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

Вопрос 29

A brief sketch of history of the English language Old English (500-1100 AD)

West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began populating the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. The invaders pushed the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants out of what is now England into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, leaving behind a few Celtic words.

The Norman Conquest and Middle English (1100-1500)

William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. This mixture of the languages is known as Middle English. The most famous example of Middle English is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Middle English period came to a close around 1500 AD with the rise of Modern English.

Early Modern English (1500-1800)

The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. Words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words. The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.

Late-Modern English (1800-Present)

The principal distinction between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the result of two historical factors. The first is the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society. The second was the British Empire. Finally, the 20th century saw two world wars, and the military influence on the language during the latter half of this century has been great.

Вопрос 30

It is a Germanic language known to us by a translation of the Bible dating from the 4th century. The language is Germanic but has major differences from other known Germanic languages.

Geographically Goths were originally located in Southern Scandinavia, in the 3rd century AD moved to Europe and settled on the territory of modern Romania, Bulgaria, later Ukraine.

After dividing into two main parts: Ostrogoths and Wisigoths, the former settled in Italy, the latter moved to Spain and Southern France.

It is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable corpus; the others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names.

Gothic is important for the understanding of the evolution of Proto-Germanic into Old Norse. For instance, the final -n in North Germanic languages, such as navn and namn (name) is explained by referring to Gothic in which namo had its plural genitive namne. Sometimes, Gothic explains forms of words found on the oldest runestones.

A rather archaic phonetic system: Germanic stops were preserved here together with their specific fricative allophones; the Common Germanic *e also remained in Gothic, though disappeared in all other Germanic languages. Vowel mutations are exceedingly frequent in morphology. The Verner's Law is absent in Gothic.

Gothic contains no morphological umlaut. Gothic retains a passive voice inherited from Indo-European, but unattested in all other Germanic languages. Gothic preserves several verbs that display reduplication (haitan, "to be called" > haihait) in the formation of the preterit; it had dual number in pronouns and Verbs.

Lexicon. Though the sources of the Gothic language are rather scarce, there are a great lot of archaic terms which make the language most useful for comparative studies.

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