1/ Modern Germanic languages

Genetically, English belongs to the Germanic or Teutonic group of languages, which is one of the twelve groups of the I-E linguistic family. The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows:

English – in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,

German – in the Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, part of Switzerland;

Netherlandish – in the Netherlands and Belgium

Afrikaans – in the South African Republic;

Danish – in Denmark;

Swedish – in Sweden and Finland;

Norwegian – in Norway;

Icelandic – in Iceland;

Frisian – in some regions of the Netherlands and Germany;

Faroese – in the Faroe Islands;

Yiddish – in different countries.

Lists of Germanic languages given in books differ in some points, for the distinction between separate languages and also between languages and dialects varies. Until recently Dutch and Flemish were named as separate languages; Frisian and Faroese are often referred to as dialects, since they are spoken over small, politically dependent areas; the linguistic independence of Norwegian is questioned, for it has intermixed with Danish; Br E and Am E are sometimes regarded as two independent languages. All the Germanic languages are related through their common origin and joint development at the early stages of history.

2/ OE verbs

OE verbs are traditionallt classified into three conjugations(дієвідміни)

-‘weak' (about 1/3 of individual occurrences)

-the 'productive' conjugation

-many formed by derivation

-‘strong' or 'vocalic (about 1/3)

-‘other' (generally very common verbs): about 1/3

anomalous verbs

'preterite-present' verbs

What's the relevance of OE strong verbs to PDE?

Some don't exist any more

Some OE strong verbs have become weak: help, seethe

Some OE strong verbs have persiste

3. Origin of Engl eng

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic HYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Proto-Germanic_language"language, united by subjection to the sound shifts of GrimmHYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_law"'HYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Grimm%2527s_law"s law and VernerHYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Verner%2527s_law"'HYPERLINK "file:///wiki/Verner%2527s_law"s law. These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe.

From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups, West, East, and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify.

West Germanic languages Dutch (Low Franconian, West Germanic) Low German (West Germanic)Central German (High German, West Germanic) Upper German (High German, West Germanic) English (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic) Frisian (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic) North Germanic languages East Scandinavian West Scandinavian

The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period.During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties.The southernmost varieties had completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

4/ Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known human languages have personal pronouns.

English in common use today has seven personal pronouns I we you he she it they

Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference) that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others. The demonstratives in English are this, that, these, those, yonder, and the archaic yon, possibly followed by one(s) in the case of pronouns, as explained below.

A demonstrative determiner modifies a noun:

This apple is good.

I like those houses.

A demonstrative pronoun stands on its own, replacing rather than modifying a noun:

This is good.

I like those

5, Ancient germanic tribes

The Germanic peoples (also called Teutonic in older literature) are a historical ethno-linguistic group, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages. Migrating Germanic peoples spread throughout Europe in Late Antiquity (300-600) and the Early Middle Ages. Germanic languages became dominant along the Roman borders (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and England), but in the rest of the (western) Roman provinces, the Germanic immigrants adopted Latin (Romance) dialects.The Germanic people played a large role in transforming the Roman Empire into Medieval Europe.

By the 1st century CE, the writings of Caesar, Tacitus and other Roman era writers indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples into tribal groupings centred on:

--the rivers Oder and Vistula/Weichsel (East Germanic tribes),

--the lower Rhine river (Istvaeones),

--the river Elbe (Irminones),

--Jutland and the Danish islands (Ingevones)

6. Latin influence on oe vocabular

English is a Germanic language, having a grammar and core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. Estimates of native words (derived from Old English) range from 20%–33%, with the rest made up of foreign borrowings. A large number of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages (such as Gothic, Frankish or Greek) into Latin and then into English. The Germanic tribes who would later give rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxon and Jutes) traded and fought with the Latin speaking Roman Empire. Borrowings from Greek and Latin :

animals: fish/piscine, gull/larine,worm/vermian, spider/arachnid, snake/anguine, physiology: head/capital, ear/aural, tooth/dental, tongue/lingual, lips/labial, astronomy: moon/lunar, sun/solar, earth/terrestrial, star/stellar.

sociology: mother/maternal, father/paternal, brother/fraternal,

The Norman Conquest of 1066 gave England a two tiered society with an aristocracy that spoke Anglo-Norman and a lower class that spoke English. In 1204, the Anglo-Normans lost their continental territories in Normandy and became wholly English. By the time Middle English arose as the dominant language in the late 14th century, the Normans had contributed roughly 10,000 words to English, of which 75% remain in use today.

