Ўзбекистон Республикаси Олий ва ўрта махсус таълим вазирлиги

А. Қўлдошев

Герман филологиясига кириш

Бакалавриатура босқичининг 5220100 – филология (тиллар бўйича) йўналиши талабалари учун дарслик

Тошкент – 2008

Маъсул муҳаррир: Филология фанлари доктори, профессор Ж.Б. Бўронов
Тақризчилар: Ғ.Х. Сатимов – филология фанлари номзоди, доцент.
А.С. Содиқов - филология фанлари номзоди, доцент.

А. Қўлдошев.
Герман филологиясига кириш. Бакалавриатуранинг инглиз филологияси ва таржимонлик факультетлари талабалари учун дарслик. Мас. Муҳаррир: Ж.Б. Бўронов. Т., 2008, 145 бет.

Аннотация

Мазкур дарсликдан тилнинг мавжудлигининг умумий қонуниятлари, тилларнинг ривожланиш механизмлари, сабаблари, табиати ва турлари; тил тараққиётида турли омилларнинг тутган ўрни; қадимги герман қабилалари ва тиллари тарихи; герман тиллари фонетик, грамматик структурасининг ўзига хос хусусиятлари; ҳозирги замон герман тилларитнинг қисқача тавсифи ва шу каби бошқа масалалар ўрин олган.  

Аннотация

«Введение в германское языкознание» представляет собой один из вводных курсов в специальное языкознание и является как бы мостом, перекинутым между ними и общим языкознанием. Поэтому при построении данного курса учтены основные положения общего языкознания и истории языка как базы для изучения особенностей структуры и функционирования древних и современных германских языков в диахронном и синхронном планах.

Annotation

The Present Course-book contains the material about the structural and functional features of ancient and modern Germanic languages. And as a book on the theoretical course of “An Introduction to Germanic Philology” it follows the tendencies and principles and methods of investigating the languages applied in General linguistics. 

CONTENTS

Сўзбоши ………………………………………………………..…..…4
Introduction ……………………………………………………..…..…5
Language families………………………………………………..……11
The historical-comparative method in linguistics …………………….21
The Indo-European languages …………………………………..….....32
The Germanic languages………………………………………..……..41
Linguistic features of Germanic languages………………..…………..49
Germanic alphabets………………………………………..…………..61
General information about Germanic languages…………………..…..65
The Gothic language………………………………………...………....71
The Danish language………………………………………..…………77
The Norwegian language……………………………………..….…….83
The German language………………………………………..….……..92
The Icelandic language……………………………………..……...…100
The Swedish language……………………………………….…….…103
The Faroese language……………………………………….……..…110
The Frisian language……………………………………….………...114
The Dutch language………………………………………….……….118
The Yiddish language……………………………………….……..…123
The English language………………………………………….……..133
Vocabulary comparison……………………………………….……...150
Literature…………………………………………………………..…152

Сўзбоши

Мазкур дарслик бакалавриатура босқичининг 5220100 – филология (немис, инглиз тиллари) йўналиши бўйича таълим олаётган 4-курс талабалари учун яратилган бўлиб, ундан “Герман филологиясига кириш” назарий курси асослари ўрин олган.
Бу дарслик Ўзбекистон Республикаси Давлат Таълим стандартига биноан ишлаб чиқарилган мутахассислик ўқув режасининг 4- “Махсус курс” бўлимининг 4.01 позициясидан ўрин олган “Роман-герман филологиясига кириш” фани (7 семестр, 16 соат маъруза, 16 соат семинар машғулотлари) учун яратилган.
Дарслик Ўзбекистон Республикаси Олий ва Ўрта махсус таълим вазирлиги, Ўзбекистон халқ таълим вазирлиги ҳамда Ўзбекистон Республикаси Давлат матбуот қўмитасининг 07.03.2003 йилдаги №71/22/44 – сонли қўшма буйруғи билан тасдиқланган узлуксиз таълим тизими учун ўқув адабиётларининг янги авлодини яратиш концепциясида баён этилган талабларга мос ҳолда яратилгандир.
Мазкур дарсликдан тилнинг мавжудлигининг умумий қонуниятлари, тилларнинг ривожланиш механизмлари, сабаблари, табиати ва турлари; тил тараққиётида турли омилларнинг тутган ўрни; қадимги герман қабилалари ва тиллари тарихи; герман тиллари фонетик, грамматик структурасининг ўзига хос хусусиятлари; ҳозирги замон герман тилларитнинг қисқача тавсифи ва шу каби бошқа масалалар ўрин олган.  
Мазкур дарслик муаллифнинг ЎзДЖТУ инглиз филологияси ва таржимонлик факультетларида кўп йиллар давомида ўқиган маърузалари асосида яратилган бўлиб энг кейинги пайтларда яратилган монография, мақола каби асарлар ва интернет манбалари асосида қайта ишлаш, тўлдириш натижасида юзага келди. Шунинг учун у талабалар аудиториясида синовдан ўтган ва кўпчиликнинг бу қўлланма ҳақида ижобий фикрга келишига сабаб бўлди.
Мазкур дарсликнинг яратилишида қимматли маслахатлари билан ўз кўмагини аямаган олимлар – ЎзДЖТУнинг етакли мутахассислари бўлмиш проф. Юсупов Ў.Қ., проф. Бўронов Ж.Б., доц. Содиқов А.С., доц. Ирисқулов М.Т. каби устозларга муаллиф ўз миннатдорчилигини изҳор этади.
Муаллиф мазкур дарслик қўлёзмасини синчиклаб ўқиб чиққан ва унинг тилини яхшилашда ёрдам берган чет эллик мутахассислар Д. Байерс ва Крис Даффга алоҳида миннатдорчилик билдиради. 

INTRODUCTION

The word Philology is used to denote two disciplines or aspects of human activity.
1.	The study of human records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form and determination of their meaning.
2.	Language Study or Linguistics. The word “Philology” is from Greek and it means “love of learning and literature”.
Linguistics is the branch of Philology which deals with the study of the theoretical and practical problems of language functioning: system, structure and usage.
The discipline we are presenting you within the hours given for this subject  i.e. that is “An Introduction to Germanic Philology”, deals with the problem of working out common  features of the Germanic group of languages related to each other by the links of common origin. We’ll speak about the modern status of each member of the Germanic group of languages in the modern world. 
These are the following aspects of language study: structural, functional, historical, typological, quantitative, geographical, genetical, sociolinguistic, psychological and others.
Let’s consider some notions denoted by the above mentioned terms.
Genetically languages can be: a) related languages: English, Russian, Persian etc.; b) non-related: English, Uzbek, and Dravidian etc.
Geographically languages can be: 1. Endemic - Endemic languages function within the frontiers of one country; 2. Pandemic - Pandemic languages function as a means of communication in two or more countries of the world.
Quantitative aspect - In this case we discuss the numerical volume of the speakers in this or that language.
Typological aspect - Here we determine synthetic and analytic languages, languages of the agglutinative and amorphous type and others.
Sociolinguistic aspect deals with the problems of functioning of certain in the society. The following problems are discussed here: language situation, language policy, language planning, register, marker, etc. 
Language situation denotes the quantity and functional value of the languages used in certain country or region.
Language situation can be of three types:
1) Monolingual (unilingual) language situation is a situation in which one language is used as a means of communication within the borders of a country. 
2) Bilingual language situation. (BSL)
Bilingual language policy is such a policy in which two languages are used as a means of communication in a country.
There are two of bilingual language situation:
1. Diglossia (from Greek рi (two) and glossa – language)
2. Bilingualism proper (from Latin bi – (two) and lingua (language). In diglossia one of the two languages used in the country is more preferable than the second one and some privileges are given to that language.
In bilingualism the two languages used in the country have got the equal social states and no privilege is given to any of them.
3) Polylingual (multilingual) language situation
In polylingual language situation more than two languages are used as a means of communication.
Language planning is a notion which denotes a certain set of measures undertaken by the state authorities in relation to the languages used in the country.
Language Policy can be of two types:
1) Constructive language policy
2) Destructive language policy
As an example of language policy we can name the following items: Destructive Language Policy is observed in the following is carried out in the state: closing the school where the language is taught and where it is the language of teaching; closing the papers; decreasing the Radio & TV programs hours; promoting the use of other language; banning the use of this language in science; banning the language as a language of Parliament debates and other political activities.
Constructive Language Policy is observed when the state authorities promote the Language usage, increase, support and extend the language functions.
There are three types of language varieties: functional variety, social variety and territorial variety.
Socio-functional variety has the following functional types of the languages of the world: a) Official working language of UNO; b) Regional language; c) Official language of a Country; d) Language of a Part of a Country; e) Language of science and Technologies; h) Language of Prose and Poetry; i) Language of Teaching (or Instruction); j) Language of Nearby Territories (Neighbourhood); k) Language of Intercourse in the family; l) Language of Religion.
2) Social variety is observed in the following antinomies: men – women; old – young; educated – uneducated; urban – rural; white – black; colonial – Metropolitan
3) Territorial variety is observed in the functioning of the language in different parts of the world: a) Britain (dialects: Northern, Kentish, Middlesex, Southern, Cockney etc.); b) USA; c) Australia; d) Canada; e) South Africa; f) Ireland; g) Scotland. 
Territorial variety of the language is such a variety which has developed a certain over-dialectal norm used in its territory of functioning.
Forms of Existence of the language
Language functions in the following forms:
1) Literary language. This has two forms: a) Literary bookish and b) Literary colloquial
2) Vernacular speech
3) Dialect
Functional-pragmatic variety is a variety which serves the aims of this or that communicative act or has obtained corresponding structural features.
Linguistic changes
There are two tendencies in the process of a language development:
1) Integration. (Convergence) In integration dialects or languages develop towards obtaining common features in phonetic, grammatical structures and vocabulary.
2) Differentiation (or divergence). In differentiation dialects or languages develop towards obtaining different features in phonetic, grammatical structures and vocabulary to form new languages.
Causes of language changes
There are two types of factors of language change:
1) Extra linguistic factors: Extra linguistic factors of language change include: a) Geographical factors; b) Social factors; c) Temporal factors. 
2) Intra linguistic factors: 
Intra linguistic factors of language change include:
1) Phonetic changes Phonetic changes include all kinds of changes taking place in the phonetic structure of a language like consonant and vowel changes, qualitative and quantitative changes, positional and independent changes.
2) Spelling changes Spelling changes include all changes taking place in the writing of words in different varieties of the language, like honour – honor, colour – color etc.
3) Grammatical changes Grammatical changes include all changes taking place in the grammatical structure of the language; like using one form instead of another: have got – have, in the street – on the street.
4) Lexical changes Lexical changes include all changes taking place in the vocabulary of the language. They are: widening, narrowing, metaphorical use, connotative use, occasionalisms. 
5) Stylistic changes Stylistic changes include all changes within the frames of stylistics that is the use of the word of one style can be used in the other style, thus becoming a stylistically marked form.
Rate of linguistic changes
Language changes are usually slow and gradual. They proceed in minor, imperceptible steps unnoticed by the speakers. The rate of the language change is restricted by the communicative function of language for a rapid change would have disturbed communication between speakers of different generations.
Unlike human society, language undergoes no revolutions or sudden breaks. The slow rate of linguistic change is seen in the gradual spread of new features in language space.
Different parts or levels of language develop at different rates.
Mechanism of language change
Any language change begins with the synchronic variation. Alongside with the existing language units – words, forms, affixes, pronunciation patterns, spelling norm, syntactic constructions – there spring up new units. They may be similar in meaning but slightly different in form, stylistic connotation, social values, distribution inn language space, etc.
Variation may have the following stages:
Table 1

Stages	Form A	Form B	
1. 	An Element of the Norm.	It does not exist.	
2.	An Element of the Norm.	An Element of the Substandard Speech.	
3.	An Element of the Norm.	An Element of the Norm.
	
4.	An Element of the Substandard Speech.	An Element of the Norm.	
5.	The form dies out.	An Element of the Norm.	

Causes of Language evolution
The scholars give different explanations of the causes of language evolution.
1. J.G. Herder and W. Grimm show the Romantic tendencies as the principal causes of the language development.
2. A. Schleicher proposed a naturalistic explanation of the language development saying that “As the language is a living organism, at has got its birth, maturity, old age and decay”.
3. W. Wundt and H. Paul explained the language development psychologically, saying: “A change in the individual psychology causes a change in the language”.
4. J. Vendryes and A. Meillet explained the process of language development from the point of view of the sociologic school in linguistics saying that Linguistic changes are caused by social conditions and events in external history.
5. F. de Saussure, L. Hjelmslev, R. Jacobson, L. Bloomfield explained the language development from the structuralist point of view, saying that the main internal cause of the language change is the pressure of language system. When the balance of symmetrical structural arrangement is disrupted, it tends to be restored again under the pressure of symmetry.
Intra linguistic causes of language change
A. Accommodation of the language structure to the physiological features of human body 
1. Tendency to make the pronunciation easier (Indian English, Scottish English, Black English). (substratum theory, Celts ← Romans ← German, Negro English, Afro-American).
2. Tendency to explain different meanings with different forms (stylization, expansion of the poetic function of the language).
3. Tendency to express similar meanings with one form (the Principal of Language economy, development of polysemy).
4. Tendency to form concrete borderlines between morphemes (norm and normalization, development of the Norm).
5. Tendency to the economy of language means (s. item 3).
6. Tendency to delimitate the complexity of speech units.
7. Tendency to change the phonetic structure when the lexical meaning is lost.
8. Tendency to form the language with a plain morphological structure.
B. Necessity of improving the language structure.
1. Tendency to eliminate the abundance (redundancy) of the means of expression (using participial or Infinitive constructions instead of Complex Sentences).
2. Tendency to use more expressive forms (emotional vocabulary).
3. Tendency to get rid of the language elements containing insignificant semantic function (the principal of frequency of usage).
C. Necessity of keeping the language in the condition of communicative validity (generations should understand each other).
D. Internal language changes and processes having no relation to the impact of certain tendency (system-based changes).
1. Influence of the form of one word to the form of another word (Analogy).
2. Contamination.
3. Junction of different words of different origin on the principle of the unity of meanings.
4. The raising of the new means of expressing certain meanings, as a result of association. E.g. Jeans - джинсы, bucks - баксы (buck – male rabbit, doe – female rabbit), rails – рельсы.
5. Appearance and disappearance of phonological oppositions: [ëə]> [ë:] – more.
6. Spontaneous changes of phonemes.
7. Change of the meaning of the words.
8. Notional words become suffixes in OE ere – meant – a man → now suffix - teacher.
9. Cases of interrelation of processes.
There are two main factors of language change:
Continuity (преемственность, изчиллик) IE → Germ. → En.
Causality (причинность, сабабийлик) French Influence on English, 1066, Norman Conquest. 

References

Шайкевич А.Я., Абдуазизов А.А., М.Т. Ирискулов. Введение в языкознание. Т. 1987; М.Т. Ирискулов. Тилшуносликка кириш. Т, 2007; Гак В.А. Введение во французскую филологию. М., 1987; Арсеньева В.В. и др. Введение в германскую филологию. М., 1981; Степанов Г.С. Основы общего языкознания. М., 1975. Ф.де Соссюр. Курс общей лингвистики. М., 1977; Дж. Лайонз. Введение в теоретическую лингвистику. 1973; Э. Бенвенист. Общая лингвистика. М., 1972; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ., 1969.   

LANGUAGE FAMILIES

Introduction to the more important language families including Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Malayo-Polynesian and others.

It appears that the use of language came about independently in a number of places.
All languages change with time. A comparison of Chaucer's English, Shakespeare’s English and Modern English shows how a language can change over several hundred years. Modern English spoken in Britain, North America and Australia use different words and grammar.
If two groups of people speaking the same language are separated, in time their languages will change along different paths. First they develop different accents; next some of the vocabulary will change (either due to influences of other languages or by natural processes). When this happens a different dialect is created; the two groups can still understand each other. If the dialects continue to diverge there will come a time when they are mutually unintelligible. At this stage the people are speaking different languages. One of the best examples in Western history occurred after the Roman Empire collapsed in the 4th Century AD. Latin was the language of that empire. All the Latin speakers in different parts of Europe (Italian Peninsula, Gaul, Iberian Peninsula, and Carpathian) became isolated from each other. Their languages evolved along independent paths to give us the modern languages of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.
The Sanskrit spoken in North India changed into the modern languages of the region: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and others.
Ancient Persian has evolved into Farsi, Kurdish and Pashto.
In time, with enough migrations, a single language can evolve into an entire family of languages.  
Each language family described below is a group of related languages with a common ancestor. Languages in the same branch are sister languages that diverged within the last 1000 to 2000 years (Latin, for example, gave rise to the Latin Branch languages in the Indo-European Family).
Languages in different branches of the same family can be referred to as cousin languages. For most families these languages would have diverged more than 2000 years ago. The exact times scales vary for each family.
Languages in the same family share many common grammatical features and many of the key words, especially older words, show their common origin. 
The difference between a language and a dialect can be political rather than linguistic. For example, linguistically, Croatian and Serbian are closely related dialects of the same language. However, they are written in different scripts and are spoken by people of different religions living in Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia respectively. As such they are called different languages for political reasons.
Macedonian is considered by Bulgarians as a dialect of their language while Macedonians themselves consider it a separate language. Since Bulgaria has long claimed Macedonia as part of its territory, the reasons for each view are obvious!
Low German (spoken in Northern Germany) and Dutch (Netherlands) are linguistically dialects but politically separate languages. Low German and Swiss German are mutually unintelligible but are both considered to be German. There are more differences between Italian spoken in different cities in Italy than between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.
The language of Iraq and Morocco are both called Arabic but they differ greatly. The Chinese speaking government of China considers China's other languages (like Cantonese and Wu) to be dialects whereas they are often very different.
These political elements will be generally ignored in this outline.
The study of languages and their relationships gives us information about how people have migrated during historical times. It also helps with the dating of developments like plant domestication and the development of tools.
Ten Language Families 
The Indo-European Family
The most widely studied family of languages and the family with the largest number of speakers. Languages include English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Greek, Hindi, Bengali; and the classical languages of Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian.
The Uralic Family
A family found in Europe (Hungarian, Finnish) and Siberia (Mordvin) with complex noun structures.
The Altaic Family
A family spread from Europe (Turkish) through Central Asia (Uzbek), Mongolia (Mongolian), to the Far East (Korean, Japanese). These languages have the interesting property of vowel harmony.
The Sino-Tibetan Family
An important Asian family of languages that includes the world's most spoken language, Chinese. These languages are monosyllabic and tonal.
The Malayo-Polynesian Family
A family consisting of over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South East Asia. Languages include Malay, Indonesian, Maori and Hawaiian.
The Afro-Asiatic Family
This family contains languages of northern Africa and the Middle East. The dominant languages are Arabic and Hebrew.
The Caucasian Family
A family based around the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Georgian and Chechen are the main languages. They are known for their large number of consonants.
The Dravidian Family
The languages of southern India (in contrast to the Indo-European languages of northern India). Tamil is the best known of these languages.
Austro-Asiatic Family
This family is a scattered group of languages in Asia. They are found from eastern India to Vietnam. Languages include Vietnamese and Khmer.
Niger-Congo Family
This family features the many languages of Africa south of the Sahara. The large numbers of languages include Swahili, Shone, Xhosa and Zulu.
The Uralic Family of Languages
There are three European languages that are members of the Uralic Family. The family is named from the Ural Mountains. The people speaking these languages originated from the Siberian side of the Urals. Over 1500 years ago they migrated to Europe and have become entirely Europeanized. Their languages tell the story of their migrations.
In the Finnic Branch, Finnish and Estonian are closely related. There are also a group of closely related dialects called Karelian (spoken in the Karelia region of Finland and Russia).
Languages in the Ugric Branch (like Hungarian) are very different having separated from the Finnic ones around 3000 years ago. Hungarian's closest relatives (Ostyak, Vogul) are found in central Siberia. The majority of the languages in this family are spoken in Siberia (Mordvin, Komi, Nenets) apart from Sбmi which is spoken in Lapland (northern Scandinavia).
Yukaghir (spoken in eastern Siberia) uses a pre-literate form of pictograms similar to those of some Native Americans.
The Uralic Languages have many suffixes. Finnish, for example, behaves as if it had 15 noun cases, Hungarian has 17. Country names in Finnish are difficult to recognize. Finland, for example, is Suomi. Mordvin has complex verbs varying for subject and object over four tenses and 7 moods.
The Altaic Family of Languages
The Altaic Family is named after the Altai Mountains, in Central Asia. These people were nomadic horsemen living in the plains. One group migrated towards Europe; the other group migrated towards the Korean Peninsula and the islands of Japan.
Turkish is the most westerly member of this family as well as the most spoken one. Many of the other languages of this group are spoken in former USSR republics Azeri (in Azerbaijan), Turkmen (in Turkmenia), Kazakh (in Kazakhstan), Kirghiz (in Kyrgyzstan), Uzbek (in Uzbekistan), Uigur (in Western China east of the Pamir Mountains).
Mongolian is found in Mongolia (where it is written in the Cyrillic script) and Northern China (with a script that goes down rather than horizontal). Korean and Japanese are the most easterly Altaic languages.
The scripts used by these languages depend on historical or political factors. Turkish uses a Latin-based script, the ex-Soviet languages and Mongolian ones use the Cyrillic alphabet. Korean has its own distinctive script. Korean writing evolved separately from all the other scripts in the world, having been invented six hundred years ago. The language used to be written in Chinese characters.
Japanese is still written with Chinese characters (called Kanji) but there are two other alphabetic scripts. Hiragana is used to indicate prefixes and suffixes while Katakana is used for foreign words.
The Altaic languages have a lot of suffixes and a property called vowel harmony. This means that the vowels are divided into two groups. Words will either have one type of a vowel or the other. All the suffixes have two forms, one for each type of vowel. In Turkish, the plural is formed by the addition of LER or LAR. The suffixes themselves can be glued on one after the other. For example, EV is house, EV-LER is houses, EVLER-IMIZ is our houses, EVLERIMIZ - E is to our houses, etc. Languages that behave in this manner are called agglutinating. Turkish is one of the most regular languages in the world. It has one irregular noun (water) and one irregular verb (to be).
Japanese and Korean have highly complex honorific forms for verbs depending on the social level of the speaker and the one spoken to. Japanese also has some differences in vocabulary depending on whether the speaker is male or female. For example, stomach is HARA if spoken by a male, and ONAKA if spoken by a female.
All languages are influenced by languages they are in contact with. At the two extremes of the Altaic family, Turkish has many Arabic words while Korean and Japanese have many from Chinese.
The Sino-Tibetan Family of Languages
The Sino-Tibetan Family is an important Asian family language, Chinese, the official language of China.
The languages in this family are monosyllabic tonal languages. Words are made up of single syllables: Chinese has over 1600. GUO - country, MEN - gate, WO - I, REN - person, AN - peace. The syllables themselves have tones. This means that the voice can be high, low, rising, falling, etc, just like singing. It is like the way many people raise the voice at the end of a question. As an example the syllable, MEN can mean gate or we depending on tone. Chinese has four tones, Thai has five (MAI can mean not, burn, wood or no depending on tone), Cantonese has nine and Kam-Sui has 15.
The languages in the Sinitic Branch are the various languages of China (Chinese, Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Vue). They are all written in Chinese characters. Each syllable has a different character so that the writing is not alphabetic. There are over 50,000 characters, 6000 of which are used to read a newspaper. Even though the different languages have different pronunciations, the meanings of characters are the same.
The languages in the Tibeto-Burman Branch are spoken in Burma (Burmese, Karen) Thailand and Laos (Lisu, Lahu), Southern China (Chin, Vi), Tibet (Tibetan), Bhutan (Jonkha), Nepal (Sherpa, Newari), and eastern India (Mizo, Manipuri).
When written, the scripts are derived either from the curly scripts of south India or the angular scripts of north India.
The Tai is are spoken in Thailand and Laos (Thai and Lao written in curly south Indian scripts, and the unwritten Shan) and amongst the tribal people of Southern China (Chuang, Vao, She).
Thai has noun classifiers. These are groups of words that go with certain types of nouns. KHON goes with people nouns (except royalty or sacred people), TUA goes with animals, IEM goes with sharp or pointed objects, and KHAN goes with objects with handles.
The language family is thought to have originated in northern China around the Yangse River valley. Some linguists consider the Tai Languages to be a separate family.
The Malayo-Polynesian Family of Languages
Also known as Austronesian, the Malayo-Polynesian Family is made up of over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South-East Asia. Although covering a large geographical area, the languages are remarkably uniform in structure.
The most common are Malay and Indonesian (which are actually dialects of a single language). Malay was written in the Arabic script until the 20th Century when the Latin alphabet was adopted.
This family includes the languages of Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese (all from Java), Batak (Sumatra), Balinese (Bali), Tetun (Timor). The languages of the Philippines (Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan). Many non-Chinese languages of Taiwan (like Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Tsou). These languages are found in Indo-China: Cham is spoken in Vietnam. It was the language of a pre-Vietnamese Hindu Chamba Empire. The present speakers are Muslim. In the Pacific, languages like Maori (New Zealand), Fijian, Tahitian, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chamorro (Cham), and Hawaiian exist as a means of communication.
An interesting exception is Malagasy, which is spoken in Madagascar, a large island off the coast of southern Africa. Its nearest linguistic relative is spoken in Borneo. Over 1500 years ago, people from the islands of Indonesia migrated in boats across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. Here, they picked up African culture, but their language gives away their origins.
These languages have fairly simple noun and verb forms. Malay has no inflections for tense or case. Plurals are made by doubling the word (ANAK - child, ANAK ANAK - children). This is called Reduplication and is commonly used to enhance grammatical meanings. Passive forms of verbs are commonly used (let the guide be followed rather than follow the guide).
Javanese has a special vocabulary used to and by chiefs. 
The possessive pronouns (my / our) are more complex than, the noun forms and have differing forms depending on the item possessed. In some of the Pacific languages, the possessive pronouns have a form for alienable possession (something that is possessed temporarily like a car or book), and a form for inalienable possession (something that is always possessed like body parts).
Ilocano has three words for this: one for visible objects, one for things not in view and another for things that no longer exist.
Some languages have two forms of the personal pronoun, we. One form is used if it includes the person or people addressed (inclusive) and another form if the person addressed is not included (exclusive). 
The Pacific languages are characterized by few consonants and vowels. Hawaiian has only 8 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W and the glottal stop) and 5 vowels (A, E, I, 0, U). There is a preference for open syllables (like in the names of the islands FI JI and TA HI TI).
Tagalog and Maori have a Verb-Subject-Object word order. Malagasay has the word order Verb-Object-Subject.
The speakers of this language family are thought to have originated in southern China (the Yellow River valleys) and migrated via Taiwan into the islands of the Philippines (about 2500BC), Indonesia and out into the Pacific (about 1000BC).
The Afro-Asiatic Family of Languages
The Afro-Asiatic Family is dominated by Arabic, an important modern and classical language. It is the language of the Quran and of Islam.
The other languages in the Semitic Branch of this family are Maltese which is written in the Latin script because the Maltese are Catholic. Hebrew is another important classical language with its own script. It is the language of Judaism and of the Old Testament of the Bible. By the 1st Century BC it had become a liturgical language for Judaism. A modern form was revived and is now spoken in Israel where it is called Ivrit.
Amharic is the language of Ethiopia and has its own script. Tigrinya is spoken in the Horn of Africa. Many important ancient languages belong to this branch: Akkadian (the language of the Assyrian Empire) used the Cuniform writing system to write pre-Biblical flood and creation stories. Phonoecian and its closely related relatives Ugaritic (for which the alphabet was invented) and Punic (the language of Carthage), Nabatean, an ancestor of Arabic spoken in Petra. Syriac, a liturgical language of the early Christian church. The most interesting is Aramaic, once the administrative language of the Persian Empire, later the language of Palestine during Roman times. It now survives in small pockets in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
The Berber Branch is spoken in the hills of North Africa by the Berbers (Tuareg, Kabyie), also in the branch was Guanch, spoken on the Canary Islands until becoming extinct in the 16th Century.
People in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia speak languages of the Cushitic Branch (Somali, Galla, Beja, Afar). 
Hausa, the most important member of the Chadic Branch, is the main language of Nigeria. It was once written in the Arabic script but now uses the Latin alphabet. The Chadic Branch contains 600 languages spoken in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon.
The Egyptian Branch contains Egyptian, the language of Ancient Egypt written in hieroglyphics. Coptic is the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church. It uses a Greek based alphabet. It is extinct as a spoken language.
These languages have grammars based on consonant clusters. Arabic uses clusters of three consonants. For example, in Arabic, the Letter triplet KTB has to do with writing. KiTaB is book. Plurals are all irregularly formed and the usual way is to change the vowels. KuTuB is books. Other words with the KTB root have something to do with writing: KaTaBa - to write, KaTtaBa - to make someone to write (i.e. to teach), maKTaB - office, KaaTiB - writer, maKTaBa - library, miKTaB - typewriter, KuTuBii bookseller, maKTuuB – fate, letter  ("that which is written"). The consonants give the root meaning while the vowels, suffixes and prefixes give the grammatical meaning.
The Arabic alphabet mainly uses consonants because the reader can supply the correct vowels from the context. The first Alphabets were invented by speakers of Semitic languages and so had no vowels. Unusual for this family, Somali has 20 separate vowel sounds. It also has four tones which indicate gender, number and case.
This language family originated in the Sahara area before it became a desert and spread to the Horn of Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. During the 7th Century AD, Arabic spread from the Arabian Peninsula with Islam to cover most of North Africa and the Middle East.
The Caucasian Family of Languages
The Caucasian Family is named after the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This is a very linguistically diverse region.
The Caucasian languages include Georgian (Georgia), Chechen and Ingush (both found in Chechnya in southern Russia), and Avar (9 dialects from a region called Dagestan). Urartian (extinct language of the Urartu Empire of Eastern Turkey) also belongs to this family.
Some linguists consider that these languages may actually be three separate families.
The languages are dominated by difficult consonant clusters. Ubykh (an extinct language whose last speaker died in 1992 in eastern Turkey) had 81 separate consonant sounds. Attempts are being made to revive it.
Kabardian (spoken in southern Russia) has only three vowels which often disappear in speech.
Many of these languages have a large number of noun cases. Tsez (spoken in a small region between Georgia and Chechnya) has 42.
The languages also have a property called ergativity. This means that the subject of a transitive verb is different from the subject of an intransitive verb. Transitive verbs can take an object (see, hear); intransitive verbs cannot take an object (go, walk).
The Dravidian Family of Languages
North India is dominated by languages of the Indo-European Family.
The Dravidian Family of languages is the very difficult sounding languages of South India. They include the major languages like Tamil (spoken in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, northern Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia), Malayalam (Kerala state), Kannada (from Karnataka) and Telugu (Andhra Pradesh). Each has its own script which has the curved appearance typical of South Indian writing.
These languages are found in central India (Gondi, Kurukh, Kui), western India (Tulu) and in the Indus Valley of southern Pakistan (Brahui).
Elamite, a language known from inscriptions in Western Iran is now thought to have been Dravidian. These languages are distinguished by retroflex constants, which have been borrowed by the Indic Branch of the Indo-European Languages. These constants give Indian languages their distinctive sound and are formed with the tongue rolled up to the top of the mouth. The languages are agglutinating with up to 8 noun cases.
The languages once covered all of the Indian sub-continent and originated in the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan).
The Austro-Asiatic Family of Languages
The Austro-Asiatic Family is a scattered group of languages in Asia. They are found from eastern India to Vietnam. The family once covered a larger area until Tai language speakers migrated south from southern China.
The Viet-Muong Branch includes Vietnamese and Muong (both languages of Vietnam). The former is written in a form of the Latin script.
The Mon-Khmer Branch includes Khmer (the language of Cambodia written in a derivative of South Indian scripts), Mon (once a major language of a Thai empire; now spoken in parts of Burma, Thailand, China and Vietnam), Palaung (a tribal language in the hills of Burma and Thailand), So (Laos and Thailand), Nicobarese and Nancowry (both from the Nicobar Islands of the Indian Ocean).
The so-called Aslian languages are found in the hills of peninsular Malaysia and include Sengoi and Temiar.
The languages of the Munda Branch are found scattered in pockets of north India (Mundari, Santali in the state of Bihar and Khasi in Assam).
These languages are not tonal apart from Vietnamese where tones developed recently under Chinese influence. Vietnamese was once thought not to be related to other languages. The branches of this family were originally considered to be separate families.
The Niger-Congo Family of Languages
The Niger-Congo Family features the many languages of Africa south of the Sahara. The family originated in West Africa. Migrations of Peoples took the languages to eastern and southern Africa. There are over 900 languages in this family in nine branches.
Africa's borders reflect colonial history rather than linguistic boundaries. For this reason, many of these languages are spoken across national frontiers.
The languages of this family include the west African languages of Fulani (Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso), Malinke (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast), Mende (Sierra Leone), Twi (Ghana), Ewe (Ghana, Togo), Mossi (Burkina Faso), Yoruba (Nigeria), Ibo (Nigeria), Kpelle (Liberia), Wolof (Senegal, Gambia) and Fang (Cameroon, Gabon, Guinea).
In east and southern Africa the main language include Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Berundi, Zaire - the most spoken language in this family), Kikuyu (Kenya), Ganda (Uganda), Ruanda (Rwanda), Rundi (Berundi), Luba (Zaire), Lingala (Zaire, Congo), Kongo (Zaire, Congo, Angola), Bemba (Zaire, Zambia), Nyanja (Malawi, Zambia), Shona (Zimbabwe), Ndebele (the Matebele in Zimbabwe and South Africa), Tswana (Botswana) and its close relative Sotho (South Africa, Lesotho), Swazi (Swaziland, South Africa), Xhosa (South Africa) and its close relative Zulu (South Africa).
The southern languages have tones which are used partially for meaning but mostly for grammar. Banda (Congo) has three tones. Its speakers use three-tone drums to send formulaic messages. Efik has four tones and uses m and n as vowels.
Most of the Niger-Congo languages have prefixes and suffixes to qualify nouns and verbs as well as words that agree with them. Nouns and verbs never exist on their own. Fulani has 18 suffixed noun qualifiers.

