by means of ending -ed added to the infinitive stern (work/worked/worked). 2) A twofold declination of adjectives (strong & week). When a demonstrative, possessive pronoun or the definite article presides the adjective or when it is used substantively (used as noun: wounded) in is declined on one way called week. Modern English doesn’t distinct with week & strong forms of adjectives. But the Earliest English does because of its history. 3) A fixed stress ascent. In Germanic the stress became fixed upon the root syllable, whereas the stress in Indo-European was originally free. & in Modern English we can generally recognize native words as distinguished from those that have been borrowed from other languages by observing the stress when affixes (prefixes & suffixes) are added in front of new words: friend, friendly, friendship, unfriendly  native, because the stress remains when we add the affixes; pure, purification purify  the stress shifts, so, they are borrowed. 4) Irregular shift of consonants. Acc. to the «Grimm’s law» there is a correspondence between Indo-European & Germanic consonants & Germanic sounds of some consonants are the results of the development of the original Indo-European consonants as they existed in the Indo-European ancient lang. The law is subdivided into three acts: 1) IE voiceless stops [p], [t], [k] developed into voiceless fricatives [f], [O], [h] (пять - five; три - three; кров - hrof); 2) voiced stops were shifted to voiceless stops (болото - pool; два - two; genu – knee); 3) voiced aspirated stops were reflected as voiced non-aspirated stops in Germanic (bhrata- brother; dho - do; ghosts - guests).