7. Ancient germanic tribes

By the 1st century A.D., the writings of Caesar, Tacitus and other Roman era writers indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples into tribal groupings centred on:

--the rivers Oder and Vistula (Poland) (East Germanic tribes),

---the lower Rhine river (Istvaeones),

---the river Elbe (Irminones),

---Jutland and the Danish islands (Ingvaeones).

The Istvaeones, Irminones, and Ingvaeones are collectively called West Germanic tribes. In addition to this those Germanic people who remained in Scandinavia are referred to as North Germanic. These groups all developed separate dialects, the basis for the differences among Germanic languages down to the present day.

Latin-Greek ethnographers (Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, and Strabo) mentioned in the first two centuries AD the names of peoples they classified as Germanic along the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Danube, the Vistula and on the Baltic Sea. Tacitus mentioned 40, Ptolemy 69 peoples.

8. Morphological clasif of of OE noun

In Proto-Germanic the morphological structure of a noun was very transparent and consisted of three elements: a root, a stem formative, and an inflectional ending. The stem formative characterised the noun as belonging unambiguously to one of many nominal declensions. By the time of Old English, however, stem formatives were no longer distinguishable, suffering the fate of other medial unstressed syllables. In no nominal paradigm of Old English can one find any morphological element that would unambiguously serve as its characteristic feature. Therefore, there is no synchronic motivation for preserving the Proto-Germanic descriptive framework when classifying Old English nouns. And yet, this perspective is widely adopted even in very recent publications; Old English nouns can be classified into three groups which include words with: - vocalic stems, ending in -a-, -o-, -i-, -u- (...); - consonantal stems, ending in -n-, -r-, -o-, -nd-, -iz/az-; - and root-consonant stems; all forming the respective declension types. Welna's approach is probably the clearest example of using non-existent criteria to classify Old English nouns, but by no means an isolated one.

9. The roman conguest

The Roman conquest of Britain was a process, beginning effectively in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius. However, Great Britain had already frequently been the target of invasions, planned and actual, by forces of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. Between 55 BC and the 40s AD, the status quo of tribute, hostages, and client states without direct military occupation, begun by Caesar's invasions of Britain, largely remained intact. Augustus prepared invasions in 34 BC, 27 BC and 25 BC. The first and third were called off due to revolts elsewhere in the empire, the second because the Britons seemed ready to come to terms. According to Augustus's Res Gestae, two British kings, Dumnovellaunus and Tincomarus, fled to Rome as suppliants during his reign, and Strabo's Geography, written during this period, says that Britain paid more in customs and duties than could be raised by taxation if the island were conquered.In the medieval period, much of this borrowing occurred through ecclesiastical usage established by Saint Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th century, or indirectly after the Norman Conquest, through the Anglo-Norman language. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words were dubbed "inkhorn terms", as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some were so useful that they survived. Imbibe and extrapolate are inkhorn terms created from Latin words. Many of the most common polysyllabic English words are simply adapted Latin forms, in a large number of cases adapted by way of Old French

10. vowels

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel.

In all languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages which have them) coda.

There is a conflict between the phonetic definition of "vowel" (a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract) and the phonological definition (a sound that forms the peak of a syllable).[1] The approximants [j] and [w] illustrate this conflict: both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract (so phonetically they seem to be vowel-like), but they occur on the edge of syllables, such as at the beginning of the English words "yes" and "wet" (which suggests that phonologically they are consonants). The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms 'vocoid' for a phonetic vowel and "vowel" for a phonological vowel,so using this terminology, [j] and [w] are classified as vocoids but not vowels.