References 

Головин Б.А. Введение в языкознание. М.,1975;  Реформатский А.А. Введение в языкознание. М., 1969; Брук Л.М. Население мира. М., Наука, 1981; Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь. М., СЭ, 1991; Этнографическая энциклопедия, М., 1991; Общее языкознание, часть III. Методы лингвистических исследований. М., 1974; Языки народов мира; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ, 1969.  

THE HISTORICAL COMPARATIVE METHOD IN LINGUISTICS

As we have seen, the human mind has been speculating for hundreds of years on the origin and relationship of languages. But the solution to all these problems was far from being correct because no linguistic material was available. It was not until the Renaissance that material was gathered for later investigators to work on, and they could not help being struck by the amazing similarity between some languages. Even in the sixteenth century, an Italian missionary called Filippo Sassetti had noted the similarity between the Italian numerals from six to nine - sei, sette, otto, nove, and their Sanskrit counterparts - њaњ, saptб, aєювъ, nбva.. An attempt to classify known languages according to the resemblance between them was made by the thinker Scaliger in 1599, when he grouped the chief languages after their wont for God, calling them respectively the deus-theos (i.e. Latin Greek), gott (Germanic), and bog (Slavonic) languages.
 This classification, however intelligent, might have continued blindly along these lines for ages, were it not for the discovery of Sanskrit.
In the history of language, the discovery of Sanskrit is often compared to the discovery of America in the history of Mankind. It altered at a single stroke the whole field of linguistic research. (see Berezin F.M., 1969)
William Jones, an English lawyer in India, wrote in 1786: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more acquisitively refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly be produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit."
In these often quoted lines, Jones announced clearly and unequivocally the relationship between three of the great languages of antiquity-Sanskrit, Greek and Latin and at the same time anticipated the reconstruction of that common source which, it seems, no longer exists-the parent Indo-European language itself.
This climax of language research in the 18th century heralded the full blossoming of philology in the 19th century. We have good grounds for saying that linguistics as a science was created in the 19th century, especially comparative linguistics.
The first of the great pioneers in comparative linguistics of the last century in Western Europe was the Danish Rasmus Rask (1787-1832). His major work Undersagelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (Investigation on the Origin of Old Norse or Icelandic (1818) may be called a comparative Indo-European Grammar. In this book Rask clearly demonstrated the significance of laws of sounds as a proof of linguistic kinship, although he added that they were especially convincing when supported by grammatical similarities. Thus in Rask we find the whole kernel from which modern linguistic comparative methods have been developed.
Rask introduced the idea that the comparison not only of inflectional systems, but also of phonetic characteristics, constituted a scientific approach to the examination of linguistic relationships; in other words, when properly examined, phonetics could provide clues as well as grammar.
Rask examined all the languages bordering geographically on Norse to discover whether they were related, and where he found a relationship he followed it up. He was the first to recognize the relationship between the languages now called Germanic. The scheme of genetic relations between these languages which Rask drew up was quite correct.
Rask's great merit was not merely that his scheme of linguistic relationships was correct, but that his reasoning in substantiating them was soundly based. He was quite right to state in his book that in the comparison of languages the grammatical side should never be forgotten, for the coincidence of words was extremely unreliable.	Even without the use of Sanskrit, Rask hit upon the two sound shifts in the history of the Germanic languages. It should be added that he did not see the complete regularity of the development of sounds. For example, he did not look for the reasons for the exceptions to his main rules. It remained for later generations of linguists to make discoveries that introduced a new conception of regularity and "law" into the evolution of sounds.
It was spokesmen for the German linguistic tendency called the Young Grammarians who insisted in the 1880's on the remarkable regularity of sound-changes and proclaimed the principle that phonetic laws admit of no exceptions. If the law did not operate in some instances, they said, this was because they had been broken by analogy, e.g. by resemblances of sound or meaning which join different words together in the speaker's mind. The Young Grammarians believed that these blind fatalistic sound laws were purely destructive, breaking the systematic structure of a language until the irregularities caused by them had to be remedied by analogous formations. The two concepts of sound laws and analogy were considered enough to explain practically everything in the development of language.
Some years later objections were raised to inviolable sound laws theory, and linguistic facts made students admit the existence of other circumstances which made these sound laws more flexible. Exceptions to the rules were explained with reference to hitherto unsuspected determining factors. (See Verner's Law below.)
For example, we find in Modern English f as the representative of Middle English f in such words as fox, foot, and full. But in the word vixen-"female fox"-we find v instead of f. Does this refute the theory of regular phonetic change? No, it does not if we find another explanation for the v in vixen, which is that vixen, is borrowed from a dialect of Southern English speech in which f regularly became v.
Phonetic formulae testifying to the close connection between Indo-European languages are based upon close observation of phonetic relations, and there are regular sets of phonetic, morphological, and syntactical laws. For instance, in the field of phonetics comparison shows the following law: Indo-European p corresponds to Greek p, Latin p, Lithuanian p, and Armenian h or w. In Armenian, h appears where in Greek we find p: the Greek pyr "fire" is hur in AFmenian; the Greek pater is hair in Armenian.
Changes like these may show the evolution of a single, or of a combination of sounds, from the earliest available records down to the latest innovations.
One important figure in the development of comparative linguistics as a science is the German scholar Franz Bopp, (1791-1867) who wrote a book, Ьber das Konjugationssystem der Sanskrit Sprache ("On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit") (1816) comparing this subject with the conjugation of verbs in Greek, Persian, and German languages, and virtually creating the science of comparative linguistics; Sanskrit, supposed to be a more primitive language than Greek or Latin, became from then on the mainspring of linguistic research.
The merit of his book lies in its study of inflections; Bopp's main contribution was his systematic comparison of the inflectional endings of all the Indo-European languages.
He was dominated by one great idea, which he thought could be applied everywhere: the idea that every verb-form contains the concept “to be”, and that in all verbal endings one may expect to find elements with this meaning. In all s-endings he sought the root es-, s- (Lat. es-t "he is", s-unt "they are"). Nowadays we cannot agree completely with this idea, but his essay is regarded as the beginning of comparative grammar.
It was the German philologer Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) who established the principle of the sound shift in the phonetic history of the Germanic group of languages or, as he called it, the Lautverschiebung in his book Deutsche Grammatik-("German Grammar") (1819). In his opinion, there were two sound-shifting. The first occurred before the 4th century; the second had been completed by the 8th.
	The first relates to the Low German group; the second, the High German.
These shifts may be shown by the following chart: Indo-European becomes in Low German and in High German:

bh
dh
gh	b
d
g	p(b)
t
k(g)	
b
d
g	p
t
k	ff(f)
zz(z)
hh(h)	
p
t
k	f
th
h		

It will be observed, first, that the law describes the alteration only of consonants; second, that it deals with the transformation or evolution of these consonants from the parent Indo-European language into the Germanic languages. It has no reference to languages developed out of Latin or to any language outside the Indo-European classification. (see Berezin F.M., 1969)
In 1877 Karl Verner added to Grimm's Law a supplementary law that has become known by his name. He explained certain irregularities in the Grimm series with reference to the position of accent in the Indo-European word. For example, according to Grimm's Law, the Anglo-Saxon forms for "father", "mother" and "brother" should have been fжther, mфthor, brфthor, since the Latin pater, mвter, frвter have, as middle consonant t, which should give th. Why, then, has Anglo-Saxon only brфthor where the th is regular; why are the other forms (frжder, mфdor) missing? Why does Anglo-Saxon show, instead of "fжther", fжder: medial d instead of medial th?
Verner pointed out that in Sanskrit the accents in the words for "father", "mother" and "brother" fell as follows: pitбr, mвtбr, bhrǻtar. In the first two words the accent comes after the t; in bhrǻtar it comes before. The developement of bhrǻtar was therefore regular: t shifted to th (Anglo-Saxon brothor, English brother). In cases where the accent occurred after the t, however, a further shifting took place; the t became d instead of th, giving the Anglo-Saxon fжder and modor. Verner's Law explained other peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon phonetics and grammar.
Russian linguists should also be mentioned among the founders of comparative linguistics.
As early as the middle of the 18th century, the great Russian scientist M. V. Lomonosov (1711-1765) started on a comparative and historical study of languages. He understood which languages constituted the Slavonic group and established close ties between Baltic and Slavonic languages, assuming a common origin between them. It is interesting to point out that Lomonosov proved the existence of genetic ties between Baltic and Slavonic languages by comparing' not only words, but also grammatical forms.
Lomonosov distinguished between "related" and "non-related" languages. In his rough notes for his Russian Grammar. an interesting diagram was found containing the numerals "one" to "ten" in related languages - Russian, Greek, Latin and German, on the one hand, and in non-related languages - Finnish, Mexican, Chinese, on the other. In drawing up this chart Lomonosov undoubtedly had in mind the original, "related", unity of Indo-European languages which he counterposed to "non-related" languages. The numerals used by Lomonosov are quite reliable from an etymological point of view.
There is an important concept of comparative linguistics in Lomonosov's book, e.g., he claimed that all related languages had a common source, and the process of their development took thousands of years.
Although he did not use the methods of comparative linguistics in his works, Lomonosov Nevertheless created a basis for further investigations in this field in Russia. Russian scientists began to get interested in the comparative study of languages, and the academician P.S. Pall as edited a glossary of 285 words in two hundred languages of Europe and Asia in 1786 at the request of Empress Catherine.
Russian linguistics in the early 19th century is linked with the name of A. C. Vostokov (1781-1864), who tried to show the various points of contact between related' languages. Vostokov's famous paper Some Considerations on Slavonic was published in 1820 under the auspices of the Moscow Society of Russian Philology Lovers. In this article Vostokov set out the chronology of specimens of Old Church manuscripts, and showed their difference from Old Russian. Beside this, he cleared up the problem of the so-called juses and showed their relationship to the Polish nasals.
As we have said, the phonetic correspondences revealed by Rask and Grimm became the foundation of the comparative phonetics of Indo-European languages. But Vostokov's definition of the sound meaning of the Slavonic juses was no Less important a discovery. He demonstrated that these juses were sounds dating from the period of common Slavonic languages. Vostokov's theory of the common origin of all Slavonic languages and the possibility of reconstructing all the languages of this group was not clearly stated and remained a mere hypothesis.
Vostokov's merit is that he was the first scholar in the history of linguistics to show phonetic regularity in the sounds of related languages, anticipating Rask and Grimm.
A great contribution to comparative linguistics in Russia was made by F. I. Buslaev (1818-1897), professor at the Moscow University, where he lectured on comparative grammar. But his lectures on the history of the Russian language were more interesting and valuable, as they were based on independent investigations of specimens of Old Russian written language and folk-lore.
Buslaev discussed the problems of comparative linguistics in connection with the history of Russian in his first book On Teaching the Native Language (1844), the methodological significance of which lies in the fact that Buslaev here emphasized, for the first time in Russian linguistics the close relations between the history of the Russian language and the history of the Russian people who used it. Buslaev wrote: "Language expresses the life of the people. The language we speak now is the result of historical movement and of many changes over many thousands of years; language may be defined only in a genetic way, which necessitates historical research."
He studied Russian dialects very thoroughly but his weakness in this field was that he considered that the phonetics of these dialects reflected the phonetic processes of the recorded Indo-European languages. This fault may be explained by his ignorance of the prolonged historical formation of individual Indo-European languages.
These Russian linguists contributed a great deal to the advance of the comparative method in the early 19th century. They applied this method to varying degrees, but they perfected it and managed to solve some important problems connected with the comparative grammar of the Slavonic languages.
We must explain that the comparative method tries to reconstruct certain features of the language spoken by the original single language community, on the basis of resemblances in the descendent languages. The purpose of this reconstruction is to find out the general laws governing the development of these languages, from their common source onwards. If two languages have one common feature, this is more likely to have been inherited from the common ancestor of both languages than to have arisen independently in each of the two descendent languages, unless they are known to have been subjected to some common influence.
Now we must become acquainted with the concept of cognates which is a term used in comparative linguistics. The word means "born together", and it refers specifically to words which nave survived in various languages from a common original language. There are dozens of examples, but let us take the word mother. This word certainly existed in Indo-European, probably in a form something like *mвter (the asterisk before "mater" is intended to indicate that this form is reconstructed). Latin has preserved it intact. The Greek meter is not much different or Old Irish mвthir or the Slavonis mali. The Proto-Germanic form must have been something like *modor, judging from the appearance of the word in Old High German and Old Norse; the German Mutter and the English mother have developed from the Old High German muother and the Anglo-Saxon mфdor respectively. So modern equivalents of "mother", like the French mĕre, the German Mutter and the Spanish madre are cognates.
While dealing with the reconstruction of the Proto (Common) Indo-European language (Proto- applies only to the ancestral language as reconstructed by the comparative method) we can rely only on those cognates from the related languages whose origin from this language is supported by sound laws and general tendencies in the development of their meaning, and the possibility of chance can be ruled out.
One plain example of chance is the English bad and the Persian bad, both of which have the same meaning, though the words are not related in origin. With a slight shift of sound, we have the Italian donna and the Japanese onna, both of which mean "woman", or the Russian khoroshiy and the Japanese yoroshii, both of which mean "good".
Vocabulary is therefore a very shaky criterion on which to base language kinship, though it may be observed that there are certain basic words, like names of family relationships and numerals, which are hardly ever borrowed.
Numerals are especially reliable in obtaining information about the close genetic kinship of certain languages within a linguistic group. This may be seen from the following scheme (see Berezin F.M., 1969): 
Indo-European languages

Numeral	Sanskrit	Slavonic	Greek	Latin	German
(Gothic)	
2
3
4
10
100	Dvau
Trayas
Catvaras
Dasa
Satam	D(u)va
Tri
Cetyre
Desatь
Sъto	Dyo
Treis
Tettares
Deka
He-katon	Duo
Tres
Quattuor
December Centum	Twai
Threis
Fidwor
Taihun
Hund	

We can be certain that words similar in form are cognates if they express material phenomena like "night", "star", "snow", "wind", "thunder": animals like "hound", "goat", "ox", "steer"; parts of a house like "door", "timber"; parts of the human body like "ear", "tooth", "heart", "foot"; and most significant of all, words which express family relationships like "father", "mother", brother" and "sister", The following chart illustrates this:

Modern English	Sanskrit	Slavonic	Greek	Latin	German
(Gothic)	
Father
Mother brother
daughter	Pitar
Matar
Bhratar
Duhitar	-
mati
bray(r)ъ
dъshti	Pater
Meter
Phrator
Thygater	Pater
Mater
Frater
-	Fadar
Modar
Brother
dauhtar	
But mere coincidences of related words are not enough to prove .their close kinship. Jones pointed outlast long ago as 1786 that grammatical forms had to be taken into consideration because only resemblances in the grammatical forms and the meaning expressed by them are absolutely reliable. If the same grammatical meanings are expressed in the same grammatical forms in the compared languages, we can be sure of their close relationship. Take, for instance, the verb "to take" in related languages, in the form "they take":

Russian	Old Slavonic	Sanskrit	Greek	Latin	Gothic	
berut	berot	bharanti	pheronti	ferunt	bairand	

	This example shows that the endings -ut, -ot, -anti, -onti, -unt, -and are equivalent and come from the same source.
	The importance of grammatical criteria is that words can be borrowed, but grammatical forms cannot.
As far as the meaning of the reconstructed words is concerned, they need not coincide exactly; they can diverge according to the laws of polysemy, as the following example shows:
	
Sanskrit	Kravis	Russian	Krov’	
Greek	Kreas	Old High German	Hreo	
Latin	Cruor	Anglo-Saxon	Hra	
Lithuanian	Kraujas	English	raw	
Old Slavonic	Krьvь			

On the basis of these forms, it can be assumed that in the Indo-European parent language there was a root *"kreu" which could assume different, though related, meanings ht all these languages: "blood" in Russian, "meat" in Greek, "raw" in English.
Correct reconstruction helps us to understand the real etymology of words. We can confidently reconstruct the words in the parent language for "brother" and "sister" as *bhriiter and *sjeso(r). In the former, the first element bhrii-was a gradational variant of the verbal root *bher-"to bear", "to carry". The second morpheme was, of course, the same -ter as in *pa-ter. In *sje-sor the first component was the reflexive element meaning "one's own", and the second signified "female", seen also in Latin uxor or uksor "wife".
These short excursions into etymology should be enough to show the fascination of this research.
Engels appreciated the importance of the comparative method in the study of languages. He showed that "substance and form of one's own language, however, only became intelligible when their origin and gradual evolution are traced, and this cannot be done without taking into account, first, their own extinct forms, and secondly, allied languages, both living and dead."
This important statement is of great significance for a proper understanding of the essence of the comparative method in linguistics. This method has been justified by discoveries made in the 19th century. On the basis of the comparative method it was suggested that the Latin nouns ager "tillage", and sacer "sacred" originated from the reconstructed forms *agros and *sakros. In 1899 a document was found in Rome dating from the 6th century A. D. in which the suggested form sakros was found.
Some original forms calculated by eminent linguists in the 19th century by comparative method were discovered in the Hittite language in the north east of Asia Minor at Boghazkoy on the site of the prehistoric capital Hattusas, about eighty miles east of Ankara. Some cuneiform tablets in the Hittite language, discovered in Boghazkoy in Asia Minor, were translated by the Czechoslovak scholar Bedrich Hrozny in December, 1915, who proved its linguistic affinity with Indo-European. A revolution was also affected in early Greek studies by the discovery in 1939 of clay tablets at Pylos in Messenia which were deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952. This meant putting back the beginning of recorded Greek to a time long before Homer, perhaps as early as 1500 B. C.
It was suggested long ago with the help of the comparative method that the Greek words aichme "spear" and artokopos "baker" arose from the forms *aiksmii and *artopokwos. This was confirmed by the recently deciphered Krito-Micenian inscriptions.
The comparative method has been thoroughly applied to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Romance, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, and Proto-Slavonic. Rather Less thorough use of the method has been made in reconstructing Proto-Semitic, Proto-Finno-Ugric, and Proto-Bantu. Work is well under way on the Malayo-Polynesian languages, Algonquian, and several other groups.
As we have stated, the comparison of languages which are believed to have been dialects of one language in the past, is done by what is known as the comparative method.
There is, however, another method of reconstructing the previous stages of a language when neither older texts nor related languages are known. A suitable term for this method is internal reconstruction, the theoretical foundation of which lies partly in synchronic, partly in diachronic linguistics. Synchronic linguistics (from the Greek syn "with" and chronos "time", IE. simultaneity) deals with the study of language at the present moment, while diachronic linguistics (from the Greek dia "through" and chronos "time", IE. of continuous time) concerns the study of language in its historical development.
In the last decade the method of glottochronology has sprung up, better known as the Lexicostatistic method, which envisages the measurement of linguistic change, particularly of the ages of language families without documented histories.
The basic premise of glottochronology is the fact that the basic vocabulary of human language tends to be replaced at a constant rate throughout its development. This approach is based on the principle stated by E. Sapir who said that the greater the degree of linguistic differentiation within the group, the greater was the period of time that must be assumed for the development of such differentiation.
If we could measure the degree of differentiation of two related languages, this would show the relative Length of time that they had been diverging from their common ancestor: it would be glottochronology (from Greek glotta "language" and chronos "time").
The glottochronological method involves three principle variables: the rate of retention, the period of time and the proportion of coinciding test list equivalents in two languages that are related.
The formula for finding the rate of retention is t=log c ч log r 
in which t=the period of time between two stages of a language, c=the proportion of common forms, and r=the rate of retention. With this formula, it was found that the rate of retention is approximately 80 per cent per thousand years.
Glottochronology is the study of the rate of change in language, and the use of the rate for historical inference, especially for the estimation of the age of a language and its use to provide a pattern of internal relationships within a language family.
In principle, glottochronology should be applied only after the comparative method has prepared the ground, and it is of use mainly for languages with long historical stages of more than a thousand years.
Even in ideal conditions, glottochronological dates provide only a rough estimate of the most probable date when the related languages diverged.
Practically, different investigators give different data for the divergence dates of linguistic families. M. Swadesh, an American linguist who supports this method passionately, gives, for example, a time depth of 46 centuries since the minimum divergence between Aleut and south-west Greenlandic, considering this a unit of the fullest divergence in the family.
The exact calculation depends on many factors, such as, for example, differences in the judgment of cognates, differences in the material selected from within a family, etc.
Thus the divergence times revealed by the glottochronological method are not all accepted, since the use of this method has not been generally recognized. Beyond this, we may consider comparable those divergence times in which we have a good deal of confidence, and our degree of confidence must depend upon the circumstances. We can be more confident in divergence times that are confirmed by evidence from other sources. Swedish was quite right when he wrote: "Lexicostatistical data must be coupled with other evidence, including that of archaeology, comparative ethnography, and linguistic paleontology. The separate lines of study serve to verify or correct one another and to fill in details of the story."
Many linguists attack glottochronology for basing itself on the false premise that, when languages begin to diverge,-the separation is sharp and complete.
Besides, it is doubtful whether the vocabulary of one language family changes at the same rate as that of another. What has been established for Indo-European languages cannot necessary be applied to other families? Then again, one should bear in mind that the test list of words taken for statistical calculation includes items of vocabulary which have been subject to various cultural influences.
We must be very careful in the application of mathematical techniques to the measurement of linguistic change. Some of them must be abandoned as groundless.
Only the comparative method that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century, now coupled with other methods which, taken together, help to penetrate deeper into the prehistoric past of the Indo-European languages, can be considered a really sound approach to the understanding of the history of language.	

References

Вопросы методики сравнительно-исторического изучения индо-европейских языков – М., Наука, 1956; А.В.Десницкая. Вопросы изучения родства индоевропейских языков, М. Наука, 1955; В. Георгиев. Исследования по сравнительно-историческому языкознанию. М.,  Изд. иностранной литературы. М., 1958; Степанов Ю.С. Методы и принципы современной лингвистики. М., Наука, 1975; Н.М. Тронский. Сравнительно-исторические исследования. – Теоретические проблемы языкознания. М., 1968, с. 5-34; Сравнительно-историческое изучение языков разных семей. Задачи и перспективы. М., Наука, 1982; Ф. Бопп. О системе спряжения санскритского языка в сравнении с таковым греческого, латинского, персидского и германских языков. – в кн.: Хрестоматия по истории языкознания. XIX-XX вв. М., Учпедгиз, 1956; Я. Гримм. Немецкая грамматика. Берлин, 1936; Березин Ф.М. История лингвистических учений. М., ВШ, 1975; Березин Ф.М. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ., 1969.     

THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

It has been estimated that there are more than 6000 distinct languages to be found in the world to-day, and all these fall into linguistic groups which are part of linguistic families which may have appeared in different parts of the globe simultaneously.
It should be borne in mind that when people speak of linguistic families they do not use the term "family" in the genetic sense of the word. The fact that people speak the same, or related, languages does not mean that there is a link of race or blood. It is therefore completely unscientific to establish any connection between racial origin and language.  
It is often possible to show that languages are historically or genetically related, i.e. they descend from a common source, but when it comes to races we have no such evidence. We cannot say, for instance, that the Mongolian race means the same as the Mongolian languages. Furthermore, it is quite probable that no such thing as an Indo-European race ever existed. In the course of the migrations of ancient peoples, numerous linguistic and racial mixtures took place. The linguistic map of the world shows that many non-Indo-European peoples of Europe and Asia abandoned their own languages and adopted the Indo-European. The Basque language, which is spoken in the north of Spain and the south of France, resisted the assimilation of Indo-European in the past and is not genetically related to the Indo-European languages. On the other hand there is no racial difference between the Estonians, for instance, who speak a Finno-Ugric language, and the Lets, who speak a language of Indo-European origin. (see Berezin F.M., 1969)
So all the attempts to draw a parallel between race and language which were put forward at the end of the 19th century by chauvinistically-minded linguists were sharply criticized by progressive thinkers.
In trying to reconstruct the original state of any linguistic family, linguists face many difficulties, of which the main one is the absence of any recorded history of languages entering the family on the one hand, and the vast language migrations on the other. The tribal migrations which took place in the distant past completely obscured the linguistic state of antiquity and resulted in the disappearance of whole peoples and the emergence of new tribes with their own languages.
There are many examples of such migration. Some modern scientists, for instance, hold that the ancestors of the American Indians came from Asia and reached America by crossing the narrow and often frozen Bering Straits. The migration of these travelers, advancing in small groups, lasted over about the last 10 millennia B. C. Then the newcomers from Asia advanced to the south via the Cordilleras valleys. In the last thousand years B. C.-, Asian peoples occupied the whole of America, reaching its eastern and southern regions. The primitive peoples of America brought with them the languages which they had spoken earlier in Asia. The striking resemblances in the whole structural systems of Asiatic and American Indian languages suggest that they might once have had the same linguistic origin.
Polynesian languages seem to have spread in all directions from their centre of diffusion in Tahiti to Samoa, Hawaii, New Zealand, westwards to Madagascar and eastwards to Easter Island off the coast of South America.
A thorough examination of the vocabulary and grammar of African languages such as Youruba, Ibo and Ewe makes us think that over a very long period of time-perhaps several thousand years-they all developed out of the same original language, the bearers of which spread in different directions in successive migrations.
But in considering the great migrations and the prehistory of language, we shall take as an example the Indo-European family, because a lot of information has been obtained about this linguistic group through the thorough work of investigators in many countries over a long period of time.
The name given to this family of languages, Indo-European, is based on the fact that it covered most of Europe and extended eastward as far as northern India. The people speaking this original language lived a very long time ago, to be precise, about 2,500 to 2,000 B.C.
In the 19th century, it was usually held that the original home of the Indo-European people lay in Central Asia, and that successive waves of emigration from there carried the various members of the family to Europe. This is mainly to be explained by the confusion of the primitive Aryans with the much earlier Indo-Europeans, and by the importance attached to the oldest Indo-European language, Sanskrit.
Recent research has shown that it is possible to narrow down the territorial limits in Europe within which the cradle of the Indo-European languages is to be found. It is known with reasonable certainty that the Italian and Greek peninsulas were colonized from the North. The occupation of France and the British Isles by Celts from Central Europe occurred comparatively late (c. 500 B.C.). The Iberian Peninsula remained predominantly non-Indo-European until Roman times, and in modern Basque a trace of pre-Indo-European speech still survives. The Eastern limit is indicated by the fact that before the two Asiatic migrations (Tocharian and Indo-Iranian), Indo-European must have been bordered to the east by an early form of Finno-Ugric, and there is some evidence of contact between these two families in the primitive period. There is reason to believe that the original centre of Finno-Ugrian expansion lay between the Volga and the Urals, and this gives us the furthest boundary, beyond which Indo-European was not to be found in its early stages. This leaves the central part of Europe, extending from the Rhine to Central and Southern Russia, and the greater part of this area had long been occupied by various Indo-European dialects. Some linguists consider that it is impossible to define the original Indo-European homeland to limits any narrower than these.
What we know of Indo-European is based mainly on linguistic evidence. The Indo-European vocabulary reveals a great deal in this respect, which is not surprising when one considers that if a single word occurs in all branches of the Indo-European family, it can be safely assumed that it is descended from the original language. If this happens repeatedly in words of a certain type, we can assume that whatever those words describe was part of the original Indo-European language. Conversely, if certain kinds of words have no likenesses in the Indo-European languages, we can assume that the material circumstances which brought these words into being came relatively late. For instance, most Indo-European languages have common words for animals like bears and wolves, for plants like pine-trees, for phenomena like snow. But there are no common words for elephants, crocodiles, or palm trees.
According to these linguistic clues it would seem that the Indo-Europeans did not live near the water but in forests, because in all Indo-European languages we come across the same words for such trees as birches, willows, and oak-trees. They had domestic animals like the horse, dog, sheep, pig, goose. At some prehistoric time Indo-Europeans were apparently cattle-raising nomads and had a stone-age culture. Their instruments were probably of stone, but they made some use of metals. Their religion was probably pantheistic, with a Sky-father and an Earth-mother. We may conclude from their conquests that they were probably valiant warriors.
By studying the oldest customs of the oldest descendants of the Indo-European people; we may learn something about their social organization. Thus, the use of cattle for money is found among the early Slavonic peoples, the Irish and the early Romans.
The comparative method allows us to state that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a highly inflective language. Nouns and verbs were richly varied in their paradigms. The former had no fewer than eight case-forms-nominatives, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative, and instrumental. Verbs made extensive use of many suffixes. Both nouns and verbs had distinct forms for the dual number. The forms of the pronouns already showed different roots, like I, me, and we, us in English. There were no separate inflexions for the passive" but only for the middle voice, which expressed the idea that the speaker was especially interested in the action denoted by the verb. As for word order it was free as in Greek and Latin. Subject, verb, object might stand first; attribute preceded substantive, as in good man. Counting was based on ten; nevertheless traces of the duodecimal system remained. Whereas the numerals one to four were felt to function as adjectives, those above four were taken as nouns.
Shortly after 2,000 B.C. the Indo-Europeans had to make great migrations, being pressed by other tribes, and they began to migrate in different directions. Some of its members moved as far as south-east Asia, entering the Indian Peninsula through the Khyber Pass in the second millennia B.C., probably before 1,500 B.C. This group spoke a language which becomes known at a later stage as Sanskrit. On their way, these Indo-Europeans split up enough to leave several related languages scattered along their route, in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and modern Iran.
One section seems to have gone directly westward, then down into the Balkan Peninsula, arriving at the coast of the Ionian Sea, giving us classical and then modern Greek. The Italic people pushed south from the Alps. The Proto-Germans followed the Celts and Left their languages all over northern Europe.
It should not be forgotten that before Indo-European speech spread across Europe there were many earlier languages (e. g. Basque, Etruscan, and others).
It is certain that the Indo-European was not so a monolithic language as to be fully reconstructed by comparison. And as long ago as the 1880s, linguists admitted the existence of differences of dialect within the Indo-European parent language. At present we cannot do very much about these differences; but it is important to recognize their existence. A period of dialect divergence preceded the final separation of the Indo-European languages from their parent stock, and these dialects had created separate languages even before the period of the great migrations.
The question of the early Indo-European dialects has been the subject of considerable study and some useful results have been obtained. It is possible to form a fair idea of their distribution in the period preceding the emergence of separate languages. The earliest and best-known dialect distinction is that which separates the satem-languages from the centum-languages. These two groups are so named from the way they treat the Indo-European guttural [k] in the word for "hundred", which appears as an occlusive in one group of languages (Lat. centum, Gr. hekaton, Toch. kilnt, Goth. hund (h <k), whereas in another group of languages it corresponds to spirants or sibilants (Zend satem, O. Slav. suto, Lith. siiiitas, Skr. satam). The languages involved in this change are Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavonic, Armenian, and Albanian (possibly with ancient Illyrian, Thracian, and probably Phrygian). Since this feature is so widespread, and occurs without any variation of the conditions in any of the languages concerned, it must be assumed that the change took place in the Indo-European period, before the dispersal of the separate languages, and that it affected a group of related dialects within the Indo-European area. (see Berezin F.M., 1969)
Before the discovery of Tocharian and Hittite the centum-satam division was commonly regarded as a division between Western and Eastern Indo-European languages, and it was customary to regard both the centurn and the satem languages as united groups. The division of Indo-European languages into these two groups was quite arbitrary and never altogether satisfactory, since for one thing Greek is cut off from the Western Indo-European languages by the intervening satam-language Albanian, and apart from this it shows real resemblances not to them but to the satam-languages. But the discovery of those new languages, which we consider unmistakably centum-Languages, made it quite impossible' to speak of an East-West division any longer, and showed that there was no single centum-group.
On this basis, the well-known modern British linguist T. Burrow gives the following division of the original Indo-European dialects to replace the centum-satam division.
	(1) A central group which can be equated with the satam-languages.
	(2) Four peripheral dialect groups surrounding the central group, namely:
(a) West Indo-European, consisting of Italic, Celtic and Germanic; (b) Greek, which, however, has special relations with the central group; (c) Eastern Indo-European which has survived as "Tocharian"; (d) Hittite and other Indo-European languages of Asia Minor which were the first to separate from the original Indo-European stock.
The Indo-European languages as a whole are divided into ten major branches, in addition to which died out without leaving any written records. The ten major branches and their main representatives are as follows:
Indo- Iranian, which was later, subdivided into:
		I. Indian (the oldest form is Sanskrit). The main representatives of the modern Indian languages include Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gipsy and some others).
II. Iranian, which is represented by such languages as Avestan or Zend (old form), the so-called Pahlavi (the middle form) and Baluchi, Pushtu, Kurdish, Yagnobi, Ossetic, and some other modern languages.
III. Baltic, which is divided into Lithuanian (the language spoken by some three million people in the Lithuania the old texts of which go back to the 16th century, and Latish, spoken by 2 million people).
IV. The Slavonic languages, which are divided into three large groups:
(1) Eastern Slavonic where we find three languages: (a) Russian, spoken by more than 122 million people, the basis of a common and a literary language; (b) Ukrainian, called Little Russian before the 1917 Revolution, spoken by some 40 million people; and (c) Byelorussian (white Russian), spoken by 9 million people.
(2) Southern Slavonic which include: (a) Bulgarian, current mostly in Bulgaria among more than seven million people; (b) Serbo-Croatian, the language of the Serbs and Croats, about 12 million people, chiefly in Yugoslavia, whose oldest texts date from the 11th century; (c) Slovenian, spoken by 2 million people, with its oldest texts dating from the 1Oth   century.
(3) Western Slavonic, the main representatives of which are: (a) Czech, used by about 10 million people in Chech Republic, with texts going back to the 13th century; (b) Slovakian; (c) Polish, spoken by about 35 million people, chiefly in Poland. Polish has a rich literature, the texts of which reach back to the 14th century.
Baltic and Slavonic are very closely related, though not as closely as Indo-Aryan and Iranian. There are some ancient divergences between them which make it possible to reconstruct a primitive Baltic-Slavonic language. Nevertheless in view of their many close resemblances it is convenient to group them together under the common name of Baltic-Slavonic.
V. Germanic has three distinct groups:
	          (1) North Germanic or Scandinavian which includes: (a) Danish, (b) Swedish, (c) Norwegian, (d) Icelandic; the songs of Eddo written in Icelandic are important landmarks in world literature;
(2) West Germanic with (a) English, spoken to-day by about 270 million people in Great Britain and abroad (USA, Australia, Canada), (b) Frisian, spoken in the provinces of the Northern Netherlands, with their oldest literary sources dating from the 14th century, (c) German (spoken by about 83 million people) with two dialects-Low German occupying the lower or northern parts of Germany, and High German which is located in the mountainous regions of the South of Germany-which have many peculiarities of pronunciation, (d) Dutch, spoken by 12 million people, (e) Yiddish, now spoken by Jewish population in Poland, Germany, Rumania, Hungary. It is based upon some middle German dialects or a mixture of dialects blended with Hebrew, Slavonic and other elements;
(3) East Germanic which has left no trace. The only representative of this group is Gothic, whose written records have been preserved in the fragmentary translation of the Bible by the bishop Ulfila. Some Gothic words spoken in the Crimea were collected there in the 16th century.
VI. Italo-Celtic with two large groups:
	          (1) Italic, the only language of which has survived is Latin; Latin has developed into the various Romance languages which may be listed as follows: (a) French, spoken by 60 million people in France and abroad (chiefly in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada), (b) Provencal, of various kinds, of which the oldest literary document dates from the 11th century, (c) Italian with numerous dialects, spoken by 51 million people in Italy itself and abroad, (d) Spanish, spoken by 156 million in Spain, the Filipina Islands, Central and Northern America (except Brazil), (e) Portuguese, (f) Rumanian, (g) Moldavian, (h) Rhaeto-Romanic, spoken in three dialects in the Swiss canton, in Tyrol and Italy.
(2) Celtic, with its Gaelic sub-group, including Irish, which possessed one of the richest literatures in the Middle Ages from the 7th century, Scottish and the Briton subgroup with Breton, spoken by a million people in Brittany and Welsh, spoken in Wales.
VII. Greek, with numerous dialects, such as Ionic-Attic, Achaean, Aeolic, Doric, etc. The literature begins with Homer's poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, dating from the 8th century B. C. Modern Greek is spoken in continental Greece, on the islands of the Ionian and Aegean Seas and by Greek settlements.
VIII. Armenian, spoken by three and a half million people in Armenia and in many settlements of Armenians in Iran, Turkey, etc. Literary Armenian is supposed to go back to the 5th century. Old Armenian, or Grabar, differs greatly from Modern Armenian or Ashharabar.
IX. Albanian, spoken now by approximately two million people in Albania. The earliest records of Albanian date from the 17th century A. D. Its vocabulary consists of a large number of words borrowed from Latin, Greek, Turkish, Slavonic, and Italian.
Two main theories have been advanced concerning the break-up of the original language into those separate languages. One is the Stammbaumtheorie (the tree-stem theory), put forward by August Schleicher (1821-1868), a famous German Indo-Europeist of the last century, in his book Compendium der Vergleichenden Grammatik der indo-germanischen Sprachen ("Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages") (1861). According to him, the original Proto-Indo-European splits into two branches: Slavo-Germanic and Aryo-Greco- Italo-Celtic. The former branch splits into Balto-Slavonic and Germanic, the latter into Arian and Greco-Italo-Celtic, which in its turn was divided into Greek and Italo-Celtic, etc. 
The main fault of his theory was that he did not take into account other causes for linguistic divergence than geographical distance from the parent language, and it was not borne out by the linguistic facts. Later research has shown that the Slavonic languages bear a striking resemblance to Indo-Iranian, so much so that they were classified into the satem-languages group, while Italic and Celtic have more in common with Germanic than Slavonic.
Another weak point of Schleicher theory is that he assumed the Indo-European parent language to be monolithic, without any variety of dialect. At the same time, the process of the formation of language families is oversimplified in this theory because he left out of account the fact that side by side with the process of language differentiation, there was a process of language integration too.
Schleicher’s faults are typical of many books on comparative linguistics in the second half of the 19th century.  
Schleicher’s theory was so unsatisfactory even to his contemporaries that they tried for a long time to correct his shortcomings and to put forward other theories, among which the “wave” theory should be mentioned. The founder of this theory, Iohannes Schmidt (1843-1901) argued in his book Die Verwandtschaftsverhaltnisse der indo-germanischen Schprachen (“The Relationships of the Indo-European Languages”, 1872) that new languages and dialects started and spread like waves when you throw a stone into the water.
He suggested that dialect A has some features in common with dialects B and C, others with dialects C and D but not with B, that dialect B, on the other hand, shares some phenomena with dialects C and D, but not with dialect A, etc.   
Schmidt was right to assume that the relationship between Indo-European languages could not .be portrayed by means of a family tree. He clearly demonstrated the primitive and abstract nature of Schleicher's view of the process of formation of language families and the relations between them, but he himself failed to examine the systematic process of the changes in the original language.
Two major members of the family which were discovered in the present century are missing in these schemes. They are:
X. "Tocharian", as it is called, which is preserved in fragmentary manuscripts in Chinese Turkistan, dating from the 6th to the 10th centuries A.D. It is divided into two dialects, which for convenience are termed A and B.
XI. Hittite, which survives in cuneiform tablets recovered from Boghazkoy in Anatolia, the site of the capital of the ancient Hittite kingdom. Some think that the Hittites or Hethites of the Bible (the Khatti mentioned in Egyptian records) may have been the Indo-Europeans. The interpretation of this language and its close relation to Indo-European was announced by Bedrich Hrozny in December, 1915. The time covered by these records is from the 19th to the 12th century B. C., the bulk of them dating from near the end of this period. It is the oldest recorded Indo-European language. Its discovery has raised many new and interesting problems.
In addition to the major languages listed above, there existed in antiquity a considerable number of other Indo-European languages, which are known only from scanty remains in the form of inscriptions, proper names and occasional glosses. They are:
XII. Thracian, a satem-language, which once extended over a very wide area, from Macedonia to southern Russia.
XIII. Phrygian, also a sattem-language, introduced into Asia Minor about the 12th century B. C. and possibly closely related to Thracian.
XIV. Illyrian, with its South Italian offshoot Messapian.
 XV. Osco-Umbrian, Italic dialects closely related to Latin, and commonly grouped with it under the common name Italic.
		XVI. Venetic of North-East Italy, a centum language of the West Indo-European group.
XVII. To complete the list, we should mention certain ancient languages of Asia Minor which together with Hittite form a special group. The Hittite cuneiform texts mention two such languages, Luwian and Palaean, and a little text material, particularly of Luwian, is to be found in them. In addition there is the so-called Hieroglyphic Hittite, the decipherment of which is now fairly advanced, and which is considered to be of Indo-European origin, and Carian, the decipherment of which has been recently done by the young linguist V. Shevoroshkin.
Linguistic evidence shows that close contact existed between the dialects of Indo-European. From the point of view of vocabulary, for instance, Indo-Iranian shared with Baltic and Slavonic a considerable number of words which may be found only in these languages and they supply important clues of the connection between these two linguistic families: the Sanskrit word suit "to be bright, white" has its cognate in the Old Slavonic language in the form of sutlti "to dawn".
Slavonic and Indo-Iranian coincide in changing s to s in contact with the semi-vowels i and u, the vibrant rand the velar occlusive k. Slavonic shows special affinities with Iranian in its use of the word Bogii both for "god" and for "grain" or "wealth". Some common grammatical elements may be found in Balto-Slavonic and in Germanic languages; they share the element m in the Dative and Ablative cases (Old Slavonic uliikomu, Gothic wulfam "with wolves") while in Sanskrit the element bh appears here (Sanskrit urkebhyas has the same meaning).
The prominent Russian linguist A. A. Shakhmatov showed that the earliest Finno-Ugric borrowings from their neighbors in south Russia show common Aryan rather than Iranian traits.
The study of close linguistic relations between the dialects of the Indo-European parent language is well under way now and the decipherment of newly discovered languages will contribute to the solution of this problem.

