- •1. When did the historical study of languages begin? Who was the first to prove the relations of many languages to each other and the existence of their common source?
- •2. What is the character of internal and external language changes?
- •3. What are considered to be the main reasons for language changes?
- •4. What groups belong to the Indo-European family of languages? What are Satem and Centum languages?
- •5. What group does English belong to? Name the closest linguistic relations of English.
- •6. What territory did the ancient Germanic tribes inhabited?
- •7. What are the distinctive features of Germanic languages that made them different from other Indo-European languages?
- •8. What is the nature of the First Consonant Shift? Who was the first to explain its regularities?
- •9. Who was the first to explain the irregularities in the First Consonant Shift?
- •Ie voiceless stop was preceded by an unstressed vowel, the voiceless fricative
- •10. How long is the history of the English language?
- •11. What periods do we distinguish in the History of the English language?
- •12. What languages were spoken in the British Isles before the Germanic invasion? Which of their descendants have survived today?
- •13. When did the Germanic invasion in the British Isles begin? What Germanic tribes came to live there?
- •14. What Germanic kingdoms existed on the British Isles?
- •15. How did the country acquire the name of England?
- •16. What important event took place at the end of the 8th century ad on the territory of the British Isles?
- •17. What alphabet did Anglo-Saxons used for their writings? What written records have survived from that time?
- •18. What vowels existed in Old English? How were they represented in writing?
- •19. What consonants existed in Old English? How were they represented in writing?
- •20. What main phonetic changes occurred during the Old English period?
- •Vowel changes
- •Consonants changes
- •21. What was the etymological composition of the oe vocabulary? What languages did the loan words come there from? Composition
- •Foreign influences on Old English
- •22. What word building patterns were common in oe?
- •23. What categories did the oe noun have?
- •24. What categories did the oe adjective have?
- •25. What were the classes of oe pronouns?
- •26. What categories did the oe verb have?
- •27. What were the most common syntactical patterns in oe?
- •28. Did there exist any analytical forms in oe?
- •29. What events of the Modern English period launched the process of forming the National English Language?
- •30. What important changes in phonetic system happened in Early ModE?
- •The Great Vowel Shift
- •31. What was the Nature of the Great Vowel Shift?
- •32. Describe the main changes in grammar system in Modern English.
- •33. Changes in the categories of nouns and adjectives. What old forms of substantive plural survived in ModE? Changes and features of ModE noun system
- •34. Describe the main changes in the ModE pronoun system.
- •35. Describe the main changes in the categories of verb in ModE. Changes and features of Early ModE verbal system
- •36. Describe the main changes in ModE syntax.
- •37. Describe the main changes in vocabulary system in Early Modern English.
1. When did the historical study of languages begin? Who was the first to prove the relations of many languages to each other and the existence of their common source?
Sir William Jones, as a Supreme Court Justice in India, studied Sanskrit and
was struck by the affinity among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. In 1786, in a paper
delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, he proposed that these languages,
as well as Germanic and Celtic languages were descended from a common source,
Indo-European (IE), which was probably spoken between 5,000 and 3,000 B.C.E.
Further Indo-European studies were conducted by Franz Bopp, 1816, who
conducted comparisons of verbal systems of different languages; Rasmus Rask,
who noticed systematic phonological changes (1818); A Schleicher, who made
attempt to reconstruct pre-historic Indo-European forms.
2. What is the character of internal and external language changes?
In studying the history of a language we are faced with a number of problems
concerning the driving forces or causes of changes in the language. The causes can
apparently be of two kinds: external and internal.
External causes: language is influenced by factors lying outside it, or
extralinguistic factors. Such historic events as social changes, wars, conquests,
migration, cultural contacts and the like strongly influence a language, especially
its vocabulary.
Internal causes: many changes that occur in the history of language cannot
be traced to any extralinguistic causes; the driving power in such cases is within
the language itself. Most changes in the phonetic structure of a language, and also
in its grammatical structure, are due to internal causes, for example due to the
general tendency of language to economy: speakers tend to make their utterances
as efficient as possible, they try to exert the least effort in communicating with
language (thus making use of abbreviations, simple grammar structures in spoken
language). Also, many changes are caused by analogy, when speaker tend to liken
similar words and grammatical phenomena.
3. What are considered to be the main reasons for language changes?
Languages change for a variety of reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in
response to social, economic and political pressures. History records many
examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization and migration.
Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if
enough users alter the way they speak it.
Frequently, the needs of speakers drive language change. New technologies,
industries, products and experiences simply require new words. Plastic, cell phones
and the Internet didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time, for example. By using new and
emerging terms, we all drive language change. But the unique way that individuals
speak also fuels language change. That’s because no two individuals use a
language in exactly the same way. The vocabulary and phrases people use depend
on where they live, their age, education level, social status and other factors.
Through our interactions, we pick up new words and sayings and integrate them
into our speech. Teens and young adults for example, often use different words and
phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and slowly
change the language.