References 

Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; Э. Весен. Скандинавские языки. М., Изд-во иностр. лит-ры. М., 1949; И. Фридрих. Краткая грамматика хеттского языка. М., Изд-во иностр. лит-ры, 1952; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х.,1953; А. Мейе. Введение в сравнительное изучение индоевропейских языков, М. Изд-во иностр. лит-ры, 1933; Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь. М., 1990;  Гухман М.М. Готский язык. М., Наука, 1960; Арсеньева В.С. и др. Введение в германскую филологию. М.ВШ.1981; Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М. ВШ. 1982; Жирмунский В.М. История немецкого языка. М.ВШ. 1987; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М. ВШ. 1969.     
THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Languages can be classified according to different principles. The historical or genealogical classification, groups, languages in accordance with their origin from a common linguistic ancestor. Genetically, English belongs to the Germanic or Teutonic group of languages, which is one of the twelve groups of the IE linguistic family. Most of the area of Europe and large parts of other continents are occupied today by the IE languages, Germanic being one of their major groups.
The Germanic languages in the modern world are as follows: English - in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the South African Republic, and many other former British colonies and dominions; German – in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, part of Switzerland; Netherlandish - in the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) (known also as Dutch and Flemish respectively); 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 the Federal Republic of Germany; Faroese - in the Faroe Islands; Yiddish - in different countries.
Lists of Germanic languages given in manuals and reference-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. The survey of their external history will show where and when the Germanic languages arose and acquired their common features and also how they have developed into modern independent tongues.
The Earliest Period of Germanic History. Proto-Germanic.
The history of the Germanic group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic (PG) language (also termed Common or Primitive Germanic, Primitive Teutonic and simply Germanic). PG is the linguistic ancestor or the parent-language of the Germanic group. It is supposed to have split from related IE tongues sometime between the 15th and 10th c. B.C. The would-be Germanic tribes belonged to the western division of the IE speech community.
As the Indo-Europeans extended over a larger territory, the ancient Germans or Teutons moved further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the region of the Elbe. This place is regarded as the most probable original home of the Teutons. It is here that they developed their first specifically Germanic linguistic features which made them a separate group in the IE family. PG is an entirely pre-historical language: it was never recorded in written form. In the 19th c. it was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics from written evidence in descendant languages. Hypothetical reconstructed PG forms will sometimes be quoted below, to explain the origin of English forms.
It is believed that at the earliest stages of history PG was fundamentally one language, though dialectally colored. In its later stages dialectal differences grew, so that towards the beginning of our era Germanic appears divided into dialectal groups and tribal dialects. Dialectal differentiation increased with the migrations and geographical expansion of the Teutons caused by overpopulation, poor agricultural technique and scanty natural resources in the areas of their original settlement.
The external history of the ancient Teutons around the beginning of our era is known from classical writings. The first mention of Germanic tribes was made by Pitheas, a Greek historian and geographer of the 4th c. B.C., in an account of a sea voyage to the Baltic Sea. In the 1st c. B.C. in COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WAR (COM-MENTARII DE BELLO GALL ICO) Julius Caesar described some militant Germanic tribes - the Suevians - who bordered on the Celts of Gaul in the North-East. The tribal names Germans and Teutons, at first applied to separate tribes, were later extended to the entire group. In the 1st c. A.D. Pliny the Elder, a prominent Roman scientist and writer, in NATURAL HISTORY (NATURALIS HISTORIA) made a classified list of Germanic tribes grouping them under six headings. A few decades later the Roman historian Tacitus compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons DE SITU, MORIBUS ET POPULIS GERMANIAE; in this work he reproduced Pliny's classification of the Germanic tribes. F. Engels made extensive use of these sources in the papers ON THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT GERMANS and THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE. Having made a linguistic analysis of several Germanic dialects of later ages F. Engels came to the conclusion that Pliny's classification of the Teutonic tribes accurately reflected the contemporary dialectal division. In his book on the ancient Teutons F. Engels described the evolution of the economic and social structure of the Teutons from Caesar's to Tacitus's time.
Towards the beginning of our era the common period of Germanic history came to an end. The Teutons had extended over a larger territory and the PG language broke into parts. The tri-partite division of the Germanic languages proposed by 19th c. philologists corresponds, with a few adjustments, to Pliny's grouping of the Old Teutonic tribes. According to this division PG split into three branches: East Germanic (Vindili in Pliny's classification), North Germanic (Hilleviones) and West Germanic (which embraces Ingveones, Istvones and Herminones in Pliny's list). In due course these branches split into separate Germanic languages.
The traditional tri-partite classification of the Germanic languages was reconsidered and corrected in some recent publications. The development of the Germanic group was not confined to successive splits; it involved both linguistic divergence and convergence. It has also been discovered that originally PG split into two main branches and that the tri-partite division marks a later stage of its history.
The earliest migration of the Germanic tribes from the lower valley of the Elbe consisted in their movement north, to the Scandinavian Peninsula, a few hundred years before our era. This geographical segregation must have led to linguistic differentiation and to the division of PG into the northern and southern branches. At the beginning of our era some of the tribes returned to the mainland and settled closer to the Vistula basin, east of the other continental Germanic tribes. It is only from this stage of their history that the Germanic languages can be described under three headings: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic.
East Germanic
The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most numerous and powerful of them were the Goths. They were among the first Teutons to leave the coast of the Baltic Sea and start on their great migrations. Around 200 A. D. they moved south-east and some time later reached the lower basin of the Danube, where they made attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. Their western branch, the Visi-gotas, invaded Roman territory, participated in the assaults on Rome under Alaric and moved on to southern Gaul, to found one of the first barbarian kingdoms of Medieval Europe, the Toulouse kingdom. The kingdom lasted until the 8th c. though linguistically the western Goths were soon absorbed by the native population, the Romanised Celts.l The eastern Goths, Ostrogotas consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance in the lower basin of the Dniester, were subjugated by the Huns under Atilla, traversed the Balkans and set up a kingdom in Northern Italy, with Ravenna as its capital. The short-lived flourishing of Ostrogothic culture in the 5th-6th c. under Theodoric came to an end with the fall of the kingdom.
The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records of the 4th-6th c. The Goths were the first of the Teutons to become Christian. In the 4th c. Ulfilas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Parts of Ulfilas' Gospels - a manuscript of about two hundred pages, probably made in the 5th or 6th c. have been preserved and are kept now in Uppsala, Sweden. It is written on red Parchment with silver and golden Letters and is known as the SILVER CODEX (CODEX ARGENTEUS). Ulfilas' Gospels were first published 'n the 17th c. and have been thoroughly studied by 19th and 20th c. Philologists. The SILVER CODEX is one of the earliest texts in the languages of the Germanic group; it represents a form of language very close to PG and therefore throws light on the pre-written stages of history of all the languages of the Germanic group, including English.
The other East Germanic languages, all of which are now dead, have Left no written traces. Some of their tribal names have survived in place-names, which reveal the directions of their migrations: Bornholm and Burgundy go back to the East Germanic tribe of Burgundians; Andalusia is derived from the tribal name Vandals; Lombardy got its name from the Langobards, who made part of the population of the Ostrogothic kingdom in North Italy.
North Germanic
The Teutons who stayed in Scandinavia after the departure of the Goths gave rise to the North Germanic subgroup of languages The North Germanic tribes lived on the southern coast of the Scandinavian peninsula and in Northern Denmark (since the 4th c.). They did not participate in the migrations and were relatively isolated, though they may have come into closer contacts with the western tribes after the Goths Left the coast of the Baltic Sea. The speech of the North Germanic tribes showed little dialectal variation until the 9th c. and is regarded as a sort of common North Germanic parent-language called Old Norse or Old Scandinavian. It has come down to us in runic inscriptions dated from the 3rd to the 9th c. Runic inscriptions were carved on objects made of hard material in an original Germanic alphabet known as the runic alphabet or the runes. The runes were used by North and West Germanic tribes.
The disintegration of Old Norse into separate dialects and languages began after the 9th c., when the Scandinavians started out on their sea voyages. The famous Viking Age, from about 800 to 1050 A.D., is the legendary age of Scandinavian raids and expansion overseas. At the same period, due to overpopulation in the fjord areas, they spread over inner Scandinavia.
The principal linguistic differentiation in Scandinavia corresponded to the political division into Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The three kingdoms constantly fought for dominance and the relative position of the three languages altered, as one or another of the powers prevailed over its neighbors. For several hundred years Denmark was the most powerful of the Scandinavian kingdoms: it embraced Southern Sweden, the greater part of the British Isles, the southern coast of the Baltic Sea up to the Gulf of Riga; by the 14th c. Norway fell under Danish rule too. Sweden regained its independence in the 16th c., while Norway remained a backward Danish colony up to the early 19th c. Consequently, both Swedish and Norwegian were influenced by Danish.
The earliest written records in Old Danish, Old Norwegian and Old Swedish date from the 13th c. In the later Middle Ages, with the growth of capitalist relations and the unification of the countries, Danish, and then Swedish developed into national literary languages. Nowadays Swedish is spoken not only by the population of Sweden; the language has extended over Finnish territory and is the second state language in Finland.
Norwegian was the last to develop into an independent national language. During the period of Danish dominance Norwegian intermixed with Danish. As a result in the 19th c. there emerged two varieties of the Norwegian tongue: the state or bookish tongue riksmal (later called bokmal) which is a blending of literary Danish with Norwegian town dialects and a rural variety, landsmal. Landsmal was sponsored by 19th c. writers and philologists as the real, pure Norwegian language. At the present time the two varieties tend to fuse into a single form of language nynorsk ("New Norwegian").
In addition to the three languages on the mainland, the North Germanic subgroup includes two more languages: Icelandic and Faroese, whose origin goes back to the Viking Age.
Beginning with the 8th c. the Scandinavian sea-rovers and merchants undertook distant sea voyages and set up their colonies in many territories. The Scandinavian invaders, known as Northman, overran Northern France and settled in Normandy (named after them). Crossing the Baltic Sea they came to Russia - the "varyagi" of the Russian chronicles. Crossing the North Sea they made disastrous attacks on English coastal towns and eventually occupied a large part of England -- the Danes of the English chronicles. They founded numerous settlements in the islands around the North Sea: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, Ireland and the Faroe Islands; going still farther west they reached Iceland, Greenland and North America.
Linguistically, in most areas of their expansion, the Scandinavian settlers were assimilated by the native population: in France they adopted the French language; in Northern England, in Ireland and other islands around the British Isles sooner or later the Scandinavian dialects were displaced by English. In the Faroe Islands the West Norwegian dialects brought by the Scandinavians developed into a separate language called Faroese. Faroese is spoken nowadays by about 30,000 people. For many centuries all writing was done in Danish; it was not until the 18th c. that the first Faroese records were made.
Iceland was practically uninhabited at the time of the first Scandinavian settlements (9th c.). Their West Scandinavian dialects, at first identical with those of Norway, eventually grew into an independent language, Icelandic. It developed as a separate language in spite of the political dependence of Iceland upon Denmark and the dominance of Danish in official spheres. As compared with other North Germanic languages Icelandic has retained a more archaic vocabulary and grammatical system. Modern Icelandic is very much like Old Icelandic and Old Norse, for it has not participated in the linguistic changes which took place in the other Scandinavian languages, probably because of its geographical isolation. At present Icelandic is spoken by over 200000 people.
Old Icelandic written records date from the 12th and 13th c., an age of literary flourishing. The most important records are: the ELDER EDDA (also called the POETIC EDDA) - a collections of heroic songs of the 12th c., the YOUNGER (PROSE) EDDA (a text-book for poets compiled by Snorri Sturluson in the early 13th c.) and the Old Icelandic sagas.
West Germanic
Around the beginning of our era the would-be West Germanic tribes dwelt in the lowlands between the Oder and the Elbe bordering on the Slavonian tribes in the East and the Celtic tribes in the South. They must have retreated further west under the pressure of the Goths, who had come from Scandinavia, but after their departure expanded in the eastern and southern directions. The dialectal differentiation of West Germanic was probably quite distinct even at the beginning of our era since Pliny and Tacitus described them under three tribal names. On the eve of their "great migrations" of the 4th and 5th the West Germans included several tribes. The Franconians (or Franks) occupied the lower basin of the Rhine; from there they spread up the Rhine and are accordingly subdivided into Low, Middle and High Franconians. The Angles and the Frisians (known as the Anglo-Frisian group), the lutes and the Saxons inhabited the coastal area of the modern Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany and the southern part of Denmark. A group of tribes known as High Germans lived in the mountainous southern regions of the Federal Republic of Germany (hence the name High Germans as contrasted to Low Germans- a name applied to the West Germanic tribes in the low-lying northern areas. The High Germans included a number of tribes whose names are known since the early Middle Ages: the Alemanians, the Swabians, the Bavarians, the Thtiringians and others.
In the Early Middle Ages the Franks consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance. Towards the 8th c. their kingdom grew into one of the largest states in Western Europe. Under Charlemagne (768-814) the Holy Roman Empire of the Franks embraced France and half of Italy, and stretched northwards up to the North and Baltic Sea. The empire lacked ethnic and economic unity and in the 9th c. broke up into parts.' Its western part eventually became the basis of France. Though the names France, French are derived from the tribal name of the Franks, the Franconian dialects were not spoken there. The population, the Romanised Celts of Gaul, spoke a local variety of Latin, which developed into one of the most extensive Romance languages, French.
The eastern part, the East Franconian Empire, comprised several kingdoms: Swabia or Alemania, Bavaria, East Franconia and Saxony; to these were soon added two more kingdoms - Lorraine and Friesland. As seen from the names of the kingdoms, the East Franconian state had a mixed population consisting of several West Germanic tribes.
The Franconian dialects were spoken in the extreme North the Empire; in the later Middle Ages they developed into Dutch - the language of the Low Countries (the Netherlands) and Flemish ~~ the language of Flanders. The earliest texts in Low Franconian date from the 10th c.; 12th c. records represent the earliest Old Dutch. The formation of the Dutch language stretches over a long period; it is linked up with the growth of the Netherlands into an independent bourgeois state after its liberation from Spain in the 16th c.
The modern language of the Netherlands, formerly called Dutch, and its variant in Belgium, known as the Flemish dialect, are now treated as a single language, Netherlandish. Netherlandish is spoken by almost 20 million people; its northern variety, used in the Netherlands, has a more standardized literary form.
About three hundred years ago the Dutch language was brought to South Africa by colonists from Southern Holland. Their dialects in Africa eventually grew into a separate West Germanic language, Afrikaans. Afrikaans has incorporated elements from the speech of English and German colonists in Africa and from the tongues of the natives. Writing in Afrikaans began as late as the end of the 19th c. Today Afrikaans is the mother-tongue of over four million Afrikaners and colored people and one of the state languages in the South African Republic (alongside English).
The High German group of tribes did not go far in their migrations. Together with the Saxons the Alemanians, Bavarians, and Thuringians expanded east, driving the Slavonic tribes from places of their early settlement.
The High German dialects consolidated into a common language known as Old High German (OHG). The first written records in OHG date from the 8th and 9th c. (glosses to Latin texts, translations from Latin and religious poems). Towards the 12th c. High German (known as Middle High German) had intermixed with neighboring tongues, especially Middle and High Franconian, and eventually developed into the literary German language. The Written Standard of New High German was established after the Reformation (16th c.), though no Spoken Standard existed until the 19th c. as Germany remained politically divided into a number of kingdoms and dukedoms. To this day German is remarkable for great dialectal diversity of speech.
The High German language in a somewhat modified form is the national language of Austria, the language of Liechtenstein and one of the languages in Luxemburg and Switzerland. It is also spoken in Alsace and Lorraine in France. The total number of German-speaking people approaches 100 million.
Another offshoot of High German is Yiddish. It grew from the High German dialects which were adopted by numerous Jewish communities scattered over Germany in the 11th and 12th c. These dialects blended with elements of Hebrew and Slavonic and developed into a separate West Germanic language with a spoken and literary form. Yiddish was exported from Germany to many other countries: Russia, Poland, the Baltic states and America.
At the later stage of the great migration period - in the 5th c. - a group of West Germanic tribes started out on their invasion of the British Isles. The invaders came from the lowlands near the North Sea: the Angles, part of the Saxons and Frisians, and, probably, the lutes. Their dialects in the British Isles developed into the English language.
The territory of English was at first confined to what is now known as England proper. From the 13th to the 17th c. it extended to other parts of the British Isles. In the succeeding centuries English spread overseas to other continents. The first English written records have come down from the 7th c., which is the earliest date in the history of writing in the West Germanic subgroup (see relevant chapters below).
The Frisians and the Saxons who did not take part in the invasion of Britain stayed on the continent. The area of Frisians, which at one time extended over the entire coast of the North Sea, was reduced under the pressure of other Low German tribes and the influence of their dialects, particularly Low Franconian (later Dutch). Frisian has survived as a local dialect in Friesland (in the Netherlands) and Ostfries-Iand (the Federal Republic of Germany). It has both an oral and written form, the earliest records dating from the 13th c.
In the Early Middle Ages the continental Saxons formed a powerful tribe in the lower basin of the Elbe. They were subjugated by the Franks and after the breakup of the Empire entered its eastern subdivision. Together with High German tribes they took part in the eastward drive and the colonization of the former Slavonic territories. Old Saxon known in written form from the records of the 9th c. has survived as one of the Low German dialects.

References

Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; Гухман М.М. Развитие залогового противопоставления в германских языках. М., Наука, 1961; Э.А. Макаев. Структура слова в индоевропейских и германских языках. М., Наука, 1970; Жирмунский В.М. История немецкого языка. М.ВШ. 1987; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х.,1953; Степанов Ю.С. Методы и принципы современной лингвистики. М., 1975; Э. Бенвенист. Общая лингвистика. М., Прогресс, 1975; Ф. де Соссюр. Труды по языкознанию. М., Прогресс, 1977.

LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES

All the Germanic languages of the past and present have common linguistic features; some of these features are shared by other groups in the IE family, others are specifically Germanic.
The Germanic group acquired their specific distinctive features after the separation of the ancient Germanic tribes from other IE tribes and prior to their further expansion and disintegration that is during the period of the PG parent-language. These PG features inherited by the descendant languages represent the common features of the Germanic group. Other common features developed later, in the course of the individual histories of separate Germanic languages, as a result of similar tendencies arising from PG causes. On the other hand, many Germanic features have been disguised, transformed and even lost in later history.
PHONETICS 
Word Stress
The peculiar Germanic system of word accentuation is one of the most important distinguishing features of the group; it arose in PG, was fully or partly retained in separate languages and served as one of the major causes for many linguistic changes.
It is known that in ancient IE, prior to the separation of Germanic, there existed two ways of word accentuation: musical pitch and force stress. The position of the stress was free and movable, which means that it could fall on any syllable of the word-a root-morpheme, an affix or an ending - and could be shifted both in form-building and word-building Both these properties of the word accent were changed in PG. Force or expiratory stress (also called dynamic and breath stress) became the only type of stress used. In Early PG word stress was still as movable as in ancient IE but in Late PG its position in the word was stabilized. The stress was now fixed on the first syllable, which was usually the root of the word and sometimes the prefix; the other syllables - suffixes and endings were - unstressed. The stress could no longer move either in form-building or word-building.
These features of word accent were inherited by the Germanic languages, and despite later alterations are observable today. In Mod E there is a sharp contrast between accented and unaccented syllables due to the force of the stress. The main accent commonly falls on the root-morpheme, and is never shifted in building grammatical forms. The following English and German words illustrate its fixed position in grammatical forms and derived words:
English: be'come, be'coming, over'come; 'lover, 'loving, be'loved,'
German: 'Lie be, 'lie ben 'liebte, ge'liebt, 'lieberhaft, 'Liebling.
(Cf. these native words with words of foreign origin which move the stress in derivation, though never in form-building: exhibit v, exhibition n).
The heavy fixed word stress inherited from PG has played an important role in the development of the Germanic languages, and especially in phonetic and morphological changes. Due to the difference in the force of articulation the stressed and unstressed syllables underwent widely different changes: accented syllables were pronounced with great distinctness and precision, while unaccented became less distinct and were phonetically weakened. The differences between the sounds in stressed position were preserved and emphasized, whereas the contrasts between the unaccented sounds were weakened and lost. Since the stress was fixed on the root, the weakening and loss of sounds mainly affected the suffixes and grammatical endings. Many endings merged with the suffixes, were weakened and dropped. Cf., e.g., the reconstructed PG word 'fish', with its descendants in Old Germanic languages:
PG *fiskaz, Gtjisks, 0 Icel jiskr, OE jisc.
(The asterisk * is placed before reconstructed hypothetical forms which have not been found in written records; the words may be pronounced exactly as they are written; spelling in Old Germanic languages was phonetic).
Vowels
Throughout history, beginning with PG, vowels displayed a strong tendency to change. They underwent different kinds of alterations: qualitative and quantitative, dependent and independent. Qualitative changes affect the quality of the sound, e.g.: [o>a] or [p>fl; quantitative changes make long sounds short or short sounds long, e.g.: [i>i:] dependent changes (also positional or combinative) are restricted to certain positions or phonetic conditions, for instance, a sound may change under the influence of the neighboring sounds or in a certain type of a syllable; independent changes - also spontaneous or regular - take place irrespective of phonetic conditions, i.e. they affect a certain sound in all positions.
From an early date the treatment of vowels was determined by the nature of word stress. In accented syllables the oppositions between vowels were carefully maintained and new distinctive features were introduced, so that the number of stressed vowels grew. In unaccented positions the original contrasts between vowels were weakened or lost; the distinction of short and long vowels was neutralized so that by the age of writing the long vowels in unstressed syllables had been shortened. As for originally short vowels, they tended to be reduced to a neutral sound, losing their qualitative distinctions and were often dropped in unstressed final syllables.
Strict differentiation of long and short vowels is commonly regarded as an important characteristic of the Germanic group. The contrast of short and long vowels is supported by the different directions of their changes. While long vowels generally tended to become closer and to diphthongize, short vowels, on the contrary, often changed into more open sounds. These tendencies can be seen in the earliest vowel changes which distinguished the PG vowel system from its PIE source. IE short [o] changed in Germanic into the more open vowel [a] and thus ceased to be distinguished from the original IE [a]; in other words in PG they merged into [o ]. The merging of long vowels proceeded in the opposite direction: IE long [a:] was narrowed to [o:] and merged with [o:]. The examples in table illustrate the resulting correspondences of vowels in parallels from Germanic and non-Germanic languages (more apparent in Old Germanic languages than in modern words, for the sounds have been modified in later history).
In later PG and in separate Germanic languages the vowels displayed a tendency to positional assimilative changes: the pronunciation of a vowel was modified under the influence of the following or preceding consonant; sometimes a vowel was approximated more closely to the following vowel. The resulting sounds were phonetically conditioned allophones which could eventually coincide with another phoneme or develop into a new phoneme.
The earliest instances of progressive assimilation were common Germanic mutations; they occurred in Late PG before its disintegration or a short time after. In certain phonetic conditions, namely before the nasal [n] and before [i] or [j] in their next syllable the short [e], [i] and [u] remained or became close (i.e. appeared as' [i] and [u], while in the absence of these conditions the more open allophones: were used: [e] and [0], respectively. Later, these phonetic conditions became irrelevant and the allophones were phonologised.
After the changes, in Late PG, the vowel system contained the following sounds:
SHORT VOWELS:	i	e	a	o	u
LONG VOWELS:	i:	e:	a:	o:	u:
It is believed that in addition to these monophthongs PG had a set of diphthongs made up of more open nuclei and closer glides: [Ei], [ai], [eu], [au] and also [iu]; nowadays, however, many scholars interpret them as sequences of two independent monophthongs.
CONSONANTS. PROTO-GERMANIC CONSONANT SHIFT
The specific peculiarities of consonants constitute the most remarkable distinctive feature of the Germanic linguistic group. Comparison with other languages within the IE family reveals regular correspondences between Germanic and non-Germanic consonants. Thus we regularly find [f] in Germanic where other IE languages have pl; cf. e.g., E full, R HOJIHUU, Fr plein; wherever Germanic has [p], cognate words in non-Germanic languages have [b] (cf. E pool, R 60-Jiomo). The consonants in Germanic look 'shifted' as compared with the consonants of non-Germanic languages. The alterations of the consonants took place in PG, and the resulting sounds were inherited by the languages of the Germanic group.
The changes of consonants in PG were first formulated in terms is a phonetic law by Jacob Grimm in the early 19th c. and are often called Grimm's Law. It is also known as the First or Proto-Germanic
By the terms of Grimm's Law voiceless plosives developed in PG into voiceless fricatives (Act I); IE voiced plosives were shifted to voiceless plosives (Act II) and IE voiced aspirated plosives were reflected either as voiced fricatives or as pure voiced plosives (Act III).
Another important series of consonant changes in PG was discovered in the late 19th c. by a Danish scholar, Carl Verner. They are known as Verner's Law. Verner's Law explains some correspondences of consonants which seemed to contradict Grimm's Law and were for a long time regarded as exceptions. According to Verner's Law all the early PG voiceless fricatives [f, 0, x] which arose under Grimm's Law, and also [s] inherited from PIE, became voiced between vowels if the preceding vowel was unstressed; in the absence of these conditions they remained voiceless. The voicing occurred in early PG at the time when the stress was not yet fixed on the root-morpheme. The process of voicing can be shown as a step in a succession of consonant changes in Prehistorically reconstructed forms; consider, e.g. the changes of the second consonant in the wordfather:
PIE - *pa'ter 
Early PG - *fa’рar 
*fa'3ar 
Late PG - *'faрar	
Verner's Law accounts for the appearance of voiced fricative or its later modifications [d] in place of the voiceless which ought to be expected under Grimm's Law. In late PG, the phonetic conditions that caused the voicing had disappeared: the stress had shifted to the first syllable.
As a result of voicing by Verner's Law there arose an interchange of consonants in the grammatical forms of the word, termed grammatical interchange. Part of the forms retained a voiceless fricative, while other forms - with a different position of stress in Early PG - acquired a voiced fricative. Both consonants could undergo later changes in the OG languages, but the original difference between them goes back to the time of movable word stress and PG voicing. The interchanges can be seen in the principal forms of some OG verbs, though even at that time most of the interchanges were leveled out by analogy.
Interpretation of the Proto-Germanic Consonant Shift
The causes and mechanism of the PG consonant shift have been a matter of discussion ever since the shift was discovered.
When Jacob Grimm first formulated the law of the shift he ascribed it to the allegedly daring spirit of the Germanic tribes which manifested itself both in their great migrations and in radical linguistic innovations. His theory has long been rejected as naive and romantic. Some philologists attributed the shift to the physiological peculiarities of the Teutons, namely the shape of their glottis: it differed from that of other IE tribes, and the pronunciation of consonants was modified. Other scholars maintained that the consonant shift was caused by a more energetic articulation of sounds brought about by the specifically Germanic force word stress. Another theory suggested that the articulation of consonants in Germanic was, on the contrary, marked by lack of energy and tension.
The theory of "linguistic substratum" which was popular with many 20th c.-linguists attributes the PG consonant changes - as well as other Germanic innovations - to the influence of the speech habits of pre-Germanic population in the areas of Germanic settlement. The language of those unknown tribes served as a sort of substratum ('under-layer') for the would-be Germanic tongues; it intermixed with the language of the Teutons and left certain traces in PG. This hypothesis can be neither confirmed nor disproved, since we possess no information about the language of pre-IE inhabitants of Western Europe.
According to recent theories the PG consonant shift could be caused by the internal requirements of the language system: the need for more precise phonemic distinction reliable in all phonetic conditions. Before the shift (according to J. Kurylowicz) the opposition of voiced and voiceless plosives was neutralized (that is, lost) in some positions, namely before the sound [s]; therefore new distinctive features arose in place of or in addition to sonority, [p, t, k] changed into and began to be contrasted to [b, d, g] not only through sonority but also through the manner of articulation as fricatives to plosives. This change led to-nirther changes: since [f, h, x] were now opposed to [b, d, g] through their fricative character, sonority became irrelevant for phonemic distinction and [b, d, g] devoiced: they changed into [p, t, k], respectively. That is how the initial, stimulated further changes and the entire system was shifted.
Another explanation based on the structural approach to language interprets the role of the language system from a different angle. Every subsystem in language tends to preserve a balanced, symmetrical arrangement: if the balance is broken, it will soon be restored by means of new changes. After the replacement of [p, t, k] by [f, 0, k] the positions of the voiceless [p, t, k] in the consonant system were left vacant; to fill the vacuums and restore the equilibrium [b, d, g] were devoiced into [p, t, k]. In their turn the vacant positions of [b, d, g] were filled again in the succeeding set of changes, when [bh, dh, gh] lost their aspirated character. This theory, showing the shift as a chain of successive steps, fails to account for the initial push.
The chronology of the shift and the relative order of the changes included in Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, has also aroused much interest and speculation. It is believed that the consonant shift was realized as a series of successive steps; it began first on part of Germanic territories and gradually spread over the whole area. The change of [p, t, k] into fricatives is unanimously regarded as the earliest step - the first act of Grimm's Law; it was followed, or, perhaps, accompanied by the voicing of fricatives (Verner's Law).
Linguists of the 19th c. were inclined to refer the voicing of fricatives to a far later date than the first act of Grimm's Law. However, there are no grounds to think that the effect of word stress and intervocalic position on sonority could have been much delayed. In all probability, the IE plosives split into voiced and voiceless sounds soon after they had acquired their fricative character or even during that process.
The order of the other two steps (or acts of Grimm's Law) varies in different descriptions of the shift. 
Like other old IE languages both PG and the OG languages had a synthetic grammatical structure, which means that the relationships between the parts of the sentence were shown by the forms of the words rather than by their position or by auxiliary words. In later history all the Germanic languages developed analytical forms and ways of word connection.
In the early periods of history the grammatical forms were built in the synthetic way: by means of infections, sound interchanges and suppletion.
The suppletive way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE; it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.
The principal means of form-building were infections. The infections found in OG written records correspond to the infections used in non-Germanic languages, having descended from the same original IE prototypes. Most of them, however, were simpler and shorter, as they had been shortened and weakened in PG.
The wide use of sound interchanges has always been a characteristic feature of the Germanic group. This form-building (and word-building) device was inherited from IE and became very productive in Germanic. In various forms of the word and in words derived from one and the same root, the root-morpheme appeared as a set of variants. The consonants were relatively stable, the vowels were variable. Vowel Gradation with Special Reference to Verbs.
Vowel interchanges found in Old and Modem Germanic languages originated at different historical periods. The earliest set of vowel interchanges, which dates from PG and PIE, is called vowel gradation or ablaut. Ablaut is an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions; different vowels appear in the same environment, surrounded by the same sounds.
Vowel gradation did not reflect any phonetic changes but was used as a special independent device to differentiate between words and grammatical forms built from the same root.
Ablaut was inherited by Germanic from ancient IE. The principal gradation series used in the IE languages- [e-o] - can be shown in Russian examples: Hecmu-Houla. This kind of ablaut is called qualitative, as the vowels differ only in quality. Alternation of short and long vowels, and also alternation with a "zero" (i.e. lack of vowel) represent quantitative ablaut	:
The Germanic languages employed both types of ablaut - qualitative and quantitative, - and their combinations. In accordance with vowel changes which distinguished Germanic from non-Germanic the gradation series were modified: IE [e-o] was changed to [e/i-a]; likewise, quantitative ablaut [a-a:] was reflected in Germanic as a quantitative-qualitative series [a-o:] Quantitative ablaut gave rise to a variety of gradation series in Germanic owing to different treatment of the zero-grade in various phonetic conditions.
Of all its spheres of application in Germanic ablaut was most consistently used in building the principal forms of the verbs called strong. Each form was characterized by a certain grade; each set of principal forms of the verb employed a gradation series. Gradation vowels were combined with other sounds in different classes of verbs and thus yielded several new gradation series. The use" of ablaut in the principal forms of 'bear' was shown in table. The Gothic verbs in Table 6 give the closest possible approximation to PG gradation series, which were inherited by all the OG languages and were modified in accordance with later phonetic changes.
The use of ablaut in the sphere of grammar was not confined to the root-vowels of strong verbs. The gradation series [e/i-a] accounts for the interchange of vowels in some grammatical endings in the noun and verb paradigms. This gradation series is found, e.g. in the following noun-endings: PG Nom. sg - *-az, Gen.sg -*eso/-iso (the vowels represent different grades of ablaut of the suffix -a -). The same series [e/i-a] is found in the endings of many verbs (called thematic in contrast to athematic verbs, which did not contain any vocalic element).
Simplification of Word Structure in Late Proto-Germanic.
Role of Stem-suffixes in the Formation
of Declensions
Some changes in the morphological structure of the word in Late PG account for the development of an elaborate system of declensions in OG languages, and for the formation of grammatical endings.
Originally, in Early PG the word consisted of three main component parts: the root, the stem-suffix and the grammatical ending. The stem-suffix was a means of word derivation, the ending - a marker of the grammatical form. In Late PG the old stem-suffixes lost their derivational force and merged with other components of the word, usually with the endings. The word was simplified: the three morpheme structure was transformed into a two-morpheme structure. The original grammatical ending, together with the stem-suffix formed a new ending.
The simplification of the word structure and the loss of stem-suffixes as distinct components was facilitated - or, perhaps, caused - by the heavy Germanic word stress fixed on the root.
Most nouns and adjectives in PG, and also many verbs, had stem-forming suffixes; according to stem-suffixes they fell into groups, or classes: a-stems, i-stems, o-stems, etc. This grouping accounts for the formation of different declensions in nouns and adjectives, and for some differences in the conjugation of verbs.
Groups of nouns with different stem-suffixes made distinct types of declension. The original grammatical endings were alike for most nouns, e.g. Nom, sg -z, Dat. -i, Ace. -rn. When these endings fused with different stem-suffixes, each group of nouns acquired a different set of endings. The division of nouns into declensions resting on the stem-suffixes is not peculiar to Germanic alone; it is also found in other IE languages (some types of declensions in Germanic correspond to certain declensions in non-Germanic languages, e.g. o - stems correspond to the first declensions in Latin and Russian (their stem-suffix is -a: Germanic – в has developed from IE -a; Germanic a-stems correspond to the second declension in Latin and in Russian (o-stems in both these languages, since IE [o] became [a] in Germanic).
The Germanic languages preserved the old classification of nouns with great accuracy, added other distinctive features to the noun paradigms and, as a result, had a complicated system of noun declensions in the early periods of history.
Strong and Weak Verbs
The bulk of the verbs in PG and in the OG languages fall into two large groups called strong and weak.
The terms strong and weak were proposed by J. Grimm; he called the verbs strong because they had preserved the richness of form since the age of the parent-language and in this sense could be contrasted to weak verbs lacking such variety of form. From the verbs the terms were extended to noun and adjective declensions. The main difference between these groups lies in the means of building the principal forms: the Present tense the Past tense and Participle 11. The strong verbs built their principal' forms with the help of root vowel interchanges plus certain grammatical endings; they made use of IE ablaut with certain modifications due to phonetic changes and environment.
VOCABULARY
Until recently it was believed that the Germanic languages had a large proportion of words, which have no parallels in other groups of the IE family. Recent research, however, has revealed numerous non-Germanic parallels for words formerly regarded as specifically Germanic. It appears that Germanic has inherited and preserved many IE features in lexis as well as at other levels.
The most ancient etymological layer in the Germanic vocabulary is made up of words (or, more precisely, roots) shared by most IE languages. They refer to a number of semantic spheres: natural phenomena, plants and animals, terms of kinship, verbs denoting basic activities of man, some pronouns and numerals; in addition to roots, the common IE element includes other components of words: word-building affixes and grammatical inflections. Numerous examples of parallels belonging to this layer were quoted above, to show the sound correspondences in Germanic and non-Germanic languages. Words which occur in Germanic alone and have no parallels outside the group constitute the specific features of the Germanic languages; they appeared in PG or in later history of separate languages from purely Germanic roots. Semantically, they also belong to basic spheres of life: nature, sea, home life. Like the IE layer the specifically Germanic layer includes not only roots but also affixes and word-building patterns. The examples in illustrate Germanic words, whose roots have not been found outside the group, and some word-building patterns which arose in Late PG.
VERNER'S LAW
This is phonetic principle formulated by the Danish philologist Karl Adolph Verner (1846-96) in 1875, which modifies certain points in the earlier  work of the German philologist Jacob Grimm. Verner's Law describes a regular shift in stress that took place in words in the Germanic languages after the consonant shift postulated by Grimm. According to Grimm, the ancient Indo-European parent language sounds of P, t, and k changed into f, th and h in the Germanic languages, while b, d, and  g in the ancient tongue changed to the Germanic p, t, and k. Verner observed that this was true when the accent fell on the root syllable, but when the accent fell on another syllable, ancient Indo-European p, t, and k became Germanic b, d, and g. Verner then applied these rules to the consonants sand r. Verner's law states that with respect to the Germanic languages, the medial and final fricatives were voiced if they came after an unaccented syllable in the Indo-European parent language. His work is important in the study of linguistics because it proves both that language changes are evolutionary and that no exceptions or gaps exist in linguistic development.
Verner's Law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *t, *s and *x, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively *b, *d, *z and *g.
When Grimm's Law was discovered, a strange irregularity was spotted in its operation. The Proto-Indo European (PIE) voiceless stops *p, *t and *k should have changed into Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *f, *ю (dental fricative) and *x (Velar fricative), according to Grimm's Law. Indeed, that was known to be the usual development. However, there appeared to be a large set of words in which the agreement of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Baltic, Slavic etc. guaranteed PIE *p, *t or *k, and yet the Germanic reflex was a voiced consonant (*b, *d or *g).
At first, irregularities did not give scholars sleepless nights as long as there were many examples of the regular outcome. Increasingly, however, it became the ambition of linguists to formulate general and exceptionalness rules of sound change that would account for all the data (or as close to the ideal as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it.
Karl Verner was the first scholar who put his finger on the factor governing the distribution of the two outcomes. He observed that the apparently unexpected voicing of voiceless fricatives (and their falling together with * b, * d, * g) occurred if they were non-initial and immediately preceded by a syllable that carried no stress in PIE. The original location of stress was often retained in Greek and early Sanskrit, though in Germanic stress eventually became fixed on the initial (root) syllable of all words. The crucial diference between *phate:r and *bhra:te:r was therefore one of secondsyllable versus first-syllable stress (cf. Sanskrit pita: versus bhra:ta: ).
The *werT-1 *wurd- contrast is likewise explained as due to stress on the root versus stress on the inflectional suffix (IEaving the first syllable unstressed). There are also other Vernerian alternations such as illustrated by Modern German ziehen / (ge) zogen 'draw' < PG mc. *tiux-I *tug- < PIE *deuk-I *duk- 'lead'.
There is a spin off from Verner's Law: the rule accounts also for PGmc *z as the development of PIE *s in some words. Since this *z changed to *r in the Scandinavian languages in West Germanic (German, German, Dutch, English, Frisian). Verner's Law resulted in the alternation Isl versus Irl in some inflectional paradigms. For example, the Old English verb ceosan 'choose' had the past plural form curon and the past participle (ge)coren < *kius *kuz- < *gкus -*gыs- 'taste, try'. We would have coren for chosen in Modern English if the consonantal shell of choose and chose had not been generalized. But Vernerian /r/ has not been leveled out in were < PGmc. *we:z-, related to was. Similarly, lose, though it has the weak form lost, also has the compound form forlorn.
It is worth noting that the Verner's Law comes chronologically after Grimm's Law (because Grimm's Law provides most of its input) and before the Germanic shift of stress to the initial syllable (because the voicing is conditioned by the old location of stress). The stress shift erased the conditioning environment and made the Vernerian variation between voiceless fricatives and their voiced alternants look mysteriously haphazard.
The moral of Verner's Law is that crucial evidence necessary to sort out the historical evolution of a linguistic lineage may reside where few people would dream of looking for it. Verner found it "out there" in Greek and Sanskrit, while everyone else had tacitly assumed that Germanic changes can be explained in Germanic terms without recourse to external comparison.
A statement, propounded by the Danish philologist Karl Verner in 1875, which explains certain apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law by the original position of the accent. Primitive Indo-European k, t, p, became first in Teutonic h, th, f, and appear without further change in old Teutonic, if the accent rested on the preceding syllable; but these sounds became voiced and produced g, d, b, if the accent was originally on a different syllable. Similarly s either remained unchanged, or it became z and later r. Example: Skt. sapta (accent on ultima), Gr. 'e'pta, Gothic sibun (seven). Examples in English are dead by the side of death, to rise and to rear.
Danish linguist wondered why not every I-E stop changed in the same way. His formulation established that Grimm's Law was consistent and could account for all known cognate evolution:
Intermediate step in Stage 1 shift:
All voiceless stops changed once:
ph --> f
th --> theta
kh --> h
sh --> s z
If the sound was in an initial position or immediately after a stressed verb, it changed no further.
Those in other positions changed to voiced spirants (b, d, g).
(Both Rasmus Rask and Jakob Grimm, at the time of their deaths, were aware that there were exceptions to Grimm's Law, but no one." at that time could account for these exceptions. That remained for the Danish linguist Karl Verner (1846 - 1896) to do.
Verner noticed that a great number of exceptions to Grimm's Law also had a regularity and system of their own, and could be explained logically as well. By examining Sanskrit, which preserved the older Indo-European stress patterns and which did not undergo the Germanic Consonant shift, and comparing Sanskrit and Germanic cognates, Verner was able to see that stress patterns in words had influenced the pronunciation of nearby consonants.
To see the effect of stress on nearby consonants, say the words "exist" and" exit." Most people pronounce the first /Ig'zIst/ and the second /EksIt/. (I use the symbol /E/ to stand for the mid front lax vowel.) Notice how the voiceless velar stops /k/ in "exit" becomes the voiced velar stop /g/ when it follows an unstressed (unaccented) vowel and is surrounded by voiced sounds.
Verner concluded the changes described by Rask and Grimm occurred in early Germanic times, and then another set of consonant shifts occurred later caused by stress patterns. And then (this is crucial) the stress shifted to the first syllable, effectively hiding the causes of the succeeding shift and making it almost impossible to recognize. Verner published his results in 1875, and the patterns he described came to be known as Verner's Law.
Verner was thus able to explain a whole category of seeming exceptions to Grimm's Law: Indo-European voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ shifted to early Germanic voiceless fricatives [f], [р] and [x], according to Grimm's Law. Then, later, those voiceless fricatives that followed an unstressed syllable and were surrounded by voiced sounds shifted further to become the voiced fricatives, /р/, and /г/. Oddly, Verner's Law also appeared to apply to the voiceless alveola fricative /s/, which shifted to /z/. In all West Germanic languages, of which English is one, the /р/ shifted again to /d/ and the /z/ shifted (by a process known as rhoticism) to /r/.
Early Gmc. wres (plural wresun', with stress on second syllable) became wres (plural wreron, in WGmc): was, were PIE pater becomes faрer in Early Gmc; faрer after Verner's Law and stress shift; freder in WGmc incl. OE). (Note ModE "father" has shifted back!)

References

Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1953; Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М. ВШ. 1982; А. Мейе. Введение в сравнительное изучение индоевропейских языков, М. Изд-во иностр. лит-ры, 1933; Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка. М., ВШ, 1975; Соболевский В.В. Введение в романскую филологию. М., 1948; Гухман М.М. Готский язык. М., Наука, 1960; Жирмунский В.М. Введение в сравнительно-историческое изучение германских языков. М., Наука. 1964; Э.А. Макаев. Понятие общегерманского языка. М., 1931; Историко-типологическая морфология германских языков. М., 1977; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ, 1969.

GERMANIC ALPHABETS

Germanic tribes used 3 (three) different alphabets for their writings.
These alphabets partly succeeded each other in time.
The earliest of these was the runic alphabet, each separate Letter being called Rune. Runes have a very peculiar look for eyes accustomed to modern European alphabets.
Next comes Ulfila's Gothic alphabet (4th century). This is the alphabet of Ulfila's Gothic translation of the Bible, a peculiar alphabet based on the Greek alphabet, with some admixture of Latin and Runic Letters. In editions of the Gothic text a Latin transcription of the Gothic alphabet is used.
The latest alphabet to be used by Germanic tribes is the Latin alphabet.
It superseded both the Runic and Gothic alphabet when a new technique of writing was introduced. The material now used for writing was either parchment or papyrus. Introduction of the Latin alphabet accompanied the spread of Christianity and of Latin language Christian religious texts.
From ancient times mankind was appealed by unknown writings: half-forgotten antique languages, Egypt hieroglyphs, Indian inscriptions... The fate of runes was much happy - their sense wasn't lost in the course of time, even when Latin alphabet became dominating one in Europe. For instance, runes were used in calendars till the end of the 18-th c.
Modern linguists think that runes posses another kind of meaning, which we cannot find in ideograms, hieroglyphs or in modem exotic alphabets - this meaning exists in subconsciousness level. Runes were the personification of the surrounding world, essence of outlook. With the help of special links between runes a man could express nearly everything, compiling them (so called combined runes). In different times runes could change their meaning, so we can say this adjusting system created dozens of meanings of one and the same symbol. (Linguists find confirmation of this theory in the following example - every rune in different languages had separate and original meaning, which didn't fully coincide with another one in the second language.
Like all others components of language, runes endured numerous changes: in form, style of writing, system of sounds and Letters, which expressed them. We can say that these alphabets took wide spreading not only among Scandinavian and German tribes, but we can also trace its penetration in Celtic and Slavonic languages. Now runes keep their main original meaning - in the beginning they were the symbols of fortunetelling lore with sacred sense and mystic signs (The general matter why they didn't get wide diffusion before AD). Even the word "rune" corresponds as "secret" (compare old Celtic "run", middle welsh "rown", modem German "raunen"). The last 1000 years in Iceland runes have been used for divination. In Anglo-Saxon England the hours of king council were called "runes”.
The most important sources about runic history are ancient texts of Scandinavian pagan religion - Old Edda by Brynolf Swesson and Lesser Edda by Snorri Sturlusson. They were two missionaries who discovered these manuscripts in the time of Christian expansion. Another documents containing the information about runes origin are Northern king sagas "Red Leather" and Icelandic kin chronicles. Tombstones, altars, pagan pillars called "runic stones" played quite catholic role in scientific researches - usually they are found dappled with miscellaneous writings (Gothland, Upland, Norway). The most famous is Cilwer stone, which dates from the 5-th c. So we can find a lot of writings on jewels and weapon, for barbarians believed things had to posses their own names (breakteats).
German and Slavonic runic writing was the Letter system of peculiar look, accounted by the writing technique on bone, wood and metal. Nowadays we have the main runic alphabet, consisting of 24 signs, may be more, but another ones are regarded as variants or combined runes. Letters of any language can have several sources of origin, for a taste Greek language, which gave the birth to North Italian writing, had a good many of meaning for every sign. This tradition was inherited by Etruscan alphabet and later by runic one. However, Christian chronicles of 9-12c, known as «songs», revealed information about rune names and their meanings. Every rune in it conforms to one strophe, which begins with this rune and its name. In its turn, the name begins with its sound. The whole system is divided into 2 parts - futarks (arises from the first symbols - F, U, Th, A, R, K: Old futark (runes of Old German origin - o.f.) and Late futark (modifications of o.f. in Northumbrian, Frisian and Anglo-Saxon alphabets). 24 signs traditionally gradate into 3 groups of 8 symbols called atts ("part of land" or "kin" compare Scot. “lairt”, Ireland “aird”).
The origin of futark remains the matter of severe debates between historians, linguists and philologists. There are two main theories: 1) Runic writing appeared on the basis of Latin alphabet; 2) cradles of these signs are in transalpine and North Italian scripts. Scientists have a lot of historical facts, approving that Etruscan merchants used this system. Probably they brought it to the North (6th c. RC.). However some researchers think that runes cropped up in German tribes from ancient Rome Latin writing. Comparing 3 letter types we have: 10 runic Letters in Etruscan language, which absolutely coincide each other; 5 coinciding runic Letters and 8 resembling ones in Latin. Latin, Etruscan and some symbols from Greek originate from Akhiram alphabet (lOc. RC). But the construction of runic alphabet (RA) different from others - for example, order of the first Letters. The main period of development is one, when occult signs, used in Alpine region and in the North, became combine sole system. Many runic symbols were used as icons, showing various things and animals. Some runologists suppose that even in the most developed variant they are close to pictures: rune "Fehu" f symbolizes cattle, Thurisaz q 1, - thorn, Wunjo w - weathercock, Algiz z - elk, Zin xxs- lightning, Y r u - bow, Edhwaz m - horse.
The top of development and complete formation of RA system was in 1-2 c. AD.
	The number of runes in alphabet varied in the course of time. 28 sings appeared in the middle of the 6-th c. In Britain where German runes penetrated in the 5-th c. with Anglo-Saxon invasion, Frisian futark was improved by the some additions and changes (mostly combined runes) and numbered 29 units. In Northumberland 33 rune system existed already, with the mixture of Celtic runes. Whilst on the Continent of went through the number of other changes. In the middle of the 7-th c. the tendency to simplification appeared - some runes changed in inscription, some were lost. To the middle of the 10-th c. the number of runes decreased to 16 units and late futark formed. It was purely writing system, which wasn't used for fortune telling. It got wide spreading not only on the territory of German Empire, but in the North too, for example in Denmark and Swiss. The difference between them was in writing technology - Swiss ones were simpler, with short branches. Apparently it can be explained that it gained everyday using. This system, if not take notice of its disadvantages, was in circulation till 12-th c.
The next step in development of RA took place in the middle of the 12-th c. by adding dots to 16 sign system (dotted alphabet). It was used along with Latin one till the 16-th c. We can find its variants in Slavonic manuscripts. Ripped and branchy RA weren't alike to dotted one.
Combined (constrained) runes. They attract attention by their unusual form - it is too difficult to regard it as ordinary symbol. Their use is quite miscellaneous: in amulets, braketeats, and everywhere when difficult magic formulas were necessary. Runes are bind on the strength of common line.	
We cannot leave unnoticed such important stage of RA development as Ulfila's Gothic alphabet. It has got nothing in common with "gothic" variants of Romanticism period: The real Gothic writing system was used by the Goths on Gothland Island and later on the territory of Poland, Lithuania and even North Black Sea coast. In the 6-th c. gothic bishop Ulfila invented parallel variant of gothic alphabet. Creating it, Ulfila took the range of common Greek Letters and perfected some runic sings, which existed already, with the aim to paint them with brush. During 5 following centuries it was used by west Goths in Spain and in the South of France. But in 1018 Toledian counsel decreed to prohibit all runic alphabets as vane and pagan ones. It is clear from Letter names and their order that UA is younger than other RA. So we can trace Greek and Latin influence in the system. For example, futark structure was changed by adding 2 symbols to the first att. So UA contains 12 signs, which do not have analogs in Old Gothic: Q, D, A, B, G, and E, X, K, L, N, P, and T.
But, knowing all these peculiarities, we still can't answer to the question, from where runes came. So, a few scientists suppose that German and Slavonic RA had the same roots and originated from a same proto-language, for Etruscan theory is rather imperfect - Scandinavians couldn't borrow it, because Etruscan writings were used too far away from the North and in quite small territory. The following theory is closely connected with national migrations and mythology. One of the legendary Scandinavian tribes - vanes or veneds - came to the North from the East, where they set up Slavonic tribe - Vyatichi. We haven't got any historical confirmations, that Slavonic people didn't have writing systems before Cyril and Mefodius coming, so hypothetically we can believe that such system existed. Moreover, archeological researches showed that there were some traces of RA on the territory of ancient Russia. 
So we can say that when Slavonic tribes divided into nonrelative kins, RA went through changes of different kind. In the end of the 1st millennium BC veneds were vanished by Germanic barbarian hordes and proto runic system spread rapidly on the territory from the Black sea to Gaul. As it is follow from archeological discoveries RA can be found on the Slavonic jewels dated from 10-th c. AD, but it is difficult to say if they were originally Russian or Scandinavian ones - perhaps, runes on the jewelries were regarded as the part of design and in was copied blindly.

References 

Д. Дирингер. Алфавит. М., Изд-во иност. лит. М., 1963; И.М. Дьяконов. О письменности. – Пред. к книге Д. Дирингера. М., 1963; Гухман М.М. Готский язык. М., Наука, 1960; Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка. М., ВШ, 1975; А.И. Смирницкий. Древнеанглийский язык. М., Изд-во иностр. литер. 1958; К. Бруннер. История английского языка (в 2х томах). М., Изд-во иностр. литер.,1960; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ, 1969.

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a contemporary West Germanic language developed from seventeenth century Dutch. It is one of the eleven official languages of the Republic of South Africa. Although Afrikaans derives from Dutch, it was also influenced by Malay (spoken by the slaves in the 17th century) and the indigenous African languages. The first recognizable form of Afrikaans was apparently spoken by the Malay people of the Cape in the 17th/18th century. Number of speakers (1988): 10 million.
Burgundian
Burgundian was the East Germanic language of the Germanic speaking people who ultimately settled in southeastern Gaul (Southeastern France, Western Switzerland, and Northwestern Italy) in the fifth century C.E. It is extinct.
Dutch- Flemish
Dutch or Flemish is the contemporary descendent of Middle Dutch. With slight differences, the same language is called Dutch in the Netherlands and Flemish in Belgium. It is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands and one of the three official languages of Belgium. Number of Speakers (1988): 21 million.
East Germanic
The East Germanic branch of the Germanic languages was spoken by the Germanic speaking people who, in the second through fourth centuries C. E., migrated first to the Danube and Black Sea areas from the Germanic homeland. The languages of these people, which are poorly attested except for West Gothic, show characteristic differences from West and North Germanic branches.
The East Germanic Languages were Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian, Lombardic, Rugian, Herulian, Bastarnae, and Scirian. It is said that the East Germanic languages were probably all very similar. All of the East Germanic languages are extinct.
Faroese
Faroese is a contemporary Western North Germanic language spoken in the Faroe Islands. It is a descendant of Old Norse. Number of Speakers (1988): 41,000.
Frisian
Frisian is a contemporary West Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands and Germany. It is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. Of all Germanic languages, Frisian is most closely related to English.
Frisian from the earliest records of about 1300 until about 1575 is called Old Frisian. Subsequently Frisian is known as New Frisian. Some Frisian scholars also identify a Middle Frisian period from about 1600 to about 1800.
Frisian exists in three major divisions, each of which is subdivided into dialects. The two dialects of East Frisian have been largely replaced by dialects of New Low German which are called East Frisian. North Frisian is divided into about ten dialects. Nearly all modem Frisian literature is in West Frisian which has about six dialects.
Germanic
The Germanic branch of Indo-European is a centum language, characterized by systematic change in initial stops, a stress accent on the first syllable of the root, by the productive use of ablaut in verbs, by the use of a dental suffix in verb morphology, and by the use of strong and weak adjective conjugations.
The linguistic and archaeological data seem to indicate that the final linguistic stage of the Germanic languages took place in an area which has been located approximately in Southern Sweden, Southern Norway, Denmark and the lower Elbe. Around the year 1000 B. C., the Germanic tribes spread to the lower Weser and Oder and around 750 B. C. they reached the Vistula River.
During their expansion the Germanic tribes, who spoke an Indo-European language, mixed with other European tribes (the so-called Streitaxe- or Battle-axe people), who spoke another, unknown, language.
About 80 percent of Germanic roots are non-Indo-European.

Living Germanic Languages	
Afrikaans	High German	
Danish	Gutnish	
Danish-Flemish	Icelandic	
English	Low German	
Faroese	Norwegian	
Frisian	Swedish	

Extinct Germanic Languages	
Bastarnae	Lombardic	
Burgundian	Norn	
Frankish	Rugian	
Gothic	Scirian	
Herulian	Vandalic	

Gothic
Gothic was the East Germanic language of the Germanic speaking people who migrated from southern Scania (southern Sweden) to the Ukraine. From there the West and East Goths migrated to southern Gaul, Iberia, and Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries C. E. The Gepids were overcome by the Lombards and Avars in the fifth century and disappeared.
	Gothic is recorded in translations of parts of the Bible into West Gothic in the fourth century C. E. and by names. Gothic is extinct. The last Gothic speakers reported were in the Crimea in the sixteenth century C. E.
Gutnish
Gutnish is a contemporary Eastern North Germanic language spoken on the island of Gotland. It is first attested in Legal documents of the fourteenth century C. E. Some authorities consider Gutnish to be merely a dialect of Swedish.
Icelandic
Icelandic is the contemporary language of Iceland. It is a very conservative descendent of Old Norse. It is said that many Icelandic readers are able to read the Norse Sagas, written in Old Norse, without much difficulty. Number of Speakers (1988): 250,000
Lombardic
Lombardic was the East Germanic language of the Gennanic speaking people who invaded and settled in Italy in the sixth century C. E. It is said that Lombardic was the East Gennanic language of the Gennanic speaking people who invaded and settled in Italy in the sixth Lombardic participated in the so-called second sound shift which is primarily attested in High Gennan. Lombardic is extinct.
Middle English
Middle English was the descendent of Old English. English after about 1100 C. E. had changed enough to warrant a different designation. Middle English had about five major dialects, Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands, Southwestern, and Kentish.
Middle English is characterized by the reduction and loss of inflectional endings and the introduction of a large number of words derived first from Latin through Norman or Middle French and subsequently from Middle Dutch. By the late fifteenth century, East Midlands Middle English, the language of London, had acquired enough changes to be designated Early New English, the language of Mallory (Le Morte d'Arthur).
New Danish
New (or Modern Danish) is the contemporary descendent of Old Danish. It is the official language of Denmark. Number of Speakers (1988): 5 million
New English
New (or Modem) English is the contemporary descendent of Middle English. It is the official language of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom; it is the standard language of the United States. It is one of the official languages of Canada, India, the United Nations, and many other nations.
New English is characterized by a very large vocabulary, non-phonetic spelling, an almost total lack of inflection (most plurals of nouns are indicated), a syntax almost totally dependent on word order, and a very complicated periphrastic verb system. Number of speakers (1988): 431 million
New High German
New (or Modem) High German is the contemporary descendent of Middle High German. It is the official language of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. There are multiple extant dialects of High German. High German partakes of the so-called second sound shift. Number of Speakers (1988): 118 million
New Low German (Plattdeutsch)
New (or Modem) Low German (Plattdeutsch) is the contemporary descendent of Middle Low German. It is spoken on the North German plain in Germany and the Netherlands. The name Low Saxon is preferred in the Netherlands. There are multiple extant dialects of Low German. Number of Speakers: 1.5 to 2.0 million
New Swedish
New Swedish is a contemporary Eastern North Germanic language, a descendent of Old Swedish. It is the official language of Sweden and is spoken in Finland. Number of Speakers (1988): 9 million
Norn
	Nom was a mixed language of Old Norse and Irish spoken in the Shetland Islands. It is extinct.
North Germanic
The North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages is spoken by the Germanic speaking people who stayed in northern part of the Germanic homeland. Between about 800 c. E. and 1000 C. E., the dialects of North Germanic diverged into West and East North Germanic. Old West Germanic is known as Old Norse; Old East Germanic is known as Old Danish or Old Swedish. A characteristic of the North Germanic languages is the use of a post posed definite article.
Norwegian
Norwegian, a contemporary Western North Germanic language, is the official language of Norway. It has two major dialects: Nynorsk and Bokmal. Nynorsk is the contemporary descendent of Old Norwegian. Bokmal, also called Dano-Norwegian or Riksmal, is really a form of Danish. Nynorsk is more prevalent in rural areas; Bokmal in the cities. Since 1951 there has been a concerted effort to effect a merger of the two dialects. Number of Speakers (1988): 5 million
Old English
Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) is the oldest recorded form of English. It is said to be the language of the three tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of West Germanic speaking people who invaded and occupied Britain in the fifth century C. E. It is very closely related to Old Frisian.
Old English developed four major dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. The majority of recorded Old English is in the West Saxon dialect.
Old English is characterized by phonetic spelling, a moderate number of inflections (two numbers, three genders, four cases, remnants of dual number and instrumental case), a syntax somewhat dependent on word order, and a simple two tense, three mood, four person (three singular, one plural) verb system.
Old English is recorded from the late seventh century onwards. By about 1100 C. E. enough changes had accumulated so that the language is designated Middle English.
Old Danish
Old Danish was an Eastern North Germanic language, spoken in Denmark, the ancestor of New Danish and Bokmal.
Old Low German
Old Low German consisted of a pair of West Germanic languages, spoken along the North Sea coast and somewhat inland, Old Saxon and Old Franconian. Old Saxon was the ancestor of Middle Low German and New Low German. Old Franconian was the ancestor of Middle Dutch and Dutch-Flemish. Old Franconian is probably a lineal or collateral descendent of the collections of ancient West Germanic dialects called Frankish.
Old Norse
Old Norse was a Western North Germanic language used in Iceland, Ireland, Norway, the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland, and the Faroe Islands from approximately the tenth to thirteenth century. It started diverging from common North Germanic about 800 C. E. It is the language of the Norse Eddas and Sagas. Its living descendents are Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
Terminology for varieties of Norse is vexed. Old Icelandic & Old Norwegian are sometimes called Old West Norse, with Danish East Norse. Other folks refer to Old Norse Icelandic, excluding Norwegian. (Paul Acker).
Old Swedish
Old Swedish was an Eastern North Germanic language attested in about 2000 runic inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries C. E. Its contemporary descendant is New Swedish.
Vandalic
Vandalic was the East Germanic language of the Germanic speaking people who invaded Gaul, Iberia, and Africa. They founded a kingdom in Africa in the fifth century C. E. Vandalic is extinct.
West Germanic
The West Germanic branch of the Germanic languages is spoken by the Germanic speaking people who occupied the southwestern part of the Germanic homeland. The languages of these people show characteristic differences from the East and North Germanic branches.
The West Germanic Languages are Afrikaans, Dutch-Flemish, English, Frisian, Low German, and High German.
Groupings of the West Germanic Languages vary. The grouping shown in the tree is derived from Campbell, wherein Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are grouped as Ingaevonic languages and Old High German is shown separated. Baldi groups English and Frisian as Anglo-Frisian and High and Low German as German. In any case English and Frisian are agreed to be very closely related. English and Frisian share sound changes which do not occur in German. The Ingaevonic languages do not partake of the High German or second sound shift.
The whole West Germanic language area, from the North Sea far into Central Europe, is really a continuum of local dialects differing little from one village to the next. Only after one has traveled some distance are the dialects mutually incomprehensible. At times there are places where this does not occur, generally at national borders or around colonies of speakers of other languages such as West Slavic islands in eastern Germany. Normally the local national language is understood everywhere within a nation. The fact of this continuum makes the tracing of the lines of historical development of national languages difficult, if not impossible.

References 

Языки народов мира. М., Наука, 1963; Гухман М.М. Готский язык. М., Изд-во иностр. лит., 1960; Хлебникова И.Б. Введение в английскую филологию, 1978; Жирмунский В.М. Введение в сравнительно-историческое исследование германских языков. М., Наука. 1963; С.А. Миронов. Язык Африкаанс. М., 1969; Э. Весен. Скандинавские языки. М., Изд-во иностр. лит-ры. М., 1949; А. Мейе. Основные особенности германской группы языков, М. 1953; М.И. Стеблин-Каменский. История скандинавских языков. М., 1953; М.И. Стеблин-Каменский.- Древнеисландский язык. М., 1955; А.С. Новакович. Датский язык. М., 1974; В.М. Жирмунский. Немецкая диалектология. м-л, 1956; М.И. Стеблин-Каменский. Грамматика норвежского языка. м-л. 1957; У.В. Локвуд. Введение в современный фарерский язык. Копенгаген. 1964; Берков В.Г. Фризский язык. М., 1980; С.С. Маслова-Лашанская. Шведский язык. 1953; Ф.М. Березин. Лекции по языкознанию. М., ВШ, 1969.

THE GOTHIC LANGUAGE

The Gothic language, now dead, was spoken by a group of Old Germanic tribes, known in history as Gothic tribes. Where the Goths first came from is not definitely known. There were stories told by their old men of a time when their people had dwelt far to the north, on the shores and islands of what is now Sweden. Then had come long, slow wanderings through the forests of western Russia, until they reached the shores of the Black Sea. In time they overran the once mighty Roman Empire to the south. The first of these northern barbarians to conquer Rome were the Visi-goths, or West Goths. Another tribal union of the Goths, the Ost-rogoths, or East Goths, inhabited the Black Sea shores.
For a time the Goths ruled a great kingdom north of the Danube river and the Black Sea. Then, in A.D. 315, the Huns, a savage people, swept into Europe from Asia. They conquered the Ostrogoths and forced the Visigoths to seek refuge across the Danube within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. In a battle fought near the city of Adrianople, in 378, the Visigoths defeated and slew Emperor Valens. For a time they lived peaceably on Roman territory. In 395 they rose in rebellion under their ambitious young king Alaric and overran a large part of the Eastern Empire. In 410 Rome fell into the hands of the Visigoths. Alaric led the attack. 
Alaric's successors Led their people out of Italy and set up a powerful kingdom in Spain and southern Gaul. In the year 507 the Visigoths in Gaul were defeated by the Franks and were forced beyond the Pyrenees. For 200 years their kingdom in Spain flourished. It did not come to an end until 711, when the Moors crossed over from Africa and in a terrible eight-day battle destroyed the Visigothic kingdom. And that was the end of the Visigoths as an independent people.
The Ostrogoths for a time formed part of the vast horde which followed the king of the Huns, Attila. They settled in the lands south of Vienna when the Hunnish kingdom fell apart. Their national hero was Theodoric the Great, a powerful and romantic figure who became king in 474. In 488 he invaded Italy.
Theodore’s reign was one of the best but his kingdom was one of the great "might-have-beens" of history. He failed largely because no permanent union was affected between the barbarians and the Christian-Roman population. It was during his reign that many manuscripts of Gothic which have come down to us written.
After his death in 526 the generals of the Eastern Empires reconquered Italy. After fighting a last battle near Mount Vesuvius in 553), the Ostrogoths marched out of Italy. They merged with other barbarian hordes north of the Alps and disappeared as a people from history.
THE GOTHIC WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND MONUMENTS
These earliest monuments of the Old Germanic written language, which give us the possibility of speaking on the structure and the vocabulary of the languages, were written in Gothic. The written records of other Old Germanic languages appeared much later, several centuries after. The monuments of the Gothic language reflect the stage in its development when it is still possible to reveal to a certain extent the main peculiarities which characterize Old Germanic languages as a whole. Later on, when written monuments of other Old Germanic languages appeared, these peculiarities had become obliterated or changed considerably, so that only a comparison with Gothic makes it possible to reconstruct the earliest stage in their development or at Least to understand the origin of the phenomenon under review.
The early appearance of monuments in Gothic is due to the activities of Ulfilas (in Gothic Wulfila), a Gothic bishop and scholar (311-383). For more than 40 years he labored, first making a Gothic alphabet so that he could translate the Bible and then teaching his people the new faith. This Bible translated by Ulfilas is centuries older than the earliest writing which we have in any other Old Germanic languages, so its historical value is very great.
The manuscripts containing the fragments of the biblical translation which have come down to us, are not contemporary with Ulfilas, they were written in the West Gothic dialect in Italy about the year 500. The monuments are the following:
1. Codex Argenteus, in the University library of Uppsala (Sweden). This codex contained originally on 330- Leaves the four Gospels in the order Matthew, John, Luke and Mark. At present only 187 Leaves are still preserved. The manuscript was written on a purple parchment, the letters were silver and golden. It was first published in 1665.
II. Codex Carolinus. It consists of 4 leaves containing a fragment of the Epistle to the Romans. The manuscript is bilingual; the same text is given in Gothic and in Latin. It was first published in 1762.
III. Codices Ambrosiani, 5 fragments in the Ambrosian library in Milan.
	Codex A contains on 95 leaves some fragments or St. Paul's Epistles; and a small fragment of a Gothic Calendar.
	Codex B contains on 77 leaves fragments of some other Epistles.
	Codex C consisting of 2 leaves only, and containing fragments of St. Matthew Gospal.
	Codex D consists of 3 leaves containing fragments of the books of Old Testament.
Codex E consisting of 8 leaves (3 of them are in the Vatican at Roma), and containing a fragment of commentary on St. John.
IV. Codex Turinensis, in Turin, consisting of 4 damaged leaves, and containing fragments of two Epistles.
All these manuscripts were first published in 1819-1839.
All the manuscripts but Codex Argenteua are palimpsests (i.e. manuscripts the original text on which has been effaced to make room for a second).
	There are some other, smaller monuments of the Gothic language; they are short inscriptions on a ring and a spear, a few Gothic glosses and words in Latin texts, and others.
At the same time there appeared some innovations characteristic of the Gothic language only, such as Class IV of weak verbs in -non, the optative and imperative forms in -au. On the other hand, the Gothic language has lost some forms retained by other Old Germanic languages, among them the Instrumental case, the declension in considerable changes appeared in different word-former under the influence of reduction of unstressed syllables; the beginning of this process goes back to the period of Common Germanic. This accounts for the absence of the personal index-p in the 3 person singular optative (nimai), of the personal index -e in the 3 person singular preterit indicative (nam), of the Dative case ending -i (gumin* guminii) .which were lost in Common Germanic or probably when Old Germanic languages on1y began to separate from one another. The reduction of unstressed syllables caused the three-part structure of the word (root + stem-forming suffix +ending) to be brought to two parts (root + ending) or eyen to one part only (cf. the Dat. sing. of degs. "day" :dag: * a3-a-a).
Dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Gothic has special value for the linguist because it was recorded several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all the other Germanic languages (except for a handful of earlier runic inscriptions in Old Norse). Thus it sheds light on an older stage of a Germanic language and on the development of Germanic languages in general. The earliest extant document in Gothic preserves part of a translation of the Bible made in the 4th cent. A.D. by Ulfilas, a Gothic bishop. This translation is written in an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, supposedly devised by the bishop himself, which was later discarded.
The Gothic language is known to us by a translation of the Bible known as Codex Argenteus ("The Silver Bible") dating from the 4th century AD, of which some books survive. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. The language used is Germanic but has major differences from other known Germanic languages.
	It all appears that the Gothic Bible was used by the Visigoths in Spain until 700 AD, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the Balkans and what is now the Ukraine.
	Apart from the Bible, the only other Gothic document is a few pages of Commentary on the Gospel of John. This document is usually called the "Skeireins".
In addition, there are numerous short fragments and runic inscriptions that are known to be or suspected to be Gothic. Some scholars believe that these inscriptions are not at all Gothic.
The Gothic Bible and Skeireins were written using a special alphabet. 
The Gothic alphabet was probably created by bishop Ulfilas who also translated the Bible into the "razda" (language). Some scholars (e.g. Braune) claim that it was derived from the Greek alphabet only, while others maintain that there are some Gothic Letters of runic or Latin origin.
There are very few references to the Gothic language in secondary sources after about 800 AD, so perhaps it was rarely used by that date. In evaluating medieval texts that mention the Goths, it must be noted that many writers used "Goths" to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe, many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to Slavicspeaking people as Goths.
There is also the case of the "Crimean Goths". A few fragments of their language dating to the 16th century exist today. Assuming those fragments are genuine, it appears to be a different language from the one used in the Gothic Bible.
Principal features of Gothic
	As all the Germanic languages Gothic also has the stress on the first syllable.
Noun and Adjectives: Gothic has five cases: 
•	Nominative:for nouns acting as the subject of the sentence
•	Genitive: expresses possessive relationships 
•	Dative: for nouns acting as the indirect object
•	Accusative: for nouns acting as the direct object
•	Vocative:for the person addressed (it is usually the same form as the
Nominative).
Nouns: The inflectional ending depends on:
▪the stem of the word: The stems include a-, ia-, 0-, i-, u- and n-stems. These terms refer to the reconstructed Primitive Germanic (eg bird: "fug/s" is an a-stem, cf the Primitive Germanic word: *fuglaz).
▪the gender of the word: Gothic has masculine, feminine and neuter nouns.
		▪whether the word is singular or plural.
Adjectives: The adjective takes the same gender, number and case as the noun. The endings also vary according to:
- The stem to which the adjective belongs (as for the nouns above).
- Inflection: weak inflection (for the vocative and after a definite article) and strong inflection (in all other situations).
Articles and demonstrative pronouns
The definite article is an important new development in Germanic.
It arose from the demonstrative pronoun and still has the same form in Gothic (sa = 'the' or 'that' masculine, pata neuter, so feminine). It is only the context which enables its use as an article to be recognized.
The indefinite article does not yet exist.
The possessive pronouns are inflected according to the strong inflection of the adjective. 
Gothic uses the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person and a three-fold number division. Alongside singular and plural there is also a dual which indicates two people (eg wit = 'the two of us').
The familiar and polite forms of "you" use the same form of the second person, as in English, but unlike most other modern Germanic languages. (see also The Middle Dutch case system)
Verbs
The form of the verb indicates:
- The person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and the number (singular, dual, plural) A personal pronoun is used when needed for emphasis or contrast. I n other cases Gothic suffice with the verb on its own.
- The mood: Gothic uses the indicative, imperative and subjunctive.
- The tense: There are only two forms, the present tense for the present and future, and the preterite for the past tenses (there are as yet no analytical compound verb forms such as "have done"). The preterite can be formed in various ways:
 a) by a vowel change (strong verbs) - this method goes as far back as Indo-European.
b) by adding a dental suffix (weak verbs) with the sounds /d/ (as in English then) or f'p/ (as in English thin). Weak verbs are an innovation of the Germanic languages.
c) by reduplication, eg sleep: slEpan - salslep - salslepum). Strong and weak verbs are a typical feature of all modern Germanic languages. (See also characterization of the Germanic language family)
- active and passive: there are active and passive verb forms except for the passive preterite which is expressed by means of a different verb (wisan = 'to be' or wairpan = 'become') and a perfect participle (eg daupips was = 'he was baptised'). Here we can see the beginnings of the development from a synthetic to an analytical language, which is typical of all West-Germanic languages. (see also Middle Dutch verbs).
The principal developments from a language state with these features to the modern West-Germanic languages are the erosion of the differences between the stems of the nouns as a result of the heavy initial stress (see also loss of inflection in Middle Dutch), and the development towards an increasingly analytical language, the early stages of which we see in the formation of the passive preterite. 

References

М.М. Готский язык. М., Изд-во иностр. лит., 1960; О.А. Смирницкая. Готский язык – в ЛЭС. М., 1990, с. 111; Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; А. Мейе. Основные особенности германской группы языков, М. 1953; Жирмунский В.М. Введение в сравнительно-историческое изучение германских языков. М., Наука. 1964; J. Wright. Grammar of Gothic language. Oxford, OUP, 1917, W. Streitberg. Gotische Elementarbuch, Hdlb, 1920. 

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Gothic language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Gothic language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Gothic language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Gothic language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Gothic language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Gothic language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Gothic language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Gothic language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Gothic language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Gothic language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Gothic language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Gothic language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Gothic language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Gothic language?

THE DANISH LANGUAGE

The history of the Danish language can be traced back for more than 1,000 years. However, the Letters ж, ш and е, which many regard as characteristic of Danish, were only introduced later; for instance е did not enter official orthography until 1948.
Nordic (North Germanic) is distinguishable from other Germanic languages from around 200 AD and documented in for instance many runic inscriptions. During the Viking Age (750-1100) and early Middle Ages, the Nordic-speaking area included various dialects rather than different languages. This area extended to parts of Ireland, the British Isles, the Shetlands, the Orkneys and Normandy.
 Icelandic is the language which in its written form is closest to the ancient language. From the end of the 9th century up towards 1000 it can be regarded as a West Norwegian emigrant language, but today it is structurally different from Norwegian, especially Norwegian 'Bokmal’s which developed on the basis of written Danish. The Norwegian and Icelandic sagas, many of which takes place around 900-1100, were written down a couple of centuries later, but reflect the long communication radius of the Nordic speakers.
The language had no established name, but Danish tongue was used in Sweden as late as the 13th century. This language is related to Old English, which it strongly influenced during the Viking Age. Words such as fellow, husband, they, them, their, sky, window, live, die were introduced into English from Scandinavia and hundreds of English place names have the same origin. The main reason why Danish came to influence English was that the Vikings conquered and settled in three of four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the second half of the 9th century and later conquered the whole country after new Viking raids.
Since the Middle Ages, the Nordic languages have been affected by broadly similar influences from other European languages, from the Classical languages and especially German in the Middle Ages and subsequently to a Lesser extent French and Italian. From the second half of the 20th century all the languages have mainly been influenced by English. Among the languages in the geographic North, Finnish, Samian and Greenlandic are not Indo-European.
Danish has found its form through interaction; its vocabulary contains centuries of material and cultural deposits which capture the meeting of native and foreign, old and new. Many words are historically related to words in the other Indo-European languages: mand, sove, жde, drikke, far, mor, шje, hoved, finger, jord, hus, etc (man, sleep, eat, drink, father, mother, eye, head, finger, earth, house). Some Danish words are only shared with one or more Nordic languages: bonde, skov, fattig, elske, han, hunl etc (peasant, wood, poor, love, he, she). The introduction of Christianity resulted in new expressive needs - and thus in new words, often from Old Saxon or Old English, such as kristen, kirke and kloster (Christian, church, monastery).
Danish was subject to the strongest external influence in the period 1200-1500. The North German language of the Hanseatic towns was able to spread because the area came to dominate the entire Nordic and Baltic area commercially and economically for several hundred years. There were large German-speaking population groups in the major Danish towns and Low German was not as different from the Nordic languages of that time as German is from contemporary Scandinavian languages. Therefore German could more easily influence Nordic. It is obvious from the vocabulary. The influence was partly direct, partly indirect, as most of the Romance and Classical loans have also been mediated through this language.
Many of the words are related to trade, crafts and urban life, but quite a few enter the core vocabulary, for instance angst, lykke, magt, blive, straks, jo (fear, happiness, power, become, immediately, after all). Danish has adopted at Least 1500 words from Middle Low German alone. After the Reformation I the import of loanwords from the south continued. German remained the main supplier, but High German, Luther’s German, increasingly replaced Low German as the source of influence. Easily recognisable are words with the prefixes ge and er- such as gespenst, gemen, erfare, erhverve (ghost, vile, learnt, obtain). Within crafts and trade, the flow of loan words continued and numerous ordinary words with no particular connection with a specific sphere were added: billig, slynegl, flot, pludselig, munter, etc (cheap, villain, smart, sudden, jolly). As in Germany, most designations of occupation at the new university in Copenhagen were Latin: student, professor, magister. Maritime terms were Low German or Dutch, for instance matros, pynt, dcek, fartfiJj, etc (able seaman point, deck vessel).
In the 17th and 18th century, the nobility introduced a number of French words such as baron and respekt (baron, respect), but this influence was also wide-ranging: atelier, ku lisse, silhuet, premiere, kon ku rrence, chef, direktfir, fabrik, industri, patru/je, korps, ammunition, korset, klinik, ambulance, karantame, bandage, kanyIE, dessert, souper, bouillon, bet kotelet, kompot, garderobe, toilet, alkove, salon, sekretcer, avis, redaktfir, journalist, annonce, etc (studio, set, silhouette, premiere, competition, boss, director, factory, industry, patrol, corps, ammunition, corset, clinic, ambulanced quarantine, bandage, hypodermic needle, dessert, supper, bouillon, steak, cutlet, compote, wardrobe, toilet, alcove, salon, secretary newspaper, editor, journalist, advertisement).
Italian loans include fallit, inkasso, sa/do, konto, bankerot, andante, piano, cello (ruin, debt, collections, balance, account, bankruptcy, andante, piano, cello). Italian also provided kartoffel (potato).
Like the other European culture languages, Danish includes large contributions from Greek and Latin.
Danish like most other European languages has been strongly influenced by English/American. The influence is particularly noticeable within areas such as science, technology, trade, advertising, sports, entertainment and politician journalism, but the English fingerprint on the vocabulary is still far smaller than the French, German and Classical. Nonetheless it is striking how rapid the influence has been. It is also characteristic that within certain scientific and educational areas, the mother tongue is being rejected in favor of English. In addition, large parts of the youth culture are influenced by English-language texts and loans from English/American.
Some even believe all neologisms within the vocabulary are English. This is by no means the case. English is the most dominant loan supplying language, but the lists of neologisms still contain more native constructions, especially new combinations of familiar elements (lommeregner for pocket calculator).
This selection of words introduced in the mid 1990s gives an impression of the types of neologisms: Afrodansker, cd-rom-breender, du mmy, etisk regnskab, emaile, euro, mdevareminister, gren afgift, homebanke, light, netavis, poll, returntast, site. 
Many foreign observers of spoken Danish have noticed something unique about the pronunciation. A 16th century Swedish statement claims that Danes press out the words as though they are about to cough. The word 'cough' must be a reference to the Danish glottal stop, a means of expression which is extremely rare in other languages, but in Danish is used in the pronunciation to distinguish between numerous words which would otherwise be identical, for instance: anden (second) - anden (the duck); kшrende (driving) - kшerne (the cows/queues); mшller (miller/mills) - Mшllier (surname); parret (combined) - parret (the pair).
The glottal stop is a powerful braking of the vibrations of the vocal cords, approaching closure and this may undoubtedly sound discordant, staccato-ish, like a kind of brief, dry cough. Danes avoid glottal stops in art song.
Altogether many non-Danes find it very difficult to decode Danish pronunciation. Danish is a very vowel-rich language with important distinctions between for instance mile, mele, maele, male (dune, flour, voice, paint) and ugle, oil, sie, sile (owl, proper name, chaff, early). The final sounds in hay, leg, beer, flag (sea, game, berry, flat), which are very common, can also cause problems.
It is difficult to deduce the pronunciation from the written word. Vejr, hver, vaer, vaerd (weather, each, be, worth) are thus pronounced identically as are hjul and jul (wheel, Christmas). Seks (6) is pronounced 'sex'(seksten (16) 'sajsten'. The way from spoken to written word can also be difficult to predict. The diphthong 'aj' can be written ej, eg, aj, ig as in sejl, regn, maj, sig (sail, rain, May, oneself) and In even more ways in words of foreign origin. The Danish t is different from other t-sounds in being slightly sibilant.
Apart from the use of glottal stops and other characteristics of pronunclatlon (Danish differs from the other Scandinavian languages in the so. called weakened stops. In the Middle Ages( the Nordic p, t, k after a vowel became b, d, g In written Danish and even weaker in the spoken language. Tapa became tabe( gata became gade( kaka became kage (lose ( street( cake)( etc. These examples also show how Danish weakened the vowels in unstressed syllables to e, pronounced 0 or merged with the surrounding sounds. 
As in the other Nordic languages and in English, the number of declensions has been reduced during the history of the Danish language. Thus there is nothing in the form of the words which reveals what is subject( object or indirect object in a sentence such as manden rakte drengen skeen (the man handed the boy the spoon). The information about the relationship between the members of the sentence is largely provided by their order and understood from the words' syntactic placement.
It is characteristic of Danish and the other Nordic languages that the definite article is eclictic. While English, German (French and other Romance languages indicate definiteness by a preposed element (Nordic languages have a suffixed definite article. In Danish the house, das Haus, la maison, la casa is huset. The indefinite form is hus.
Another characteristic of Nordic languages is the possibility of creating passive form by appending a particular ending (for instance s in Danish, Norwegian 'bokmal' and Swedish. The passive tense of boghandleren saelger bogen (the bookseller sells the book) is bogen selges af boghandleren (the book is sold by the bookseller).
More than five million Danes have Danish as their mother tongue and Danish is an official language in both the Nordic countries and the EU. The Faeroe Islands have several thousand inhabitants with Danish as their first language and it is the second language of the remaining approx. 45,000 Faeroese. Danish was also the second language in Iceland until 1999 but since 1999 English has taken over this position. Danish Is an official language in Greenland alongside Greenlandic and for many Greenlanders Danish is still their second language. In addition, Danish is the mother tongue of over 10,000 Danes in South Schleswig, but the second language of far more.
Today, Danish is the Nordic language with the most rapid pronunciation changes from generation to generation and during the last century the phasing out of dialects has happened faster than in most other countries. From being rich in dialects, Danish has become dialect poor. On the other hand, there are still regional differences in the standard pronunciation of people from Zealand, Funen and Jutland.
Many Danes find Danish in its modem form less beautiful than for instance French, Italian and English.
The Danes are conservative as far as the written language is concerned. Even modest changes to the norm can result in strong reactions. 
From a bird's eye view, Denmark is a very homogeneous speech community. Well above 90% speak Danish, which has no competition as the national language. Nonetheless many Danes are concerned about language distinctions in the Danish society. A couple of decades ago, it was mainly the influence of the modern Copenhagen vernacular on the conservative spoken standard language which exercised people, but now at the turn of the millennium the debate is mainly focused on language conditions in school and society for immigrants and refugees and the fear that English will oust Danish. In reality, the immigrant languages have had no demonstrable influence on modern standard Danish - and of course there are over 100 different one. But the Danish society has no recent experience of handling minority languages and is uncertain about many of the emerging language issues.
As far as English is concerned, it is a question partly of a considerable import of words and expressions, partly of a domain loss within research education, entertainment and commercial language. Much research, much business life I many educational matters and much entertainment know no frontiers, so this development is not unnatural in an open society like the Danish. Thus, as long as research is also published in Danish, a national terminology in the mother tongue is also developed and a national education culture and national entertainment are also cultivated, there is no cause for concern. For Danish is among the hundred largest of the 6,000-7,000 languages in the world, measured by the number of native speakers. It may be close to number 1001 but considering that the country has a thousand year old tradition of Danish as the dominant language, a well-developed educational system, a large public sector with Danish as the administrative language and a well-described and standardized written language, there are no cogent reasons for strong language protectionist initiatives.
As the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment and comedy writer Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754) wrote: “Just as a nation sometimes needs the goods of another, so a language also needs the words of another language”. Holberg combined this openness with considerable arrogance on behalf of the Danish language. His example can still serve as a model.
References 

Новакович А.С. Датский язык, М., Наука, 1974; Кузнецов С.Н.Теоретическая грамматика датского языка. Синтаксис. М., Наука, 1984; А. Мейе. Основные особенности германской группы языков, М. 1953; Жирмунский В.М. Сравнительно-историческое языкознание германских языков. М. 1956; Rehling E. Del denske spregs historie. bd 1-4. Kbh 1944-68; Diderchsen P. – Elementaer dansk Grammatik, 3 udg. Kbh,  1963. 

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Danish language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Danish language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Danish language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Danish language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Danish language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Danish language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Danish language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Danish language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Danish language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Danish language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Danish language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Danish language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Danish language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Danish language?

THE NORWEGIAN LANGUAGE 

The Norwegian alphabet has 29 Letters, 3 more than the English.
These three characters are Ж(ж),  Ш (ш) and  Е(е) and they come in that order right after Z in the alphabet. They are pronounced as the vowels in "sad", "bird" and "four". Computer keyboards sold in Norway have three more keys than Standard English keyboards, one extra key for each extra Letter.
The alphabet used in Norway today is the Latin alphabet which came to Norway approximately 1000 years ago, brought by Catholic missionaries.
Some 500 years before that, in the pre-Nordic times, the Scandinavian people used the alphabet of runes.
Dano-Norwegian and New-Norwegian were both developed throughout the 19th century after the nation had gained its independence from Denmark. However, they did not get their current names, "Bokmal" and "nynorsk" until 1929.
New-Norwegian has always been the lesser used written form. It had its all time high in 1944 when 34% of the school districts used it as their main written language.
To ensure that New-Norwegian is not undermined, the government has come up with a list of regulations:
•	All school books printed in Norway must be published in both languages. . 
•	At least 25% of the programs shown on the broadcasting channel NRK must be in New Norwegian. This includes subtitling of movies, narrators, radio reporters etc. 
•	At Least 25% of all the official documents must be written in New-Norwegian. 
•	All persons working in official positions must have command of both languages. A person who sends a Letter to say, the municipality, is entitled to get a reply in the same language that his Letter was written in.
There are specified interest organizations for New-Norwegian and Dano-Norwegian that make sure these regulations are being with-held.
One single man created New-Norwegian. His name was Ivar Aasen and he was a farmer's son with a genius mind for languages. He traveled around in most of the southern parts of Norway and listened to people speak. Through his thorough research he found grammatical patterns in the dialects which he used when he created New-Norwegian.
Dano-Norwegian came from, as the name suggests, Danish. The Danish language was the written language of Norway for centuries.
The upper class, which was used to writing Danish, gave their support to the Dano-Norwegian language, looked down at New-Norwegian claiming it was a peasant's language making a mockery of "fine Norwegian".
Those pro New- Norwegian and against Dano-Norwegian augmented that the language wasn't "Norwegian enough".
In 1885 the two languages were made equal; both would be official written forms of Norwegian.
During the beginning of the 20th century spelling reforms made the two languages more alike, and many words were accepted in both languages. A special arrangement was made: Some words could be spelt in several different ways (sola or solen). One way of spelling was made compulsory for schools to teach and school book writers to use, and the other, a so-called bracket form, was allowed for everyone else to use as they wised. The students could freely choose the way of spelling that was closer to their dialect. Though the spelling and the words have changed a bit, this is still the reality in Norwegian schools today.
All reforms must be 'approved of by the parliament. From two days in 1917, when the debate in the parliament was particularly heated, there is a 125 pages report.
A radical reform was put forward in 1938. In 1940, when the Second World War reached Norway, the debate naturally stopped. The Nazi government launched their own spelling reform which all the newspapers had to use. The schools partially sabotaged the reform.
One result of the war was that the citizens united a bit more and finally agreed that both versions were just as "Norwegian" as the other (during the war all the illegal papers had been printed in Dano-Norwegian). In the early 1950s efforts were made to make one written language.
These linguistic rapprochements came to a sudden holt in 1952. That year many schools started using text books made after the radical spelling reform of '38. A lot of parents thought the reform ruined the language, and formed a protest. The parental protest began in the Oslo area and then spread to the rest of the country. Those who protested were mainly users of Dano-Norwegian. Close to 100,000 persons signed a petition against the '38-reform that year. The parents went further in their protest the year after: they corrected all their children's school books to the previous spelling standard.
As said at the very beginning of this book, when Norwegians talk, they use their dialects. Dialects are used in school (by teachers and students), on TV, on the radio.
To show how the dialects can vary, here are some ways to say "I" in Norwegian dialects (the Norwegian spelling has been kept): "leg" (standard Dano-Norwegian), "eg" (standard New Norwegian), "IE", "I", "IE" and "E". That's six different ways of just saying "I"!
Some dialects are closer to the written language than others. Norwegians normally don't have a problem understanding each others dialect; however, certain unusual dialect words can sometimes be troublesome.
The dialects developed around 1000 A.D. due to the natural isolation of people. Valleys, mountains, and fiords along with very bad communications isolated the Norwegians. A much trained ear can hear almost exactly where in Norway a Norwegian is from by listening to his dialect
When children move from one district to one with another dialect, they tend to quickly change to the dialect of their new hometown. Grown-ups won't change in that way, but children are conscious not to stand out. The adults who move from the countryside to the city will often hear their new city friends saying "Talk some more, it's so fun listening to your dialect."
Some dialects are instantly connected to certain traits and characters. This can have a connection to the 1960s when dialects were used in plays to make fun of others.
Sociolects are not the same as dialects. While dialects are the way of speaking within a geographical area, sociolects are the way the manner of speaking varies within the social groups. There's not so much difference in the sociolects in Norway today as there was 100-200 years ago. The difference between people has decreased, and at the same time the number of persons with degrees from colleges and universities has increased.
A summary of 1500 years
1500 years is a long time, and during that period the Norwegian language has gone through many stages and undergone many changes. Modern Norwegian has borrowed countless words from German, English, French, Latin, Danish and Swedish, and here's the story of how it all happened. Keep in mind that most references to dates in this article are approximate.
200-700: Runes:
The first runic alphabet had 24 Letters, and it was called "futhark" after the six first Letters in the alphabet. It is believed to have come from early Greek or Latin. The later runic alphabet had only 16 characters and looked like this:
f u th a r k h n i a s t b m i r
The Letters were considered to be magic ("runes" means "secret") and to bring protection or good fortune. Thus, few people mastered the skill of writing with runes Runes were carved into stone or wood, and they are often found on tomb stones, amulets and weapons.
The words were extremely long and complicated. Five syllables was the normal length of a word.
Norse: 700-1000 (The Viking age)
Norwegians spoke generally with the same accent. The language was simplified, shortening the words and making the conjugation of verbs and nouns more straightforward.
The Vikings traveled a lot. They pillaged and plundered, but peaceful trade occurred too. The Norwegian Vikings and the Englishmen could communicate without problems. Many Vikings settled on the British Isles and their language influenced English a great deal. For instance the word "bag" comes from the Norse "baggi", and, in strange twist, "bag" has recently found its way back to modern Norwegian.
Missionaries from the Catholic Church introduced the Latin alphabet to the Norwegians around the year 1000. With the missionaries and their alphabet came many Greek and Latin words which are still used in Norway today (so-called loanwords).
Despite the introduction of the Latin alphabet, the runic alphabet was still in use and increasing numbers of Vikings were learning to use it. Runes would be used for another 400 years.
1000-1350
The 13th century was a golden age of Norse literature. Literature that had been handed down from generation to generation orally was now written down. The literatures from these times include sagas, very long poems about morality and old stories about the Norse gods. Alliteration was very common in the literature of this period.
Many well-off Norwegians settled on Iceland, where much of the Norse literature has been found. With their settling on Iceland the Norse people exported their language, a language which is extremely close to the language on Iceland today. In fact, a Norwegian from the 13th century and a modern Icelander would probably be able to read and understand the same text. They wouldn't understand each other's spoken language because the pronunciation has changed too much.
1350-1520:
In 1349 the Black Death came to Norway's west coast. The plague wiped out almost one half of the population, and many of the dead were priests and monks who'd been called to pray for the dying and then caught the pest. With many monks gone there were only a few literate persons left, and no one to preserve the written Norwegian language in years to come:
Shortly after the plague, the Swedes took over rule of the nation, and then some years later the Dano-Norwegian Kingdom was founded. The Danish and Swedish rule of Norway influenced the Norwegian language heavily. In the larger town, such as the town of Bergen on the west coast of Norway, many hanseatic merchants came to trade goods and hence the local dialect of Bergen was influenced by German. The dialects of all major cities that received visitors from abroad picked up foreign words.
Most of the traditional Norwegian fairy tales come from this period. People were superstitious and many of the folktales sought to explain natural phenomena with trolls and witches. The folktales were written down in the mid 19th century.
1520-1830
Danish became the official language of Norway, but the common citizens continued speaking their dialects. All documents had to be written in Danish, and the upper class of Norway tried their best to speak Danish as it was considered a finer language (what could be finer than what the King spoke?). The upper class comprised a total of 2% of the population.
Danish was taught in schools: the children had to speak and write Danish as long as they were at school. The children faced a problem when they had to describe the Norwegian nature in Danish - the Danes simply didn't have the adequate words. For instance, at that time, there weren’t any Danish words for tall mountains, the closest one was hill.
The union with Denmark came to an end in 1814. On the 17th of May Norway got its own constitution. Shortly after, the nation started a union with Sweden again.
1830s:
The big issue was what to do with the language? The way the writers, politicians and journalists saw it, the country had three options:
I. Keep the Danish.
2. Norwegianize the Danish - changing the spelling so the words looked more like the way the Norwegians pronounced them and adding special culture-specific words to the written language. 
3. Make an entirely new written language based on the Norwegian dialects.
Option № 1 was rejected, but the two others were both set into practice.
The Norwegianized Danish would later be known as "Bokmal" (or Dano-Norwegian) and the other as "Nynorsk" (or New-Norwegian).
1840s:
Mr. P. Ch. Asbjomsen and Mr. J. Moe traveled from village to village in the 1840s. Every placed they stopped they would ask one of the locals to tell a fairy tale, and then the two writers would write down the story. When Mr. Moe and Mr. Asbjomsen wrote down the fairy tales, they encountered a problem: the stories had been told in a local dialect. Should they write it in Danish or in the dialect that it was told? Writing it in a dialect would make it incomprehensible to anyone who was accustomed to Danish.
The solution the two gentlemen came up with was this: they wrote the stories in a rather radical form of Danish, making the sentence structure more Norwegian and keeping culture specific words. Their work soon became a huge part of the work to norwegianize the Danish. Keeping the culture- specific words was also important to rebuild Norwegians cultural identity - of which after 400 years of Danish rule there was little Left.
1850-1920:
The debate over New-Norwegian and Dano-Norwegian was very heated.
1920- Today:
More and more English words have found their way into the Norwegian language, especially after the Second World War. The English words have come from movies (most imported films in Norway are from the U.S), music, computer terminology, television, books, etc. However, the English influence on Norwegian is not as great as was the Norwegian influence on English during the Viking age.
Language usage in the Norwegian civil service is regulated in two ways: Through the official prescription of spellings, inflected forms and other rules that apply to written material, and through the Act relating to Language Usage in the Civil Service, which regulates the relationship between the two official Norwegian languages, Bokmal and Nynorsk.
The most comprehensive rules are those embodied in the Language Usage Act and the appurtenant regulations. The most important provision of the Act stipulates two principles: First, the principle of parity, i.e., that Bokmal and Nynorsk shall be equal language forms and, second, the principle of equality, i.e. that they shall have equal status as written languages. The principle of parity entails the right to use both language forms, i.e. they shall both be accepted, while the principle of equality also entails a mandate that both forms shall actually be used. The Act lays down more detailed rules about the situations in which one language form or the other shall be used.
The regulations explicitly point out that each individual State agency shall be responsible for ensuring that the rules are followed. It is also stipulated that every State agency is responsible for ensuring that its employees receive the necessary training in Bokmal and Nynorsk within a reasonable period of time.
With reference to language usage within the context of the EEA and the EU, it is important to note that Norway's language usage provisions do not apply to internal administrative work, nor do they regulate the use of spoken language.
According to the old Language Usage Act of 1930, the obligation to use both Bokmal and Nynorsk was limited to State employees born after 1 January 1905 who had achieved a certain Level of education. According to the new Act, the obligation applies to all who have to write in connection with their work, regardless of age or education. This obligation rests with the individual employee, not with the office or State agency as such. However, this shall not be interpreted to mean that the head of a State agency does not have an obligation to ensure that the employees follow the language usage rules.
One fundamental feature of the Language Usage Act is that lower Levels of government administration, i.e. municipalities and counties, may often make language usage decisions that have a binding effect on higher Levels, i.e. on the State administration, as regards using a certain language form (Bokmal or Nynorsk). Correspondingly, the language preference of private individuals and other private Legal persons determines the form of language a State agency shall use in correspondence with the person in question. Only where municipalities and counties have not expressed a preference for a particular language form, or where the language preference of private Legal persons is unknown, is a State agency free to choose the form of language it will use.
When a State agency writes to one or more municipalities within a limited area, the State shall use the language form (Bokmal or Nynorsk) preferred by the majority of the relevant municipalities. Where more than half the municipalities have elected to remain linguistically neutral, there is no majority linguistic preference, and the State agency shall be free to choose which language form to use. Account shall not be taken of the populations of the municipalities.
The linguistic decisions adopted by municipalities shall also determine the civil service language used by local and regional branches of State agencies. Local State agencies shall use this civil service language to address all other State agencies. The same shall apply to regional State agencies, except that the civil service language of a local State agency shall be used to address said agency. Likewise, central State agencies that write to local or regional State agencies shall use the civil service language preferred by said agencies. Although these rules may appear rather complicated at first, there is a clear logic behind them. They are based on the same principle as mentioned above, i.e. that the lowest administrative Level shall determine which language form the higher Level shall use in its correspondence. It all goes back to the municipal language usage decisions.
It probably has the most far-reaching linguistic policy consequences of any section of the Act. It contains a wide assortment of provisions that cover practically all the written material produced and distributed by State agencies, except for correspondence addressed to individuals. Pursuant to the Act, this section covers "circulars, notices, information material, etc." It covers everything from stamps and bank notes to parliamentary documents and other State publications. In brief, the section covers all material written for the public that is not covered under the other rules.
Meanwhile, the section covers all State agencies at all Levels, from the largest directorate to the smallest vicar's office. However, it does not apply the same rules to the different State agencies. Once again, it is the lowest Level that generally determines the language form. Thus material with special ties to a municipality shall follow that municipality's language usage decision. This applies inter aria to announcements for job vacancies in the State. Where the catchment’s area of a State agency is larger than one municipality, but still limited, the majority language form for the area shall be used for such material as is covered under the section. In linguistically neutral areas, the material shall alternate between the language forms, ensuring a reasonable ratio between them.
In the same way, State agencies that service the entire country shall ensure that the material covered by the section varies between Bokmal and Nynorsk so that there is a reasonable quantitative distribution between them. For quite some time it was unclear what should be considered reasonable in this context, but since the Storting issued a statement on the question in 1988, the regulations now specify that a reasonable quantitative distribution is that neither language form shall, over time, be used Less than 25 per cent of the time. This applies to every State agency independently, rather than to larger units of government administration collectively.
Should an individual agency find just cause for so doing, such material as is covered under § 8 may be distributed in both Bokmal and Nynorsk. As regards forms/questionnaires, the rule is that they shall always be available and accessible in both language forms. The most practical way to accomplish this is usually to produce bilingual forms.
In conclusion, it must be mentioned that the Act related to Language Usage has a special provision regarding appeals. Thus in addition to the ordinary right of appeal in cases of personal relevance, language organizations may appeal to a superior agency if they believe a State agency is contravening any of the rules in the Act or the regulations. This probably leads to more reporting of such breaches than what would otherwise have been the case. It also means that such cases are reported to the Ministry.
Otherwise, the most important provisions of the Language Usage Act may be summed up as follows:
•	Private individuals and other private Legal persons shall receive responses in the language (Bokmal or Nynorsk) they use when addressing a State agency.
•	Municipalities and counties may decide to require Bokmal or Nynorsk in the correspondence they receive from State agencies, or they may decide to remain linguistically neutral.
•	The so-called civil service language of a lower administrative Level in the State shall determine the form used at a higher Level to handIE correspondence between them, for example, and the civil service language in turn is based on the municipality's choice of language.
State agencies shall generally alternate between the two languages in the documents they produce for the public, i.e. everything from parliamentary documents, books and magazines to stamps and bank notes, so that neither language is ever used Less than 25 per cent of the time.
References

Богородицкий В.А. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М. Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз. 1954, сс 145-160, 182; Э. Прокош Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М. Изд-во Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз. 1954, сс  14-19; Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь. М., 1990, с. 337; М.И. Стеблин-Каменский. Грамматика норвежского языка. М.-Л., 1957; Якуб В.Л. Практический курс норвежского языка. М., 1966; Haugen E. Language conflict in language planning. The case of modern Norwegian. Camb., 1966.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Norwegian language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Norwegian language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Norwegian language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Norwegian language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Norwegian language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Norwegian language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Norwegian language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Norwegian language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Norwegian language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Norwegian language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Norwegian language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Norwegian language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Norwegian language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Norwegian language?

THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

	German (Deutsch) is a member of the western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Spoken by more than 120 million people in 38 countries of the world, German is - like English and French – a pluricentric language with Germany, Austria and Switzerland as the three main centers of usage. Worldwide, German accounts for the most written translations into and from a language. Furthermore it belongs to the most learned and to the ten most spoken languages worldwide.
German is spoken primarily in Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, in two-thirds of Switzerland, in two-thirds of the South Tyrol province of Italy, in the small East Cantons of Belgium, and in some border villages of the South Jutland County. 
In Luxembourg, as well as in the French regions of Alsace and parts of Lorraine, the native populations speak several German dialects, and some people also master standard German (especially in Luxembourg), although in Alsace and Lorraine French has for the most part replaced the local German dialects in the last 40 years.
Some German speaking communities still survive in parts of Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and above all Russia, Kazakhstan and Poland, although massive relocations to Germany in the late 1940s and 1990s have depopulated most of these communities.
Outside of Europe and the former Soviet Union, the largest German speaking communities are to be found in the USA, Brazil and in Argentina where millions of Germans migrated in the last 200 years; but the great majority of their descendants no longer speak German. Additionally, German speaking communities are to be found in the former German colony of Namibia, as well as in the other countries of German emigration such as Canada, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, South Africa, Thailand, and Australia.
In the USA, the largest concentrations of German speakers are in Pennsylvania (Amish, Hutterites and some Mennonites speak Pennsylvania German and Hutterite German), Texas (Texas German), Kansas (Mennonites and Volga Germans), North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin and Indiana. Early twentieth century immigration was often to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cincinnati. Most of the post Second World War wave are in the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago urban areas, and in Florida. In Brazil the largest concentrations of German speakers are in Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Parana, and Espirito Santo. Generally, German immigrant communities in the USA have lost their mother tongue more quickly than those who moved to South America, possibly due to the fact that for German speakers, English is easier to learn than Portuguese or Spanish.
In Canada there are people of German ancestry throughout the country and especially in the west as well as in Ontario. There is a large and vibrant community in the city of Kitchener, Ontario.
German is the main language of about 100 million people in Europe (as of 2004), or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken native language in Europe after Russian, above French (66.5 million speakers in 2004) and English (64.2 million speakers in 2004). German is the third most taught foreign language worldwide, also in the USA (after Spanish and French); it is the second most known foreign language in the EU (after English;) It is one of the official languages of the European Union, and one of the three working languages ofthe EU, along with English and French.
The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration period, separating South Germanic dialects from common West Gern1anic. The earliest testimonies of Old High German are from scattered Elder Futhark inscriptions, especially in Alemannic, from the 6th century, the earliest glosses date to the 8th and the oldest coherent texts to the 9th century. Old Saxon at this time belongs to the North Sea Germanic cultural sphere, and Low German should fall under German rather than Anglo-Frisian influence during the Holy Roman Empire.
As Germany was divided into many different states, the only force working for a unification or standardisation of German during a period of several hundred years was the general preference of writers trying to write in a way that could be understood in the largest possible area.
When Martin Luther translated the Bible (the New Testament in 1522 and the Old Testament, published in parts and completed in 1534) he based his translation mainly on this already developed language, which was the most widely understood language at this time. This language was based on Eastern Upper and Eastern Central German dialects and preserved much of the gran1ffiatical system of Middle High German (unlike the spoken German dialects in Central and Upper Germany that already at that time began to lose the genitive case and the preterit tense). In the beginning, copies of the Bible had a long list for each region, which translated words unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics rejected Luther's translation in the beginning and tried to create their own Catholic standard  - which, however, only differed from 'Protestant German' in some minor details. It took until the middle of the 18th century to create a standard that was widely accepted, thus ending the period of Early New High German.
German used to be the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid. 19th century it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant, an urbanite, not their nationality. Some cities, such as Prague (German: Prag) and Budapest (Buda, German: Glen), were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Bratislava (German: Pressburg), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. A few cities such as Milan (German: Mailand) remained primarily non-German. However, most cities were primarily German during this time, such as Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Zagreb (German: Agram), and Liubliana (German: Laibach), though they were surrounded by territory that spoke other languages.
Until about 1800, standard German was almost only a written language. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost like a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible. Prescriptive pronunciation guides used to consider northern German pronunciation to be the standard. However, the actual pronunciation of standard German varies from region to region.
Media and written works are almost all produced in standard German (often called Hochdeutsch in German) which is understood in all areas where German is spoken, except by pre-school children in areas which speak only dialect, for example Switzerland. However, in this age of television, even they now usually learn to understand Standard German before school age.
The first dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, the 16 parts of which were issued between 1852 and 1860, remains the most comprehensive guide to the words of the German language. In 1860, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, this was declared the standard definition of the German language. Official revisions of some of these rules were not issued until 1998, when the German spelling reform of 1996 was officially promulgated by governmental representatives of all German-speaking countries. Since the reform, German spelling has been in an eight-year transitional period where the reformed spelling is taught in most schools, while traditional and reformed spelling co-exist in the media.
German is a member of the western branch of the Germanic family of languages, which in turn is part of the Indo-European language family.
The tenn "Gennan" is used for the dialects of Germany, Austria, Gennan-speaking Switzerland (that is, outside the French-, Italian-, and Romansch-speaking areas) and some areas in the surrounding countries, as well as for several colonies and other ethnic concentrations founded by Gennan-speaking people (for example German in the United States).
The variation among the Gennan dialects is considerable, with only the neighbouring dialects being mutually understandable. Most dialects are not understandable for someone who knows standard Gennan. However, all German dialects belong to the dialect continuum of the continental West Germanic languages because any pair of neighbouring dialects is perfectly mutually intelligible.
The dialect continuum of the continental West Germanic languages is typically divided into Low Germanic languages and High Germanic languages.
Low Germanic is defined as the varieties that were not affected by the High German consonant shift. They consist of two subgroups, Low Franconian and Low German. Low Franconian includes Dutch and Afrikaans, spoken primarily in the Netherlands, Belgium, Surinam and South Africa; Low German includes dialects spoken primarily in the German Lowlands and in the eastern Netherlands. The Low German varieties are considered dialects of the German language by some, but a separate language by others; the Low Franconian varieties are not considered a part of the German language.
High Germanic is divided into Central German and Upper German. Central German dialects include Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Hessian, Thuringian and Upper Saxon. It is spoken in the southeastern Netherlands, eastern Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France, and in Germany approximately between the River Main and the southern edge of the Lowlands. Modem Standard German is mostly based on Central German, but it should be noted that the usual German term for modem Standard German is Hochdeutsch, that is, High German.
The Moselle Franconian varieties spoken in Luxembourg have been officially standardized and institutionalized and are therefore usually considered a separate language known as Luxembourgish.
Upper German dialects include Alemannic (for instance Swiss German), Swabian, East Franconian, and Austro-Bavarian. They are spoken in parts of the Alsace, southern Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, and in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Italy.
The High German varieties spoken by Ashkenazi Jews (mostly in the former Soviet Union) have several unique features, and are usually considered as a separate language, Yiddish. It is the only Germanic language that does not use the Latin alphabet as its standard script.
The dialects of German which are or were primarily spoken in colonies founded by German speaking people resemble the dialects of the regions the founders came from. For example, Pennsvlvania German resembles dialects of the Palatinate, and Hutterite German resembles dialects of Carinthia, while Venezuelan Alemcln Coloniero is a Low Alemannic variant.
In Brazil the largest concentrations of German speakers (German Brazilians) are in Rio Grande do Sul, where Riograndenser Hunsriickisch was developed, especially in the areas of Santa Catarina, Parana, and Espirito Santo.
In the United States, the teaching of the German language to latter-age students has given rise to a pidgin variant which combines the German language with the grammar and spelling rules of the English language. It is often understandable by either party. The speakers of this language often refer to it as Amerikanisch or Amerikanischdeutsch, although it is known in English as American German.
Although German is usually cited as an outstanding example of a highly inflected language, it should be noted that the degree of inflection is considerably less than in Old German, or in Icelandic today. The three genders have collapsed in the plural, which now behaves, grammatically, somewhat as a fourth gender. With four cases and three genders plus plural there are 16 distinct possible combinations of case and gender/number, but presently there are only six forms of the definite article used for the 16 possibilities. Inflection for case on the noun itself is required in the singular for strong masculine and neuter nouns in the genitive and sometimes in the dative. This dative ending is considered somewhat old-fashioned in many contexts and often dropped, but it is still used in sayings and in formal speech or written language. Weak masculine nouns share a common case ending for genitive, dative and accusative in the singular. Feminines are not declined in the singular. The plural does have an inflection for the dative. In total, six inflectional endings (not counting plural markers) exist in German: -s, -es, -n, -en, -ns, -e.
In the German orthography nouns and most words with the syntactical function of nouns are capitalized, which makes it quite easy for readers to find out what function a word has within the sentence. On the other hand, things get more difficult for the writer. This spelling convention is almost unique to German today (shared perhaps only by the closely related Luxembourgish language), although it was historically common in other languages (e.g., Danish), too.
Like most Germanic languages, German forms left-branching noun compounds, where the first noun modifies the category given by the second, for example: Hundehiitte (eng. doghouse). Unlike English, where newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written in open form with separating spaces, German (like the other German languages) always uses the closed form without spaces, for example: Baumhaus (eng. tree house). Like English, German allows arbitrarily long compounds, but these are rare. (See also English compounds.) The longest official German word is Rindfleischetikettierungsiiberwachungsaufgabeniibertragungsgesetz. There is even a child's game played in kindergartens and primary schools where a child begins the spelling of a word (which is not told) by naming the first letter. The next one tells the next letter, the third one tells the third and so on. The game is over when the a child can not think of another letter to be added to the word.
A possible explanation for the use of "mute" to refer to German (and also to Germans) in Slavic languages is that Germans were the first people Slavic tribes encountered, with whom they could not communicate. The corresponding experience for the Germans was with the Volcae, whose name they subsequently also applied to the Slavs, see etymology of Vlach.
Hebrew traditionally (nowadays this is not the case) used the Biblical term Ashkenaz (Genesis 10.3) to refer to Germany, or to certain parts of it, and the Ashkenazi Jews are those who originate from Germany and Eastern Europe and formerly spoke Yiddish as their native language, derived from Middle High German.
Nowadays, over 100 million people speak German (Deutsch) as their native language. German is the official language of Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the four national languages of Switzerland. German is spoken in diverse modern dialects in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, northern Italy, much of Switzerland, eastern France (Alsace and parts of Lorraine), as well as parts of Belgium and Luxembourg. Small groups of German speakers also live in various eastern European countries, and many people there Learn German in schools.
German is one of the European languages of longer tradition and rougher history. Clear and ordered, the German language reflects the spirit of a nation of clear ideas and admirable organization in all the fields of life. It is comprehensible why it is the language of some of the greatest thinkers of century XIX and of gorgeous literary works that last in the cultural heap of the humanity. Nowadays, German is a native language of 98 million people in the world, who not only live in the countries where it is an official language (such as Germany and Austria).
Emigration has spread the German language to many other parts of the globe. There are communities of people who speak German in Canada, the U.S. (approximately 1.5 million speakers), South America (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), South Africa, and Australia. The fact that every tenth book published in the world is written in German reveals the extent of the German language across the globe!
Low German dialects are spoken in the flatlands of the northern regions of Germany. They sound more similar to Dutch and English than to High German. No standard literary language exists for this group of dialects. The High German - dialectal group stems from the highlands in the southern parts of Germany. The standard written German language evolved from High German dialects.
Swiss and Austrian dialects belong to the Alemannic group of dialects. Alemannic dialects differ considerably from High German in phonology and grammar. In Swiss German, for example, the word "Kind" (child) is pronounced "Chind." Furthermore, in most of the Swiss German dialects, the nouns do not differentiate case inflections like they do in High German.
German belongs to the West Germanic sub-branch (along with English, Frisian, Yiddish, Dutch, and Afrikaans) of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. The German language was shaped by migration of the Germanic tribes who lived in northern Europe during the first millennium BC. German pronunciation underwent several major changes before it crystallized in the form of High German in the 6th century AD. The earliest record written in Old High German is a Latin-German dictionary, dating from 770 AD.
German vocabulary has contributed many words to English. For example, kindergarten and dachshund are English words of German origin. So are frankfurter and hamburger. They refer to the German cities, Frankfurt and Hamburg.
For a number of years, experts and politicians discussed the revision of the German rules of spelling. The debate drew widespread public interest, since the matter was a very controversial one. Finally, however, the new spelling system was implemented officially on August 1, 1998. The reform aims to ease daily usage of the German language. The original 212 spelling rules were reduced to 112, and the rules of punctuation were cut down from 52 to 9. For the time being, an arrangement is effective that allows the usage of the old rules together with the new ones. This arrangement will end July 31, 2005. From that point on, only the new spelling rules will apply.
To an English speaker Learning German, German pronunciation may sounds difficult because of the consonant clusters in many words. It's not unusual to have three consonants in one syllable. Regular practice is necessary to learn to speak German well and develop good German pronunciation.
The written German is very uniform across Germany and Austria. The spoken German however, presents many dialects which belong to either the High German or to the Low German dialectal groups (note that 'Low German' is not a negative term but just the name of a dialectal group).
High German and Low German dialectal groups are different mainly in their system of sounds, particularly with respect to the consonants. However, it does not exist a generally accepted standard of German pronunciation (although some norms of pronunciation published in 1957 as Deutsche Hochsprache were accepted).
Even the pronunciation of highly educated Germans is affected by their native dialects. Some German-speaking groups, such as the Swabians, Saxons, Austrians, and Swiss, can be distinguished readily by their characteristic types of pronunciation.
Some dialects can be even ininteligibles for the others. Such is the case of the German spoken in Switzerland as much writing as spoken.

References

В.М. Жирмунский. Немецкая диалектология. м-л, 1956; Жирмунский В.М. История немецкого языка. М.ВШ. 1987; А. И. Домашнев. Современный немецкий язык и его национальные варианты. Л., 1983; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х.,1953; Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; Б.А. Абрамов, Н.Н. Семенюк, Немецкий язык. – в ЛЭС, М., 1990, с. 329. 

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke German language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the German language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the German language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the German language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the German language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in German language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the German language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the German language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the German language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the German language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the German language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the German language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the German language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the German language?

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

1. Relationship to other languages. Icelandic is one of the Nordic languages, which are a subgroup of the Germanic languages. Germanic languages are traditionally divided into North Germanic, i.e. the Nordic languages, West Germanic, i.e. High and Low German including Dutch-Flemish, English and Frisian, and East Germanic, i.e. Gothic, which is now dead. The Germanic languages are in the family of Indo- European languages together with the Celtic, Slavonic, Baltic, Romance, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages, in addition to several language groups, which are now dead. Accordingly, Icelandic is more or Less related to all these languages. Linguistically it is most closely related to Faeroese and Norwegian.
2. The origin of the Icelandic language. Iceland was settled in the period A.D. 870-930. Most of the settlers came from Norway, especially Western Norway, a few of them from Sweden and some from the British Isles, including Ireland. The language, which came to prevail in Iceland, was that of the people of Western Norway. It is commonly agreed that a considerable part of the immigrants was of Celtic stock (estimates, based partly on physical-anthropological studies, vary from 10 to 30 percent). However, the Icelandic language shows only insignificant traces of Celtic influence. The only evidence is a few Celtic loan words and a few personal names and place-names. Icelandic and Norwegian did not become markedly different until the fourteenth century. From then onwards the two languages became increasingly different. This was for the most part due to changes in the Norwegian language, which had in some cases begun earlier in Danish and Swedish, while Icelandic resisted change, no doubt thanks in part to the rich Icelandic literature of the 12th and following centuries. Resistance to change is one of the characteristics of the Icelandic language, which explains the fact that a twelfth century text is still easy to read for a modern Icelander. However, Icelandic has undergone considerable change in its phonetics. Another characteristic of the language is its uniformity, i.e. absence of dialects.
3. Grammar. Like the old Indo-European languages, Icelandic has a complicated grammar: Nouns are inflected in four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) and in two numbers (singular, plural). The same is true of most pronouns and adjectives, including the definite article and the ordinal and the first four of the cardinal numerals: these are also inflected in three genders, while each noun is intrinsically masculine, feminine or neuter. Most adjectives and some adverbs have three degrees of comparison and most adjectives have two types of inflection, called strong and weak, in the positive and superlative. Verbs are inflected in three persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd), two numbers (singular, plural), two simple (non-compound) tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) and two voices (active, medio-passive); in addition, by means of auxiliary verbs, the verbs enter into several constructions (including the so-called compound tenses) to represent the perfect, the future, the conditional, the progressive, the passive etc. The verbs also have three nominal forms, i.e. the infinitive (uninflected) and two participles, present and past (including supine).
4. Vocabulary innovations. In the late eighteenth century, language purism started to gain noticeable ground in Iceland and since the early nineteenth century, language purism has been the linguistic policy in the country. Instead of adopting foreign words for new concepts, new words (neologisms) are coined or old words revived and given a new meaning. As examples may be mentioned simi for telephone, tolva for computer, thota for jet, hlj odfrar for supersonic and geimfar for spacecraft. The Icelandic language committee is an advisory institution which is to "guide government agencies and the general public in matters of language on a scholarly basis."
5. Icelandic in other countries. There are Icelandic language communities in North America. They came into being because of emigration from Iceland to Canada and the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The earliest of these settlements was established in Utah in 1855, but it was around 1870 that continuous emigration began. In 1870, a small Icelandic settlement was established on Washington Island in Lake Michigan. Later, an Icelandic settlement arose in North Dakota. In 1875, the first Icelandic settlement was established in Canada, on the Western shore of Lake Winnipeg ("New Ice-land"). Such settlements arose also in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Until recently, tens of thousands of people in these areas still could speak the Icelandic language. For further details regarding the Icelandic language, see the publication Iceland 1986.

References

М.И. Стеблин-Каменский.- Древнеисландский язык. М., 1955; Берков В.П. Исландский язык. – в кн. Арсеньева В.С., Соловьева А.В. и др. Введение в германскую филологию. М., ВШ, 1981; Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М. ВШ. 1982; Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1953; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х.,1953; Einarsson S. Icelandic grammar, texts, glossary. Balt., 1956$ B. Kress Islдndische Grammatik. Lpz., 1982.
Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Icelandic language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Icelandic language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Icelandic language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Icelandic language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Icelandic language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Icelandic language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Icelandic language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Icelandic language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Icelandic language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Icelandic language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Icelandic language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Icelandic language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Icelandic language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Icelandic language?

THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE

The national language of Sweden is Swedish. It is the native tongue of some 90 per cent of the country's almost 9 million
Swedish is a language spoken in Sweden and England. Swedish is one of the Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family.
Swedish is closely related to, and often mutually intelligible with, Danish and Norwegian. All three diverged from Old Norse about a millennium ago and were strongly influenced by Low German. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Bokmal are all considered East Scandinavian languages; Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. But even if a Swede finds it difficult to understand a Dane it is not necessarily the other way around.
Swedish is the national language of Sweden, mother tongue for the Sweden-born inhabitants (7,881,000) and acquired by nearly all immigrants (1,028,000).
Swedish is the language of the Aland Islands, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland. In mainland Fin] however, Swedish is mother tongue for only a minority of the Finns, or about six percent. The Finnish-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas of southern and southwestern Finland, where they form a local major some communities.
In Estonia, the small remaining Swedish community was very well treated between the first and second world wars. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, had Swedish as the administrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture experienced an upswing. 
There is considerable migration (labor and other) between the Nordic countries but due to the similarity between the languages and culture expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. (Note: Finland is, strictly speaking, not a Scandinavian country. It does, however, belong to the so called Nordic countries together with Iceland and Scandinavian countries.)
Swedish is the de facto national language of Sweden, but it does not hold the status of an official language there.
In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. Swedish had been the language of government in Finland for 700 years, when in 1892 Finnish was given equal status with Swedish, following Russian determination to isolate the Gra Duchy from Sweden. Today about 290,000, or 5.6% of the total population are Swedish speakers according to official status for 2002. In Finnish, Swedish is officially referred to as the other domestic language, or toinen kotimainen kieli, that since educational reform in the 1970s has been a compulsory subject for pupils with Finnish mother tongue mandatory in the examinations. The introduction of mandatory education in Swedish in schools was seen as a step to avoid further Finlandization Pupils with Swedish mother tongue like wisely study the other domestic language Finnish in Mainland Finland.
		Swedish is the official language of the small autonomous territory of the Aland Islands, under sovereignty of Finland, protected by international treaties and Finnish laws. In contrast to the mainland of Finland the Aland Islands are monolingual- Finland has no official status.
Swedish is also an official language of the European Union.
There are no real regulatory institutions for the Swedish language, but the Swedish Academy and the Swedish Language Council (Svenska spraknamnden) have important roles. The primary task of the Swedish Academy is to further the use of Swedish language. The primary instrument for this is the publication of dictionaries; Svenska Akademiens Ordlista and Svenska Akademiens Ordbok.Even though the dictionaries are sometimes perceived as an official definition of the language; their function is rather intended to be descriptive.
Swedish is distinguished by having more than one high-status variety, which is unusual for languages of its modest size.
The Swedish term rikssvenska is problematic to translate. It might mean Swedish as spoken in Sweden compared to as spoken in Finland, but it might also denote the high-status variety spoken in Stockholm. Beside the high-status dialects, one can distinguish between a large number of Swedish dialects, often de1ined elements of historical divisions, provinces of Sweden:
•	Bergslagsmal (spoken in Bergslagen)
•	Finlandssvenska (spoken in Finland - Finland-Swedish, Eastern Swedish)
•	 Gutniskal (spoken in Gotlandia - Gutnish language)
•	 GOtamal (spoken in Gotaland)
•	 Norrlandska mal (spoken in Ngrrland - Northern Swedish)
•	 Sveamal (spoken in Svealand)
•	 Sydsvenska maP (spoken in Scania - Southern Swedish, formerly Eastern Danish)
•	 Alandska (spoken in the Aland Islands)
All speakers of these languages are bilingual in Swedish, and the consideration here is principally the dialect of S~ spoken by these individuals.
2 Jamska belongs to the group of (Insular) West Scandinavian languages, as opposed to the other dialects of Swedish which belong to the (Continental) East Scandinavian group. The proper name of the language is Jamska, though t spelling Jamska is sometimes used.
With respect to inflection, Swedish has five different kinds of nouns and four different kinds of verbs. Nouns come in two grammatical genders: common and neuter. Old Swedish formerly had masculine and feminine genders in place of common some old phrases and ceremonial uses preserve these archaic forms. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memory: Nouns form the plural in a variety of ways: by adding -r with or without a mutation in the terminal vowel (e.g.,jlicka, girl jlickor, girls), by adding -n, by no marker at all (e.g., barn, child or children), or by the root vowel from back to front (e.g., man, man, man, men). The last form is rare.
Most verbs end in -a in the infinitive, -r in the present tense, and -de, -fe, or -dde in the past. Verbs generally do not inflect in person or number. Other tenses are formed by combinations of auxiliary verbs with infinitives or a special form of the par called the supine. As in all the Germanic languages, there are strong and weak verbs.
Most Swedish words are of Germanic origin (the oldest category, representing the most common, everyday words). All Germanic words in Swedish are mus (mouse), kung (king), and gas (goose). Other words are borrowed from Latin, French, German (first Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, then High German), or English. New words are often formed by compounding. New verbs can also be made by adding an -a to an existing noun, as in disk (dishes) and diska « dishes). Some compounds are translations of the elements (calques) of German original compounds into Swedish.
Swedish: svenska
. hello: hej /hey/
. good-bye: hej da (hey-doh)
. please: tack (tahck)
. thank you: tack (tahck)
. that one: den ddr (den dehr)
. how much?: hur mycket (huwr muwk-eh)
. English: engelska (eng-el-skah)
. yes:ja /jal (ya)
. no: ne} /nej/ (neigh)
. generic toast: skal /skOl/ (skaal or skol)
From the mid-19th century until the Second World War more than one million people emigrated ftom Sweden, mainly to North America, and it is estimated that several hundred thousand' people now speak Swedish in various parts of the world.
Swedish is a Nordic language, belonging to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Its sister languages are Danish and Norwegian, while the other Nordic languages Icelandic and Faroese might perhaps best be described as half-sister, retaining more of their ancient character. In this perspective, English and German may be regarded as cousins
From the beginning of our era until the 9th century the languages of the Scandinavian countries were on the whole identical, and are jointly referred to as Proto-Norse. There are linguistic monuments from this period consisting of a small number of runic inscriptions.
During the Viking Age (800-1050) Scandinavians still spoke what was fundamentally a common language, often referred to as the "Danish tongue", but at this time certain characteristic features were emerging to distinguish Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. We possess thousands of rune stones from the 11th century that bear witness to these linguistic developments.
Swedish has always embraced loans from other languages, but has still managed to survive as a language of its own. A number of Latin and Greek words, like kyrka (church), prost, mossa and paradis entered Swedish along with Christianity.
During the Middle Ages, Continental influences continued unabated, and the written language received an indelible impression from the complicated sentence structure and convoluted phraseology of Latin that has lasted until our own day. But it was the urban culture of the Hanseatic merchants that made the greatest impression on Swedish society, and the German spoken and written by the Hanse merchants of Lubbock and Hamburg moulded the Swedish language more than any other foreign influence before or since. The old vinduga (window, "wind-eye") in the roof was now replaced by junster (Ger. Fenster) in the wall. Eldhus ("fire-house") becamejungfru, bwja (begin) could also be begynna, golda became betala, mel and tunf!a.
 The language of science and higher education was for centuries the internationally entrenched Latin. But during the 17th century, when the France of Louis XIV was the leading nation of Europe, French became the language with the biggest (status, and its influence grew even stronger during the 18th century with the Enlightenment and cultural development. The new loan words (phonetically adapted to Swedish) bear testimony to the kind of culture that was being imported: modern, journalist, mubel (furniture), balkong, salong, garderob (wardrobe), mustasch, parfym, ses (sauce), kastrull (saucepan), balett, ride (theatre curtain), pjos (play/drama) and roman (novel).
In the 19th century English started to flood into Swedish with words from the spheres of industrialization, travel and sport: jobb Gob), strejk (strike), bojkott, riJls (rail), lokomotiv, turist, sport, record.
Standard Swedish-the normalized national language developed on the basis of the language spoken in the Lake Manlaren region of Central Sweden and around Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The national administration was located there, and there was a vigorous ruling class language. Stabilization was greatly promoted by the first complete Bible translation into Swedish (Gustav Vasa's Bible, 1541) and by another consequence of the Reformation, a comparatively high Level of public literacy-from the end of the 17th century onwards, the clergy were obliged to ensure that their parishioners were acquainted with important passages from the Bible and knew the Lutheran catechism.
In the 18th century an educated middle class arose, and with it the beginnings of the fairly straightforward and conversational Swedish used in the press. At the same time Swedish was being developed into a scientific language by such internationally renowned figures as Carl von Linnet and Anders Celsius and their popularizers.
The development of a national language continued apace with urbanization, the growth of the press, universal schooling (the compulsory elementary school system was introduced in 1842 with Swedish as a separate subject), a vigorous national literature for the educated public that boasted such international stars as August Strindberg and Selma Lagerluf, and the mass educational and cultural movements of the folk high schools and the popular grass-roots movements (temperance, trade unions, sport, self-improvement via study circles, etc) and the Labour Movement where generations of politicians Learned to speak in public and write for a broad audience, all followed more recently by radio and television. Norms of spelling were standardized by the Swedish Academy.
There is no longer any attempt to maintain a solemn style of Swedish with archaic words and forms and complicated syntax. The distinctive but archaic biblical style disappeared with the new Bible translation that was published in 2000, allowing the character of the original texts to emerge instead.
In the Nordic countries official language planning is well established. The Swedish Language Council is a public-service institution. High standards in terminology are maintained by the Center for Terminology (TNC). The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and television and some leading morning papers have their own language advisors, and so do state agencies.
A good deal of effort has been put into taking the gobbledygook out of the language of public administration to make it more accessible for ordinary citizens. The tangled, Byzantine language promoted by the EU is perceived as a threat to the democratic values of modern public Swedish, and the head of language usage guidance for Swedish with the EU Commission in Brussels has a hard struggle to get translations put into good, comprehensible Swedish that is not polluted by the source language (usually French or English). Sweden is one of the most active countries in "fighting the linguistic fog". Letters i.e. p,a are pronounced like the vowels in more and hot, a like in care and best, and if like in the French words bleu and bluf.
The various plural forms of nouns are still very much alive: man-man [man-men], hund-hundar [dog-dogs], gast-gaster [guest-guests], kyrka-kyrkor [church-churches], apple-pie [apple-pie], hus-hus [house-houses].
The Swedish system of word formation favors easy compounding, creating long and sometimes clumsy words that replace whole phrases or even sentences. Words like resursallokering (resource allocation), stendpunktstagande (adopting a standpoint), kvittblivningsproblematiken (the set of problems related to disposal), and konsloidentifikation (emotional identification) tend to flourish in official and technical settings.
On the other hand, compounds are capable of creating whole new concepts with unique expressive value, such asfullfl (cheap and nasty beer, lit. ugly beer), kramgo (cuddly, lit. hug-good), skepsupa (indulge in secret drinking, lit. to cupboard-booze), strulputte (mess er-upper, lit. confusion-tiddler), raknenisse (bean-counter, lit. counting-gnome). A good deal of Swedish poetry relies on the impact of unique compounds. And it is difficult for any translation to adequately capture the tone of such everyday Swedish expressions as solvarma smultron med kylskepskallfil, sun-warmed wild strawberries with chilled fill (a popular kind of thick curdled milk).
Language usage advisors are currently very concerned with what is being referred to as domain loss or the ceding of territory by one language to another. The other language today is of course English, and the domains that are under threat are primarily science and a number of other specialized fields of language usage.
But whether you fear or welcome the replacement of Swedish by English, it is very unlikely to happen quickly. Most Swedes, after all, despite the great strides made by internationalization, still have their roots in a society that the vocabulary of the EU is unable to cover. They live in a rich linguistic tradition of stories and songs, jokes and proverbial expressions. Even if the talk of young people today is full of phrases and expressions in English, Swedish still forms the solid foundation of their speech. What Swedish will look like in another few decades, however, is of course an open question.
References

С.С. Маслова-Лашанская. Шведский язык. ч. 1. Л., Наука, 1953; О.К. Попов, Н.М. Попова. Шведский язык. М., ВШ, 1969; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х.,1953; Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М. ВШ. 1982; Beckman N., Svensk sprеklara. Stockh, 1964.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Swedish language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Swedish language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Swedish language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Swedish language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Swedish language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Swedish language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Swedish language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Swedish language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Swedish language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Swedish language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Swedish language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Swedish language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Swedish language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Swedish language?

THE FAROESE LANGUAGE

Faroese is a West Nordic or West Scandinavian language spoken by about 40,000 people in the Faroe Islands. It is one of insular Scandinavian languages (the other is Icelandic), which have their origins in the Old Norse language spoken in Scandinavia in the Viking Age. 
Until the 15th Century, Faroese had a similar orthography to Icelandic and Norwegian, but after the Reformation it outlawed its use in schools, churches and official documents, i.e. the main places where written languages survive essentially illiterate society. The Islanders continued using the language in ballads, folktale, and everyday life. This main a rich spoken tradition, but for 300 years, this was not reflected in text.
Hammershaimb's grammar was met with some opposition, for being so complicated, and a rival orthography was devised by Henrik Jakobsen. Jakobsen's grammar was closer to the spoken language, but was never taken up by the masses.
In 1937, Faroese replaced Danish as the official language of the Faroe Islands.
The national awakening in the 19th century was a popular recognition of Faroese cultural traditions and language. The respect and attention the Faroese gave to their language and other cultural traditions can therefore have been said to be their way of enduring and expressing Faroese national identity. The struggle to keep the Faroese language alive is part of Faroese se identity and nationalism as it is predominantly through language and folk ballads that we sense an ongoing nationalism in the Faroe Islands.
Like the geographical position of the Faroe Islands, the Faroese language, as we know it today, is placed somewhere between Norwegian and Icelandic. The Faroese language is a West-Norse language, which in grammatical terms is closest to the Icelandic language, whilst the dialects are closer, related to the Norwegian language.
In the 15th century, the Faroese written language was more or Less the same as the Norwegian and Icelandic written language, the Faroese language did have some unique word formations that were not found in the Norwegian nor Icelandic language though. But after the Reformation (1540) the Danish language replaced the Faroese written language in all official purposes. In the school and the church, it was forbidden to speak Faroese, but otherwise the common-man never really replaced the Faroese vernacular with Danish. In the middle of the 19th century Faroese once again became a written language, but due to the lack of national literature in the period after the Reformation a lot of different dialects had developed within the vernacular. This development made it difficult to go back to the old Faroese written language; hence, a new written language was therefore created which included aspects of all the different dialects.
During the three centuries where there was no official Faroese language, Faroese was only kept alive as a spoken language, which was mainly possible due to the long traditions of telling tales and singing folk ballads. During the long, dark and windy winter months, the few inhabitants in the different villages entertained each other by telling Legendary tales about their ancestors and other historical figures, and singing folk ballads while dancing the traditional Faroese ring-dance. All the villagers met these winter evenings, from the youngest to the oldest villager and all were eager to learn the tales and folk ballads by heart. When summer came and it was possible to travel to the other islands these tales and folk ballads were exchanged between the islanders. In this way both the younger and older generations throughout the country knew of the same tales and ballads and as these same stories and tales were continually told and sung, even after newer ones had been made, they were kept alive for centuries. A rich tradition of literature can therefore be said to have existed on the Faroe Islands even though it only existed as oral-literature. The tales and folk ballads still exist today in more or Less the same form as they did in the previewed period, because of the tradition of handing them down from generation to generation (till the more than 80.000 verses were finally written down in the 19th and 20th century). And as the theme of the tales and ballads are mostly of European tradition and the ballads composed in the 18th and 19th century about Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic heroism, they serve as historical as well as cultural treasures. Undoubtedly the most important ballad ever written in the Faroe Islands is Fuglakvreoio (The Bird Ballad), which is about Danish government officials (personified as birds of prey) suppressing the Faroese people (personified as small birds). Written in the late eighteenth century, Fuglakvreoi is one of the first patriotic ballads written on the Faroe Islands where a sense of resentment towards administrative figures is traced. 
National Romanticism in Europe eventually reached the Faroese and attention was once again given to the old folk ballads. In 1817 the Danish scholar RC. Lyngbye started to write down Faroese folk ballads and in 1822 Freroiske Qvrederom Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans jet was published.
In 1781, Liens Christian Svabo had started to collect old Faroese folk ballads, but due to ill fortune, he had to stop his work and he lived a humble life on a tiny government pension in T6rshavn. His magnificent piece of work was not fully printed until 1959 and only one of the ballads was printed in Svabo's lifetime - in 1814, in Swedish collections of folk poetry. This was the first time a Faroese text was printed. The first no~fist to write his ballads in Faroese was Jens Christian Djurhuus (1773), but these were not published until 1891. Traditionally Djurhuus' ballads were historical tales and only Learned by heart by the inhabitants. Djurhuus ballads Te to this day the most popular ballads in the Faroe Islands. This is very much due to the language of the ballads, because even though they were written by the end ofthe 18th century the language was closely related to the spoken language and still is. It was not until 1854 that the first Faroese grammar was published. The father of the written language was V.U. Hammershaimb (1819-1909) and in spite of the age differences between him and Djurhuus their relationship was close and very much based on their common interest in the Faroese language and folk ballads. This of course might be one of the reasons why the language in Djurhuus' ballads is so close to the present-day language of the Faroe Islands.
The oldest literature of most of the European nations is folk ballads and tales. According to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a German theologian/philosopher, these ballads and tales represent the most truthful and deepest feelings in people's spiritual inheritance. Herder's philosophy inspired patriotic feelings among people, and collections of folk ballads flourished especially in Scandinavia and Germany. It was very much Herder's Romanticism that inspired the Faroese to collect all the different tales and ballads into written literature.
A century after the French Revolution, we see the first actual national movement succeed in the Faroe Islands. F0foyinga felagio (The Faroese fellowship) was founded in January 1889 with the purpose to: (1) Bring the Faroese language to honor and recognition; (2) unite the Faroese people and further their competence in all things to enable them to provide for themselves. Evidently, the Faroese put much of their identity in their 1anguage, as the first lines of this praise to the 1anguage shows. This song was made in 1878 by Friorikur Petersen, and was reprinted in the only newspaper in the Faroe Islands at that time, Dimmalretting, in connection with the foundation of Foroyinga felagio.
What can touch the heartstrings? What can strengthen boys? The mother tongue - Hvat kann teg i sorgum troysta? Hvat kann tendra gleoisneista? Tao er m60urmal.
What can comfort you in your sorrows? What can light your glimmer of joy?        

References

С.Н. Кузнецов. Фарерский язык. – в ЛЭС, М., 1990, стр. 541; Арсеньева В.С., Соловьева А.В. и др. Введение в германскую филологию. М., ВШ, 1981; Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М. ВШ. 1982; Э. Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; W.B. Lockwood. An Introduction to modern Faroese. Kbh, 1964.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Faroese language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Faroese language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Faroese language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Faroese language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Faroese language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Faroese language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Faroese language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Faroese language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Faroese language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Faroese language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Faroese language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Faroese language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Faroese language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Faroese language?

THE FRISIAN LANGUAGE

Frisian (varyingly Frysk, Frasch, "Fresk", or "Friisk") is a language spoken by a small ethnic group living in the northwestern part of Europe.  In origin, the Frisian language is Germanic, the ancient Frisian community figuring prominently in North European history. They were especially noted as traders and raiders during Viking times.
Frisian language - member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It has a number of dialects and is spoken by more than 300,000 people, most of whom speak West Frisian and live in Friesland, a province of the Netherlands. North Frisian is spoken along the North Sea coast of Germany and on the Frisian Islands, and East Frisian is spoken farther inland in NW Germany. Speakers of various dialects are also found in the United States. Frisian is a subject of instruction in the schools of Friesland and also has a literature of its own. Of all foreign languages, it is most like English.
Frisian consists of several dialects, which are very often mutually unintelligible. At their most basic, there are 3 dialectal divisions, West Lauwers Frisian 'Frysk', Saterland Frisian 'Seeltersk', and North Frisian. The North Frisian language is however further segmented into several additional strongly unique speech forms.
The northern dialects include Mainland dialects, Island Dialects, and the Heligoland dialect, Heligoland or 'Halund' also an island. There is such a strong difference between the island and mainland forms of the North Frisian language that it has been speculated that the mainland and insular areas may have been originally populated by two separate waves of ancient Frisian colonizers, these migrations occurring in entirely different eras.
Frisian is distinct from East Frisian Low Saxon.
Most Frisian speakers live in the Netherlands, primarily in the province of Friesland (Fryslan in Frisian) where their number about 440,000. In Germany there are about 2,000 speakers of Frisian. 
While many of these Frisians live on the mainland, most are found on the islands, notably SyJJ, Fohr, Affiruffi and Heligo the local corresponding Frisian dialects are still in use.
Frisian is officially recognized and protected as minority language in Germany and the Netherlands.
Old Frisian was highly similar to Old English, and historically, Frisian is classified as the closest existing language to young.  This similarity was reinforced in the late Middle Ages by the Ingveonic sound shift, which affected Frisian and English, b or hardly the other West Germanic varieties.
However, such classifications, where possible, are based on studies of the earliest written forms of languages, so in the ca: Frisian and English, they do not take into account the centuries of drift of English away from Frisian norms. Thus the most languages are completely unintelligible to each other, partly due to the marks Low Franconia languages (such as Netherlands and Low Saxon/Low German have Left on Frisian.
The earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century. A few examples of runic inscript from the region are .probably older and possibly in the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually do not amo more than single- or few-word inscriptions, and cannot be said to constitute literature as such. Actual Frisian writings app few centuries later, and are generally restricted to Legalistic writings - this the Old Frisian period.
Dutch is, however, the most important language for the development of Frisian. In the course of history the two languages kept coming into contact with each other. This linguistic contact was determined by the power relationship in the Low Countries and has been a great influence the development of the present language situation in Friesland.
During the whole of the Middle Ages Friesland was monolingual and autonomous, under the Leadership of frequent landing tribal chiefs to Frisian was not only the spoken language but also the official language of government and judicial power. Old Frisian Legal documents have survived from the 13th century.
In contrast to Dutch where the Old Dutch period ends in the 12th century, in the case of Frisian we speak of Old Frisian until about 1550 the Frisian language of the 13th and 14th century shows certain features which correspond to the oldest linguistic forms of the other West Germanic languages, for example unreduced vowels in unstressed syllables. 
In the course of the 16th century Friesland lost its independence - in 1579 it became part of the Republic of the United Netherlands. The government passed into Dutch hands and standardized Dutch became the language of writing, government, school and church. Influential Hollanders settled in the Frisian towns - Frisian and Dutch came into contact with each other and what was later to be known as "Stadsfries" ["Town Frisian"] arose.
There are two explanations today for this language variant. On the one hand it is claimed that Town Frisian is the language of the Frisians who tried to adapt themselves to the new Dutch upper echelons (ie they spoke a "Hollandised Frisian"; see Boelens. 1982: 41). 
As a result of the polderisation of the "Middelzee" in the 16th century farmers from Holland province settled on the new land. Here too there was language contact - the Bildt dialect arose.
Until the 19th century Frisian developed further only as a spoken language. The language of the upper social levels (in towns) was Dutch that of the middle classes was Town Frisian, which managed to preserve its relatively high status until the 1950s. Written Frisian hardly existed in this period.
One exception was formed by the 17th century poet Gysbert Japiks who wrote his poems in Frisian. Not until the 19th century, with the rise elf romanticism, did anything arise that could be called a Frisian language consciousness - "people's poets" such as Joost Hiddes Halbertsma wrote in Frisian.
However, there was no question of Frisian having a place in government, school and church in the 19th century. In schools the teachers  advised "Friesch Boers niet te gedogen" ["not to tolerate rustic Frisian"] (De Jong/Riemersma. 1994: 15). Moreover Frisian had still not become standardized - not until 1879 did it get its first official spelling.
The 20th century brought gradual improvements for Frisian. Frisian took over more and more domains. Since 1937 Frisian could also be taught in elementary schools and since 1955 it could also be used as the medium of tuition. Sincer1980 it has been a compulsory language in elementary schools, and since 1993 also in secondary education. 
In principle Dutch is naturally still the dominant language in. Friesland, and Frisian is therefore strongly influenced by it, particularly at the Lexical Level. More and more people say, for example, sleutel ["key"] rather than kaai, apd saterdei ["Saturday"] instead of sneon.
On the other hand, the influences of Frisian on Standard Dutch are meager - the only words to have found entry into Dutch are those from sport terminology such as skotsjesilen (competitive sailing with old sailing boats) and klunen (skating overland).

References

Берков В.П. Фризский язык. – в ЛЭС, М., Наука, 1990, с. 563; Берков В.П. в кн.: Введение в германскую филологию. М., 1980; Fokkema K. Becknopte Friese spraakkunst. Groningen – Batavia, 1948, Sipma P. Phonology and Grammar of Modern Frisian. Lionwert, 1966; Hutterer C.J. Die Germanische Sprachen, Bdpst, 1975; Tiersma P.M. Frisian reference grammar. Dordrecht, 1985.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Frisian language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Frisian language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Frisian language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Frisian language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Frisian language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Frisian language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Frisian language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Frisian language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Frisian language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Frisian language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Frisian language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Frisian language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Frisian language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Frisian language?

THE DUTCH LANGUAGE

Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken worldwide by around 20 million people. The variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium is also informally called Flemish. The Dutch name for the language is Nederlands or Less formally Hollands and Dutch is sometimes called Netherlandic in English. Some speakers resent the name "Dutch", because of its deceptive similarity to Deutsch (German for 'German') and its resemblance to Diets, a term which was abused by Nazi collaborators 1940 - 1945.
The word Dutch comes from the old Germanic word theodisk, meaning 'of the people', 'vernacular' as opposed to official, IE. Latin or later French.
In the Dutch language, there exist two cognates of this word: duits (corresponding to German deutsch, i.e. modem German) and diets (Dutch).
The latter is no longer in general use, in part due to its adoption by 20th century fascists, for instance by NSB and other nationalists.
In early times, the Dutch language as such did not exist. Instead there were various Germanic dialects spoken in the region, mostly of (Low) Frankian origin.
A process of standardization started in the Middle ages, especially under the influence of the Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon (Brussels after 1477).
The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were the most influential in this time.
In 1618, in order to make the first Dutch Bible translation that people from all over the country could understand, a unified language was created. It consisted of elements from various dialects, but mostly based on the dialects from Holland. This can be taken as the starting point of Dutch as a modem language.
There was some slight confusion about the meaning of the Dutch language a few centuries ago, at Least in England.
Two examples: William Caxton (c.1422-1491) wrote in his Prologue to his Aeneids in 1490 that an old English text was more like to Dutche than English, and Professor W.F. Bolton marked this word in his note as German.
Peter Heylyn, Cosmography in four books containing the Chronography and History of the whole world, Vol. 11 (London, 1677: 154) tells, "...the Dutch call Leibniz," adding that the Dutch is spoken in the parts of Hungary adjoining to Germany.
He must have meant "Deutsch" in both cases.
Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium (Flanders), Belgium's capital Brussels, the northernmost part of France, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Suriname and amongst certain groups in Indonesia. The last four are former Dutch colonies.
Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles. The Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments coordinate their language activities in the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie).
Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (meaning 'general civilized Dutch', abbreviated to ABN) is the official Dutch language, the standard language as taught in schools and used by authorities in the Netherlands, Flanders (Belgium), Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. The Taalunie (Language Union), an association established by Dutch government and the government of Flanders, defines what is ABN and what is not, e.g. in terms of orthography and spelling.
For reasons of political correctness, the terms Algemeen Nederlands (general Dutch, abbreviated to AN) and Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) are also used; Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands could be interpreted as 'the Dutch that is spoken by civilized people', which would suggest that people speaking variants of the standard language are not civilized.
Flemish is the collective term used for the Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium. It is not a separate language, though the term is often used to distinguish the Dutch spoken in Flanders from that of the Netherlands. The standard form of Netherlandic Dutch differs somewhat from Belgium Dutch or Flemish: Flemish favours older words and has preserved the grammatical gender in most cases. It is also perceived as "softer" than Netherlandic Dutch, and some Netherlanders find it quaint. In contrast, Netherlandic Dutch is perceived as harsh and guttural to Belgians, and some Belgians perceive it as hostile.
Flemish should not be confused with West Flemish, which is a separate, although related language also spoken in parts of Flanders and in northern France. The Netherlands has different regions and within these regions other dialects can also be found. In the region "Groningen", they speak standard dutch as well as Gronings. Drents in spoken in Drenthe. Limburgs(Limburg) and Brabants (Brabant) are quite similar to the Flemish dialects. The Zeeuws of most of Zeeland is closer to Flemish dialects than to standard Dutch, and the similar Zeeuws of Zeeuws- Vlaanderen is not Dutch at all but rather a form of West Flemish. Some dialects such as Limburgs and several Low Saxon-influeced dialects are sometimes elevated to the status of streektaal (area language), and then discussed as separate languages. Some dialects are unintelligible to some speakers of Standard Dutch.
Dutch dialects aren't spoken as much as they used to do, nowadays only older people speak these dialects in the smaller villages, with the exception of the streektalen, which are actively promoted by some provinces. Most towns and cities stick to standard Dutch - although many cities have their own city dialect, which continues to prosper.
In addition to the many dialects of the Dutch language many provinces and larger cities have their own accents, which sometimes are also called dialects. Naturalized migrants also tend to have similar accents: for example many people from the Dutch Antilles or Suriname (regardless of race) speak with a thick "Surinaams" accent, and the Moroccan and Turkish youth have also developed their own accents, which in some cases are enhanced by a debased Dutch slang with Arabic or Turkish words thrown in, which serves in making their speech nearly unintelligible to the Dutch people.
Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia, is derived primarily from 16th century Dutch dialects, and a great deal of mutual intelligibility still exists.
Dutch devoices all consonants at the ends of words (e.g. a final d sound is shifted to a t sound; to become 'ents ofworts'), which presents a problem for Dutch speakers when Learning English.
The final 'n' of the plural ending -en is often not pronounced (as in Afrikaans), except in the North East and the South West where the ending becomes a syllabic n sound.
Dutch did not participate in the second (High German) sound shifting compare German machen I-x-I Dutch maken, English make.
German Pfanne [pf[, Dutch pan, English pan, German zwei its - Dutch twee, English two.
Like all other continental West Germanic languages, Dutch has a rather complicated word order that is markedly different from English, which presents a problem for Anglophones Learning Dutch. Dutch is also known for its ability to glue words together (like:
'derandjongerenhangplekkenbeleidsambtenarensalarisbesprekingsafspraken' which means 'the agreements for the salary of public servants which decide the policy for areas where unemployed youth is allowed to hang out. Though grammatically correct, it is never done to this extent; at most two or three words are glued together.)
The Dutch grammar has simplified a lot over the past 100 years: cases are now only used for the pronouns (for example: ik = I, me = me, mij = me, mijn = my, wie = who, wiens = whose, wier = whose). Nouns and adjectives are not case inflected (except for the genitive of masculine and neuter nouns: - (e) s).
Inflection of adjectives is a little more complicated: -e with 'de' or 'het', -e with 'een' or with nothing for masculine, feminine and plural. (And with the genitive: '-en' for masculine and neuter, -er for feminine and plural.) (This genitive, however, belongs to 'form language' and normally it is simulated by use of 'van de I het I een'. When that construction is used, no inflection for the nouns and -e for the adjective.)
Dutch nouns are, however, inflected for size: -(e), -(t) je for singular diminutive and -(e)(t)jes for plural diminutive.
Dutch has more French loanwords than German, but fewer than English. The number of English loanwords in Dutch is quite large, and is growing rapidly. There are also some German loanwords, like iiberhaupt and sowieso. Dutch also has a lot of Greek and Latin loanwords.
Dutch is written using the Latin alphabet, see Dutch alphabet. The dieresis is used to mark vowels that are pronounced separately, and called trema. It has nearly disappeared from Dutch spelling after the most recent spelling reform, which introduced the use of a hyphen in most cases where a trema was used: zeeeend is now spelled zee-eend. The Acute accent (Accent aigu) occurs mainly on loanwords like cafe, but can also be used for emphasis or to differentiate between two forms. Its most common use is to differentiate between the indefinite article 'een' (a, an) and the numeral feen (one). The Grave accent (Accent grave), when used for emphasis and differentiation between two forms, has been completely dropped in the recent spelling reform, so that He? must according to new spelling rules be spelled He? Other diacritical marks such as the circumflex only occur on a few words, most of them are loan words from the French language.
The most important dictionary of the modem Dutch language is the Van Dale groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taalill, more commonly referred to as the Dikke van Dale ("dik" is Dutch for "fat" or "thick"). However, it is dwarfed by the "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal", a scientific endeavour that took 147 years from initial idea to first edition, resulting in over 45,000 pages.
The official spelling is given by the Woordenlijst Nederlandse taal, more commonly known as "het groene boekje". (Lit. "the green booklet", because of its color.)

References

Миронов С.А. Нидерландский (голландский) язык. М., 1965; Миронов С.А. Становление нормы современного нидерландского языка. М., 1973; Миронов С.А. История нидерландского литературного языка (IX-XVI вв.). М., 1986; Haeringen C.B. van Netherlandic language research. 2nd edition, Leiden, 1960; Прокош. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М., Изд-во Иностр. лит-ры. 1954; В.А. Богоридицкий. Введение в изучение современных романских и германских языков. М., Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз-х., 1953.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Dutch language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Dutch language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Dutch language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Dutch language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Dutch language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Dutch language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Dutch language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Dutch language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Dutch language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Dutch language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Dutch language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Dutch language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Dutch language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Dutch language?

THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE

Yiddish {Yid. yidish,= n. & adj. "Jewish") is a nonterritorial Germanic language spoken throughout the world and written with the Hebrew alphabet. It originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in central and eastern Europe, and spread via emigration to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called loshn-ashkenaz (n. "language of the Ashkenazi") and taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for the language otherwise spoken in the region, now called Middle High German; compare the modern Deutsch). In common usage, the language is called mameloshn (n. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic which are collectively termed loshn-koydesh (n. "holy tongue"). The term Yiddish did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century, but for a significant portion of its history it was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews.
The word yidish means Jewish both as a noun and as an adjective. Anglophone members of the Ashkenazi community also use the words Yiddish and Jewish synonymously, in both senses. The two terms thus interchangeably designate not only the language, but also other attributes of Ashkenazi culture. 
The Ashkenazi culture that was taking root in 10th century Central Europe derived its name from Ashkenaz, the medieval Hebrew name for Germany (Genesis 10:3). Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities, and Ashkenaz included Northern France. It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardi, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Later, the Ashkenazi territory would spread into Eastern Europe as well.
Nothing is known about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. It is generally accepted that it was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe absorbed through dispersion. Since many settlers came via northern France, it is also likely that the Romance-based Jewish language of that region was represented. Traces of this remain in the modern Yiddish vocabulary, particularly in Western Yiddish; for example, bentshn, (to say a blessing said after dining), from the Latin benedicere, and the Western Yiddish.orn (to pray), from the Latin orare.
The first language of European Jews may also have been Aramaic, the vernacular of the Jews in Roman era Palestine, and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade.
Members of the young Ashkenazi community would have encountered the myriad dialects from which standard German was destined to emerge many centuries later. They would soon have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. These dialects would have adapted to the needs of the burgeoning Ashkenazi culture and may, as characterizes many such developments, have included the deliberate cultivation of linguistic differences to assert cultural autonomy. The Ashkenazi community also had its own geography, with a pattern of relationships among settlements that was somewhat independent of its non-Jewish neighbors. This led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects, the borders of which did not coincide with the borders of German dialects.
The further development of the Eastern Yiddish dialects involved the absorption of many words from Slavic languages.
The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book from 1272.
guttak im betage se vaer dismakhazor in beis hakneses. Terage
(may a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.)
This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded inapure1y Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German into which Hebrew words - makhazor (prayer book for the High Holy Days) and beis hakneses (synagogue) -had been included.
In the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and also macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex. This 14th century manuscript was discovered in the genisa of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.
Apart from the obvious use of Hebrew words for specifically Jewish artifacts, it is very difficult to decide how far 15th century written Yiddish differed from the German of that period. A lot depends on the interpretation of the phonetic properties of Hebrew characters, especially the vowels. There is a rough consensus that by this period, Yiddish would have sounded distinctive to the average German even when no Hebrew lexemes were used.
The advent of the printing press resulted in an increase in the amount of material produced and surviving from the 16th century and onwards. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, composed 1507-1508 and printed in at least forty editions beginning in 1541. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written Pariz un Viene (Paris and Vienna). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigaloisby Wimt von Gravenberg.
The Western Yiddish dialect began to decline in the 18th century, as The Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to the German view that Yiddish was a corrupt form of their language. Between assimilation to German and the incipient creation of Modern Hebrew, Western Yiddish only survived as a.language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". Farther east, where Jews were denied such emancipation, Yiddish was the cohesive force in a secular culture based on, and termed, yidishkayt ("Jewishness").
The late 19th century and early 20th century are widely considered the Golden Age of secular Yiddish literature. This coincides with the development of Modem Hebrew as a spoken and literary language, from which some words were also absorbed into Yiddish. The three authors generally regarded as the founders of the modern Yiddish literary genre were born in the 19th century, but their work and significance continued to grow into the 20th. The first was Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim. The second was SholemYakov Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholom Aleichem, whose stories about tevyeder milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman) inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. 
At the start of the 20th century, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was ever more widely published, Yiddish theater and Yiddish film were, booming, and it had even achieved status as one of the official languages of the Belorussia Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddishi Scientific Institute, later YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Yiddish emerged as the national language of a large Jewish community in Eastern Europe that rejected Zionisn and sought to obtain Jewish cultural autonomy in Europe. It also contended with Modern Hebrew as a literary language among Zionists.
On the eve of World War II, there were between 11 and 13 million Yiddish speakers (Jacobs2005). The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddishin their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war (including nearly all Yiddish speakers in the Americas), further. assimilation in countries such as the United States, Soviet Union and the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist ideology-led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish similar to the earlier decline in Western Yiddish. Nevertheless, the number of speakers within the widely spread Orthodox (mainly Hasidic) communities has lately been steadily on the rise. Although used in various countries, Yiddish has attained an official status of a minority language only in Moldova and Sweden.
Reports of the number of current Yiddish speakers vary significantly. Ethnologue estimates that in 2005 there were 3 million speakers of Eastern Yiddish of which over one third lived in the United States. In contrast, the Modern Language Association reports fewer than 200,000 in the United States. Western Yiddish, which had "several tens of thousands of speakers" on the eve of the Holocaust, is reported by Ethnologue to have had an "ethnic population" of slighty below 50,000 in 2000. Intermediate estimates are also given, for example, of a worldwide Yiddish speaking population of about 2 million in 1996 in a report by the Council of Europe.
There have been frequent episodes of debate about the extent of the linguistic independence of Yiddish from the languages that it absorbed. Some commentary dismisses Yiddish as a mere jargon, although precisely that term, in Yiddish, is also used as a colloquial designation for the language, but without pejorative connotation. There have been periodic assertions that it is a German dialect and, even when recognized as an autonomous language, it has sometimes been referred to as Judeo-German.
The national language of Israel is Modem Hebrew. The rejection of Yiddish as an alternative reflected the conflict between religious and secular forces. Many in the larger, secular group wanted a new national language to foster a cohesive identity, while traditionally religious Jews desired that Hebrew be respected as a holy language reserved for prayer and religious study. In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable.
This conflict also reflected the opposing views among secular Jews worldwide, one side seeing Hebrew (and Zionism) and the other Yiddish (and Internationalism) as the means of defining emerging Jewish nationalism. Finally, the large post-1948. influx of Jewish refugees from Arab countries (to whom Yiddish was entirely foreign, but who already spoke a Semitic language in daily life) effectively made Hebrew the only practical option. But even though this social factor would have anyway doomed any chance for Yiddish to prosper, state authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theatre in Israel.
Many of the older immigrants to Israel from the former USSR (usually those above 50 years of age) speak or understand some Yiddish.
In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, particularly the Hasidic Jews and the Mitnagdim of the Lithuanian yeshiva world, who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem.
There is a growing revival of interest in Yiddish culture among secular Israelis, with Yiddish theater now flourishing (usually with simultaneous translation to Hebrew and Russian) and young people are taking university courses in Yiddish, some achieving considerable fluency (albeit with an accent that would seem very strange to native speakers).
In June 1999, the Swedish Parliament enacted legislation giving Yiddish legal status as one of the country’s official minority languages (entering into effect in April 2000). The rights thereby conferred are not detailed, but additional legislation was enacted in June 2006 establishing anew governmental agency, the mandate of which instructs it to, "collect, preserve, scientifically research, and spread material about the national minority languages", naming them all explicitly, including Yiddish. When announcing this action, the government made an additional statement about "simultaneously commencing completely new initiatives for: Yiddish [and the other minority languages]".
The Swedish government publishes documents in Yiddish, of which recent ones detail the. action leading to the establishment of the new agency, the national action plan for human rights, and an earlier one provides general information about national minority language policies.
In the United States, the Yiddish language bonded Jews from many countries. Forverts (The Forward) was one of seven Yiddish daily newspapers in New York City, and other Yiddish newspapers served as a forum for Jews of all European backgrounds. The Yiddish Forward still appears weekly and is available in an online edition. It remains in wide distribution, together with der algemeyner zhurnal (Algemeiner Journal) which is also published weekly and appears online. Several additional newspapers and magazines are in regular production.
Interest in klezmer music provided another bonding mechanism. Thriving Yiddish theater in New York City and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere kept the language vital. Many “Yiddishisms”, like "Italianisms" and “Spanishisms”, continued to enter spoken New York English, often used by Jews and non-Jews alike unaware of the linguistic origin of the phrases. However, mother-tongue Yiddish speakers tended not to pass the language on to their children, who assimilated and spoke English.
In 1978, the Polish-born Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, a resident of the United States, received the Nobel Prize in literature.
According to the 2000 census, almost 180,000 people in the United States speak Yiddish at home. Nearly three-quarters of these live in New York State or Florida.
Most of the Jewish immigrants to the New York metropolitan area during the years of the Golden Door and Ellis Island considered Yiddish to be their native language. For example, Isaac Asimov states in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, that Yiddish was his first and sole spoken language and remained so for about two years after he emigrated to the United States as a small child. By contrast, Asimov's younger siblings, born in the United States, never developed any degree of fluency in Yiddish.
The major exception to the decline of spoken Yiddish can be found in Haredi communities allover the world. In some of the more closely-knit such communities Yiddish is spoken as a home and schooling language, especially in Hasidic communities such as Brooklyn's Borough Park, Williamsburg and Crown Heights, and in Monsey, Kiryas Joel, and New Square.
Yiddish is also widely spoken in smaller Haredi communities in such the ones as London, Antwerp and Montreal. Among most Haredim, Hebrew is generally reserved for prayer and religious studies, while Yiddish is reserved as a home and business language. In Israel, however, Haredim commonly speak Modern Hebrew, with the notable exception of many Hasidic communities. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Hare dim who use Modern Hebrew also understand Yiddish. Members of movements such as Satmar Hasidism, which views the commonplace use of Hebrew as a form of Zionism, use Yiddish almost exclusively.
Hundreds of thousands of young children have been, and are still, taught to translate the texts of the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy into Yiddish. This process is called "translating". Most Ashkenazi yeshivas highest level lectures in Talmud and Halakha are delivered in Yiddish by the Rosh yeshivas as well as ethical talks of mussar. Hasidic rebbes generally use only Yiddish to converse with their followers and to deliver their various Torah talks, classes, and lectures. The linguistic style and vocabulary of Yiddish have influenced the manner in which many Orthodox Jews who attend yeshivas speak English. This usage is distinctive enough that if has been dubbed "Yeshivish".
While Hebrew remains the language of Jewish prayer, the Hasidim have mixed considerable Yiddish into their Hebrew, and are also responsible for a significant secondary religious literature written in Yiddish. For example, the tales about the Baal Shem Tov were written largely in Yiddish.
Yiddish has two main branches: Western and Eastern. References to the language without either qualifier are normally taken to apply to Eastern Yiddish, which is the one almost exclusively encountered in present-day speech. This includes three major dialects: Northeastern or Litvish (spoken in the Baltic region, Belarus, and adjacent areas), Mideastern or Poylish (spoken in Poland and other areas of Central Europe), and Southeastern or Ukrainish (spoken in Ukraine and the Balkans). Western Yiddish also included three dialects: Northwestern (spoken in Northern Germany and the Netherlands), Midwestern (spoken in central Germany), and Southwestern (spoken in southern Germany and neighboring regions). These have a number of clearly distinguished regional varieties, plus many local subvarieties.
Some authors use the term Southeastern Yiddish as a collective designation for both Poylish and Ukrainish while still applying the term Northeastern Yiddish to Litvish. The single most populous dialect is Poylish, which together with Ukrainish is used by as many as three quarters of all Yiddish speakers.
As with many other languages with strong literary traditions, there was a more or less constant tendency toward the development of a neutral written form acceptable to the speakers of all dialects. In the early twentieth century, for both cultural and political reasons, particular energy was focused on developing a modem Standard Yiddish. This contained elements from all three Eastern dialects but its phonetic attributes were predominantly based on Northeastern pronunciation. A separate article describes the resulting modem Standard Yiddish phonology, without separate detail about the phonetic variation among the three contributing dialects or the further distinctions among the myriad local varieties that they subsume.	
"There is no standard pronunciation in Yiddish. However, the members and friends of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York, have strong views on the subject. They are convinced that Yiddish should not differ in this respect from the great Western languages, and so they are willing to introduce a standard one. In their publications they speak as if it were already in existence, but this is wishful thinking - acceptance of their system being restricted to their circle. The original proponents of this “standard” were speakers of the Northern dialect and so, without further ado and without discussing the matter or giving any reasons, they decided that their own pronunciation was the 'standard'. However, the man in the street knows nothing about it. If he happens to be a Southerner he does not exchange his rich phonemic system for the meagre one of the Northern dialect. He does not even know that this is 'supposed to be' the 'standard'. And if he is a Northerner, he goes on speaking as before, without realizing that he would need to change only one of his vowels in order to qualify as a speaker of the 'standard'. It is ironic that the partisans of the 'standard' - all convinced democrats - should ask the majority of Yiddish-speakers to switch over from their own pronunciation to that of a minority, comprising only a quarter of all Yiddish speakers."
Recent criticism of modern Standard Yiddish is expressed by Michael Wexin several passages in Wex 2005. Regardless of any nuance that can be applied to the consideration of these arguments, it may be noted that modern Standard Yiddish is not used by mother-tongue speakers and is not evoked by the vast bulk of Yiddish literature. It has, however, become the norm in present-day tuition of Yiddish as a foreign language and is therefore firmly established in any discourse about the development of that language.
Between 1992 and 2000, the Institute for Jewish Research published a three-volume Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, commonly referred to as the LCAAJ. This provides a detailed description of the phonetic elements of what is presented as an Eastern-Western dialect continuum, and mapping their geographic distribution.
The Yiddish language is written using Hebrew script as the basis of a full vocalic alphabet. Some letters that are consonants in the Hebrew language are used in Yiddish to indicate vowels. Other letters that can serve as either vowels or consonants are differentiated by combining diacritical marks with the base character. Additional phonetic distinctions between letters that share the same base character are also indicated by diacritics, or by the adjacent placement of otherwise silent base characters. The Yiddish Combining marks, commonly referred to as "points", are derived from the Hebrew nikud. Several Yiddish points are, however, not commonly used in any present-day Hebrew context and others are used in a manner that is specific to Yiddish orthography. There is significant variation in the way this is applied in literary practice. There are also several differing approaches to the disambiguation of characters that can be used as either vowels or consonants.
Words of Aramaic and Hebrew origin are normally written in the traditional orthographies of the source languages. All other Yiddish vocabulary is represented with a phonetic orthography. Both can appear in a single word, for example, where a Yiddish affix is applied to a Hebrew stem. Yiddish pointing may also be applied to words that are otherwise written entirely with traditional orthography.
In the early twentieth century, for both cultural and political reasons, focused efforts were made at developing a uniform Yiddish orthography. A specimen initial practice is described in detail by the Yiddish lexicographer Alexander Harkavy in a Treatise on Yiddish Reading, Orthograph and Dialectal Variations first published in 1898 together with his Yiddish-English Dictionary (Harkavy 1898), and available online (beginning with the section headed Yiddish reading). Additional illustrations of this variation are provided in source excerpts in Fishman, 1981, which also contains a number of texts specifically about the need (pro and con) for a uniform orthography.
The first action formally undertaken by a government was in the Soviet Union in 1920, with the abolition of the separate etymological orthography for words of Semitic origin. This was extended twelve years later with the elimination of the five separate final-form consonants (as indicated in the table below) which were, however, reintroduced in 1961. The efforts preliminary to the 1920 reform, which took place in several countries - most notably in Poland with focus on a uniform school curriculum - resulted in other devices that were not implemented by governmental mandate.
Individual Yiddish letters and letter combinations may be pronounced quite differently in the various Yiddish dialects. Whatever impact this may have on the discussion of standardized orthography, it becomes a significant factor when Yiddish is transliterated into other scripts. It is entirely possible to assign a specific character or sequence of characters in, for example, the Roman alphabet to a specific character or character sequence in the Yiddish, alphabet. This is a fundamental consideration in the preparation of multilingual dictionaries and any such work will either explicitly or implicitly be associated with a single consistent transliteration system. The transliterated form of an individual word will, however, be pronounced in a manner that appears natural in the target language. A choice therefore needs to be made about which of the several possible pronunciations of the Yiddish word is to be conveyed prior to its transliteration.
The Harkavy treatise cited above describes a system of romanization that is based on the pronunciation of the Northeastern Yiddish dialect, Litvish. This was also a mainstay of the standardization efforts of YIVO, resulting in the romanization system described in detail below. These two initiatives provide a convenient framework within which the intervening developments may be considered. There was significant debate about many aspects of that sequence, including contention about the need for any form of standardized orthography at all.
There was also consideration of the outright replacement of Hebrew script with Roman script in the native representation of written Yiddish. Romanization can therefore not be seen exclusively in a lexicographical perspective. A number of Yiddish books are currently available in Romanized editions, including Yiddish dictionaries.
There is no general agreement about the transliteration of Hebrew into the Roman alphabet. The Hebrew component of a Yiddish text will normally reflect the transliterator's preference without being seen as a component of the methodology applied to the romanization of words presented in the phonetic orthography.

References 

И.Ш. Шифман. Идиш. в кн. Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь. М, 1990, стр. 171; Фалькович Э.М. Еврейский язык (идиш), в кн.: «Языки народов СССР» т. 1, М., 1966; В.М. Жирмунский. Немецкая диалектология. м-л, 1956; Арсеньева В.С., Соловьева А.В., Берков В.П.  др. Введение в германскую филологию. М., ВШ, 1980.

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke Yiddish language?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the Yiddish language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the Yiddish language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the Yiddish language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the Yiddish language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in Yiddish language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the Yiddish language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the Yiddish language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the Yiddish language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the Yiddish language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the Yiddish language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the Yiddish language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the Yiddish language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the Yiddish language?

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Northern Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old French and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.
The Germanic tribes who gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes and perhaps even the Franks), traded with and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in the process of the Germanic invasion of Europe from the East. Many Latin words for common objects therefore entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people even before any of these tribes reached Britain; examples include camp, cheese, cook, fork, inch, kettle, kitchen, linen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pin, pound, punt (boat), street, and wall. The Romans also gave English words which they had themselves borrowed from other languages: anchor, butter, chest, devil, dish, sack and wine.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the Britons, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles led by Hengest and Horsa) to help him in conflicts with the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast of England. Further aid was sought and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles and Jutes). The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated and the identification of the tribes with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes is no longer accepted as an accurate description, especially since the Anglo-Saxon language is more similar to the Frisian languages than any single one of the others.
The invaders' Germanic language displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages of what became England. The Celtic languages remained in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. The dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxons formed what is now called Old English. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who invaded and settled mainly in the northeast of England (see Jуrvнk and Danelaw). The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distinct, including the prefix, suffix and inflection patterns for many of their words. The Germanic language of these Old English speaking inhabitants of Britain was influenced by contact with Norse invaders, which might have been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of Old English, including loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case (with the notable exception of the pronouns). The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is a fragment of the epic poem "Beowulf", by an unknown poet, though substantially modified, likely by one or more Christian clerics long after its composition.
The period when England was ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings, with the assistance of Anglo-Saxon clergy, was a period when the Old English language was alive and growing. Since it was used for legal, political, religious and other intellectual purposes, Old English coined new words from native Anglo-Saxon roots, rather than "borrowing" foreign words.
The introduction of Christianity added another wave of Latin and some Greek words.
The Old English period formally ended with the Norman conquest, when the language was influenced, to an even greater extent, by the Norman French-speaking Normans.
The use of Anglo-Saxon to describe a merging of Anglian and Saxon languages and cultures is a relatively modern development. The first citation for the second definition of 'Anglo-Saxon', referring to early English language or a certain dialect thereof, comes during the reign of Elizabeth I, from a historian named Camden, who seems to be the person most responsible for the term becoming well-known in modern times.
For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their high nobility spoke only a variety of French called Anglo-Norman. English continued to be the language of the common people. Various contemporary sources suggest that within fifty years of the invasion most of the Normans outside the royal court had switched to English, with French remaining the prestige language of government and law largely out of social inertia. For example, Orderic Vitalis, a historian born in 1075 and the son of a Norman knight, said that he learned French only as a second language. A tendency for French-derived words to have more formal connotations has continued to the present day; most modern English speakers would consider a "cordial reception" (from French) to be more formal than a "hearty welcome" (Germanic). Another homely example is that of the names for meats, such as beef and pork from French boeuf and porc. The animals from which the meats come are called by Anglo Saxon words, such as cow and pig. This might be because Anglo-Saxon peasants raised the animals; Norman-French lords ate the meat.
While the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued until 1154, most other literature from this period was in Old French or Latin. A large number of Norman words were taken into Old English, with many doubling for Old English words (examples include, ox/beef, sheep/mutton and so on). The Norman influence reinforced the continued changes in the language over the following centuries, producing what is now referred to as Middle English. Among the changes was an increase in the use of a unique aspect of English grammar, the "continuous" tenses, with the suffix "-ing". English spelling was also influenced by French in this period, with the /и/ and /р/ sounds being spelled th rather than with the Old English letters ю (thorn) and р (eth), which did not exist in French. The most famous writer from the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer and of his works, The Canterbury Tales is the best known.
English literature started to reappear ca 1200, when a changing political climate and the decline in Anglo-Norman made it more respectable. By the end of that century, even the royal court had switched to English. Anglo-Norman remained in use in limited circles somewhat longer, but it had ceased to be a living language.
Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. English was further transformed by the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration and by the standardising effect of printing. By the time of William Shakespeare (mid-late 16th century) the language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English.
English has continuously adopted foreign words, especially from Latin and Greek, since the Renaissance. (In the 17th century, Latin words were often used with the original inflections, but these eventually disappeared.) As there are many words from different languages and English spelling is variable, the risk of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain in a few regional dialects, most notably in the West Country.
In 1755 Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary, his Dictionary of the English Language.
Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon,[1] Englisc by its speakers) is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and southern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents only the literary register of Anglo-Saxon. It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.
Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years (see Timeline of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and takeover of Britain) – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the fifth century to some time after the Norman invasion of 1066, when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who were occupying and controlling large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.
The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar which it shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features were specific to the West Germanic language family to which Old English belongs, while some other features were inherited from the Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have been derived.
Like other West Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, though the instrumental was very rare), which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sзo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mфna (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne vs. der Mond).
A large percentage of the educated and literate population (monks, clerics, etc.) were competent in Latin, which was the scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of Europe at the time. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral Saxons left continental Europe for Britain. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread. The third and largest single transfer of Latin-based words happened after the Norman invasion of 1066, after which an enormous number of Norman words entered the language. Most of these words were themselves derived from Old French and ultimately from classical Latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced, or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English.
One of the ways the influence of Latin can be seen is that many Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from Anglo-Saxon but using Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service.
The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futharc or fuюarc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced; the "silent" letters in many Modern English words, such as the k in knight, were in fact pronounced in Old English. For example, the c in cniht, the Old English equivalent of knight, was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect, and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author, and even from work to work by the same author. Thus, for example, the word and could be spelt either and or ond.
Old English spelling can therefore be regarded as even more jumbled than modern English spelling, although it can at least claim to reflect some existing pronunciation, while modern English in many cases cannot. Most present-day students of Old English learn the language using normalised versions and are only introduced to variant spellings after they have mastered the basics of the language.
The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, and the modern pronoun they, among hundreds of other words.
Traditionally, many maintain that the influence of Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian.
However, distinctive Celtic traits have been argued to be clearly discernible from the post-Old English period in the area of syntax. 
To complicate matters further, Old English had many dialects. The four main dialect forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian (known collectively as Anglian), Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of these dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were successfully defended were then integrated into Wessex.
After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing; regional dialects continued even after that time to this day, as evidenced both by the existence of middle and modern English dialects later on, and by common sense – people do not spontaneously develop new accents when there is a sudden change of political power.
However, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the more remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, paperwork was written in the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular and brought many scribes to his region from Mercia in order that previously unwritten texts be recorded.
The Church was affected likewise, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into English. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration, "Pastoral Care".
Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.
Phonology
The inventory of Old English surface phones, as usually reconstructed, is as follows.
The sounds marked in parentheses in the chart above are allophones:
•	[dʒ] is an allophone of /j/ occurring after /n/ and when geminated
•	[ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ occurring before /k/ and /g/
•	[v, р, z] are allophones of /f, и, s/ respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants
•	[з, x] are allophones of /h/ occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively
•	[ɣ] is an allophone of /g/ occurring after a vowel, and, at an earlier stage of the language, in the syllable onset.
The front mid rounded vowels /ш(ː)/ occur in some dialects of Old English, but not in the best attested Late West Saxon dialect.
Morphology
Unlike modern English, Old English is a language rich with morphological diversity and is spelled essentially as it is pronounced. It maintains several distinct cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and (vestigially) instrumental, remnants of which survive only in a few pronouns in modern English.
The word order of Old English is widely believed to be SVO as in modern English and most Germanic languages (not including German and Dutch). The word order of Old English, however, was not overly important due to the aforementioned morphology of the language. So long as declension was correct, it didn't matter whether you said "My name is..." as "Mоn nama is..." or "Nama mоn is..."
Due to its similarity with Old Norse, it is believed that the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from SVO to VSO; i.e. swapping the verb and the subject.
"You are..." becomes "Are you...?"
"Юы bist..." becomes "Bist юы...?"
The runic alphabet used to write Old English before the introduction of the Latin alphabet.
Old English was at first written in runes (futhorc), but shifted to the Latin alphabet, with some additions, after the Anglo-Saxons' conversion to Christianity. The letter yogh, for example, was adopted from Irish; the letter eth was an alteration of Latin d, and the runic letters thorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and, a character similar to the number seven (⁊, called a Tironian note), and a symbol for the relative pronoun южt, a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (''). Also used occasionally were macrons over vowels, abbreviations for following m’s or n’s. All of the sound descriptions below are given using IPA symbols.

The alphabet
•	a: /ɑ/ (spelling variations like land/lond "land" suggest it may have had a rounded allophone [ɒ] before [n] in some cases)
•	в: /ɑː/
•	ж: /ж/
•	ǣ: /ж:/
•	b: /b/
•	c (except in the digraphs sc and cg): either /tʃ/ or /k/. The /tʃ/ pronunciation is sometimes written with a diacritic by modern editors: most commonly ċ, sometimes и or з. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always /k/; word-finally after i it is always /tʃ/. Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See The distribution of velars and palatals in Old English for details.)
•	cg: [ddʒ] (the surface pronunciation of geminate /jj/); occasionally also for /gg/
•	d: /d/
•	e: /e/
•	з: /e/
•	ea: /жɑ/; after ċ and ġ, sometimes /ж/ or /ɑ/
•	зa: /жɑ/; after ċ and ġ, sometimes /ж/
•	eo: /eo/; after ċ and ġ, sometimes /o/
•	зo: /eo/
•	f: /f/ and its allophone [v]
•	g: /g/ and its allophone [ɣ]; /j/ and its allophone [dʒ] (when after n). The /j/ and [dʒ] pronunciations are sometimes written ġ or ȝ by modern editors. Before a consonant letter the pronunciation is always [g] (word-initially) or [ɣ] (after a vowel). Word-finally after i it is always /j/. Otherwise a knowledge of the historical linguistics of the word in question is needed to predict which pronunciation is needed. (See The distribution of velars and palatals in Old English for details.)
•	h: /h/ and its allophones [з, x]. In the combinations hl, hr, hn and hw, the second consonant was certainly voiceless.
•	i: /i/
•	о: /i/
•	ie: /iy/; after ċ and ġ, sometimes /e/
•	оe: /i:y/; after ċ and ġ, sometimes /e/
•	k: /k/ (rarely used)
•	l: /l/; probably velarised (as in Modern English) when in coda position.
•	m: /m/
•	n: /n/ and its allophone [ŋ]
•	o: /o/
•	ф: /o/
•	oe: /ш/ (in dialects with this sound)
•	фe: /ш/ (in dialects with this sound)
•	p: /p/
•	q: /k/ – Used before u representing the consonant /w/, but rarely used, being rather a feature of Middle English. Old English preferred cƿ or in modern print cw.
•	r: /r/; the exact nature of r is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant [ɹ], as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar flap [ɾ], or an alveolar trill [r].
•	s: /s/ and its allophone [z]
•	sc: /ʃ/ or occasionally /sk/
•	t: /t/
•	р/ю: /и/ and its allophone [р]. Both symbols were used more or less interchangeably (to the extent that if there was a rule, it was to avoid using р word-initially, but this was by no means universally followed). Many modern editions preserve the use of these two symbols as found in the original manuscripts, but some attempt to regularise them in some fashion, for example using only the ю. See also Pronunciation of English th.
•	u: /u/
•	ы: /u/
•	ƿ (wynn): /w/, replaced in modern print by w to prevent confusion with p.
•	x: /ks/ (but according to some authors, [xs ~ зs])
•	y: /y/
•	ȳ: /y/
•	z: /ts/. Rarely used as ts was usually used instead, for example bezt vs betst "best", pronounced /betst/.
Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives рр/юю, ff and ss cannot be voiced.
Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent before AD 1000, is nonetheless scanty. In his supplementary article to the 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, Dr. James Hulbert writes:
In such historical conditions, an incalculable amount of the writings of the Anglo-Saxon period perished. What they contained, how important they were for an understanding of literature before the Conquest, we have no means of knowing: the scant catalogs of monastic libraries do not help us, and there are no references in extant works to other compositions....How incomplete our materials are can be illustrated by the well-known fact that, with few and relatively unimportant exceptions, all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in four manuscripts.
Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down. Some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are Beowulf, an epic poem; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of early English history; and Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered to be the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Caedmon.
Old English is often erroneously used to refer to any form of English other than Modern English. The term Old English does not refer to varieties of Early Modern English such as are found in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, nor does it refer to Middle English, the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries. The following timeline helps place the history of the English language in context. The dates used are approximate dates. It is inaccurate to state that everyone stopped speaking Old English in 1099, and woke up on New Year's Day of 1100 speaking Middle English. Language change is gradual, and cannot be as easily demarcated as are historical or political events.
450–1100 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) – The language of Beowulf.
1100–1500 Middle English – The language of Chaucer.
1500–1650 Early Modern English (or Renaissance English) – The language of Shakespeare.
1650–present Modern English (or Present-Day English) – The language as spoken today.
The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin, modern German or Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases; and for strongly declined adjectives and some pronouns also a separate instrumental case (which otherwise and later completely coincided with the dative). Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when accusative and dative pronouns merged into a single objective pronoun. Nouns in Modern English no longer decline for case, except in a sense for possessive, and for remnants of the former system in a few pronouns.
"Who" and "whom", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", etc. are remnants of both the old nominative versus accusative and also of nominative versus dative. In other words, "her" (for example) serves as both the dative and accusative version of the nominative pronoun "she". In Old English as well as modern German and Icelandic as further examples, these cases had distinct pronouns.
This collapse of the separate case pronouns into the same word is one of the reasons grammarians consider the dative and accusative cases to be extinct in English — neither is an ideal term for the role played by "whom". Instead, the term objective is often used; that is, "whom" is a generic objective pronoun which can describe either a direct or an indirect object. The nominative case, "who", is called simply the subjective. The information formerly conveyed by having distinct case forms is now mostly provided by prepositions and word order.
Modern English morphologically distinguishes only one case, the possessive case — which some linguists argue is not a case at all, but a clitic (see the entry for genitive case for more information). With only a few pronominal exceptions, the objective and subjective always have the same form.
The morphology of the Old English language is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected. It more closely resembles modern German, which has over the centuries been more conservative than English.
Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or weak verbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the addition of an ending.
Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English, for example sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and choose, chose, chosen. The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old English, there were seven major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes. Learning these is often a challenge for students of the language, though English speakers may see connections between the old verb classes and their modern forms.
The classes had the following distinguishing features to their infinitive stems:
1. о + 1 consonant.
2. зo or ы + 1 consonant.
3. Originally e + 2 consonants (This was no longer the case by the time of written Old English).
4. e + 1 consonant (usually l or r, plus the verb brecan 'to break').
5. e + 1 consonant (usually a stop or a fricative).
6. a + 1 consonant.
7. No specific rule — first and second have identical stems (з or зo), and the infinitive and the past participle also have the same stem.
The first preterite stem is used in the preterite tense, for the first and third persons singular. The second preterite stem is used for second person singular, and all persons in the plural (as well as the preterite subjunctive). Strong verbs also exhibit i-mutation of the stem in the second and third persons singular in the present tense.
The third class went through so many sound changes that it was barely recognisable as a single class. The first was a process called 'breaking'. Before <h>, and <r> + another consonant, <ж> turned into <ea>, and <e> to <eo>. Also, before <l> + another consonant, the same happened to <ж>, but <e> remained unchanged (except before combination <lh>).
The second sound-change to affect it was the influence of palatal sounds <g>, <c>, and <sc>. These turned anteceding <e> and <ж> to <ie> and <ea>, respectively.
The third sound change turned <e> to <i>, <ж> to <a>, and <o> to <u> before nasals.
Altogether, this split the third class into five sub-classes:
a.	e + two consonants (apart from clusters beginning with l).
b.	eo + r or h + another consonant.
c.	e + l + another consonant.
d.	g, c, or sc + ie + two consonants.
e.	i + nasal + another consonant.
Regular strong verbs were all conjugated roughly the same, with the main differences being in the stem vowel. Thus stelan 'to steal' represents the strong verb conjugation paradigm.
Weak verbs are formed by adding alveolar (t or d) endings to the stem for the past and past-participle tenses. Some examples are love, loved or look, looked.
Originally, the weak ending was used to form the preterite of informal, noun-derived verbs such as often emerge in conversation and which have no established system of stem-change. By nature, these verbs were almost always transitive, and even today, most weak verbs are transitive verbs formed in the same way. However, as English came into contact with non-Germanic languages, it invariably borrowed useful verbs which lacked established stem-change patterns. Rather than invent and standardize new classes or learn foreign conjugations, English speakers simply applied the weak ending to the foreign bases.
The linguistic trends of borrowing foreign verbs and verbalizing nouns have greatly increased the number of weak verbs over the last 1200 years. Some verbs that were originally strong (for example help, holp, holpen) have become weak by analogy; most foreign verbs are adopted as weak verbs; and when verbs are made from nouns (for example "to scroll" or "to water") the resulting verb is weak. Additionally, conjugation of weak verbs is easier to teach, since there are fewer classes of variation. In combination, these factors have drastically increased the number of weak verbs, so that in modern English weak verbs are the most numerous and productive form (although occasionally a weak verb may turn into a strong verb through the process of analogy, such as sneak (originally only a noun), where snuck is an analogical formation rather than survivals from Old English).
There are three major classes of weak verbs in Old English. The first class displays i-mutation in the root, and the second class none. There is also a third class explained below.
Class-one verbs with short roots exhibit gemination of the final stem consonant in certain forms. With verbs in <r> this appears as <ri> or <rg>, where <i> and <g> are pronounced [j]. Geminated <f> appears as <bb>, and that of <g> appears as <cg>. Class one verbs may receive an epenthetic vowel before endings beginning in a consonant.
Where class-one verbs have gemination, class-two verbs have <i> or <ig>, which is a separate syllable pronounced [i]. All class-two verbs have an epenthetic vowel, which appears as <a> or <o>.
In the following table, three verbs are conjugated. Swebban 'to put to sleep' is a class one verb exhibiting gemination and an epenthetic vowel. Hǣlan 'to heal' is a class-one verb exhibiting neither gemination nor an epenthetic vowel. Sорian 'to journey' is a class-two verb.
During the Old English period the third class was significantly reduced; only four verbs belonged to this group: habban 'have', libban 'live', secgan 'say', and hycgan 'think'. Each of these verbs is distinctly irregular, though they share some commonalities.
The preterite-present verbs are a class of verbs which have a present tense in the form of a strong preterite and a past tense like the past of a weak verb. These verbs derive from the subjunctive or optative use of preterite forms to refer to present or future time. For example, witan, "to know" comes from a verb which originally meant "to have seen" (cf. OE wise "manner, mode, appearance"; Latin videre "to see" from the same root). The present singular is formed from the original singular preterite stem and the present plural from the original plural preterite stem. As a result of this history, the first-person singular and third-person singular are the same in the present.
Few preterite present appear in the Old English corpus, and some are not attested in all forms.
Additionally there is a further group of four verbs which are anomalous, the verbs "will", "do", "go" and "be". These four have their own conjugation schemes which differ significantly from all the other classes of verb. This is not especially unusual: "will", "do", "go", and "be" are the most commonly used verbs in the language, and are very important to the meaning of the sentences they are used in. Idiosyncratic patterns of inflection are much more common with important items of vocabulary than with rarely-used ones.
Dфn 'to do', gвn 'to go', and willan 'will' are conjugated alike:
The present forms of wesan are almost never used. The bзon forms are usually used in reference to future actions. The modern verb 'to be' takes its present indicative forms from sindon, its past indicative forms from wesan, its present subjunctive forms from bзon, its past subjunctive forms from wesan, and its imperative and particicple forms from bзon.
Old English nouns were declined – that is, the ending of the noun changed to reflect its function in the sentence. There were five major cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental.
•	The nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence, for example se cyning means 'the king'. It was also used for direct address. Adjectives in the predicate (qualifying a noun on the other side of 'to be') were also in the nominative.
•	The accusative indicated the direct object of the sentence, for example Жюelbald lufode юone cyning means "Жюelbald loved the king", where Жюelbald is the subject and the king is the object. Already the accusative had begun to merge with the nominative; it was never distinguished in the plural, or in a neuter noun.
•	The genitive case indicated possession, for example the южs cyninges scip is "the ship of the king" or "the king's ship". It also indicated partitive nouns.
•	The dative case indicated the indirect object of the sentence, for example hringas южm cyninge means "rings for the king" or "rings to the king". There were also several verbs which took direct objects in the dative.
•	The instrumental case indicated an instrument used to achieve something, for example lifde sweorde, "he lived by the sword", where sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord. During the Old English period, the instrumental was falling out of use, having largely merged with the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retained separate forms for the instrumental.
There were different endings depending on whether the noun was in the singular (for example, hring 'one ring') or plural (for example, hringas 'many rings').
Nouns are also categorised by grammatical gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. Masculine and neuter words generally share their endings. Feminine words have their own subset of endings. The plural does not distinguish between genders.
Furthermore, Old English nouns are divided as either strong or weak. Weak nouns have their own endings. In general, weak nouns are easier than strong nouns, since they had begun to lose their declensional system. However, there is a great deal of overlap between the various classes of noun: they are not totally distinct from one another.
Here are the strong declensional endings and examples for each gender:
For the '-u/–' forms above, the '-u' is used with a root consisting of a single short syllable or ending in a long syllable followed by a short syllable, while roots ending in long a syllable or two short syllables are not inflected. (A long syllable contains a long vowel or is followed by two consonants. Note also that there are some exceptions; for example, feminine nouns ending in -юu such as strengюu 'strength'.)
Note the syncopation of the second e in engel when an ending follows. This syncopation of the vowel in the second syllable occurs with two-syllable strong nouns which have a long vowel in the first syllable and a second syllable consisting of a short vowel and single consonant (for example, engel, wuldor 'glory', and hзafod 'head'). However, this syncopation is not always present, so forms such as engelas may be seen.
In addition, masculine and neuter nouns whose main vowel is short 'ж' and end with a single consonant change the vowel to 'a' in the plural.
Some masculine and neuter nouns end in -e in their base form. These drop the -e and add normal endings. Note that neuter nouns in -e always have -u in the plural, even with a long vowel.
Nouns ending in -h lose this when an ending is added, and lengthen the vowel in compensation (this can result in compression of the ending as well).
Nouns whose stem ends in -w change this to -u or drop it in the nominative singular. (Note that this '-u/–' distinction depends on syllable weight, as for strong nouns, above.).
A few nouns follow the -u declension, with an entirely different set of endings. The following examples are both masculine, although feminines also exist, with the same endings (for example duru 'door' and hand 'hand'). Note that the '-u/–' distinction in the singular depends on syllable weight, as for strong nouns, above.
There are also some nouns of the consonant declension, which show i-umlaut in some forms.
Other such nouns include (with singular and plural nominative forms given):
Masculine: tфю, tзю 'tooth'; mann, menn 'man'; frзond, frоend 'friend'; fзond, fоend 'enemy' (cf. 'fiend')
Feminine: studu, styde 'post' (cf. 'stud'); hnitu, hnite 'nit'; вc, ǣc 'oak'; gвt, gǣt 'goat'; brфc, brзc 'leg covering' (cf. 'breeches'); gфs, gзs 'goose'; burg, byrg 'city' (cf. German cities in -burg); dung, ding 'prison' (cf. 'dungeon' by way of French and Frankish); turf, tyrf 'turf'; grыt, grȳt 'meal' (cf. 'grout'); lыs, lȳs 'louse'; mыs, mȳs 'mouse'; neaht, niht 'night' Feminine with loss of -h in some forms: furh, fyrh 'furrow' or 'fir'; sulh, sylh 'plough'; юrыh, юrȳh 'trough'; wlфh, wlзh 'fringe'. Feminine with compression of endings: cы, cȳ 'cow' (cf. dialectal plural 'kine')
Other such nouns: cealf, cealfru 'calf'; ǣg, ǣru 'egg' (the form 'egg' is a borrowing from Old Norse); cild 'child' has either the normal plural cild or cildru (cf. 'children', with -en from the weak nouns).
Adjectives in Old English are declined using the same categories as nouns: five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and two numbers (singular, plural). In addition, they can be declined either strong or weak. The weak forms are used in the presence of a definite or possessive determiner, while the strong ones are used in other situations. The weak forms are identical to those for nouns, while the strong forms use a combination of noun and pronoun endings:
For the '-u/–' forms above, the distinction is the same as for strong nouns.
Old English had two main determiners: se, which could function as both 'the' or 'that', and юes for 'this'.
Modern English 'that' descends from the neuter nominative/accusative form, and 'the' from the masculine nominative form, with 's' replaced analogously by the 'th' of the other forms. The feminine nominative form was probably the source of Modern English 'she.'
Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, for example "we two" or "you two" or "they two"). These were uncommon even then, but remained in use throughout the period.
Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case зower became "your", ыre became "our", mоn became "mine".
Prepositions (like Modern English words by, for, and with) often follow the word which they govern, in which case they are called postpositions. Also, for that the object of a preposition was marked in the dative case, a preposition may concievably be located anywhere in the sentence, even appended to the verb. e.g. "Scyld Scefing sceathena threatum meodo setla of teoh" means "Scyld took mead settles of (from) enemy threats." The infinitive is not declined.

References

А.И. Смирницкий. Древнеанглийский язык. М., Изд-во иностр. литер. 1958;В.Н. Ярцева. Исторический синтаксис английского языка. М.-Л., Наука, 1961; В.Н. Ярцева. Историческая морфология английского языка. М-Л., Наука, 1960; Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка. М., ВШ, 1975; Швейцер А.Д. Литературный английский язык в США и Англии. М, Наука, 1971; Расторгуева Т.А. История английского языка. М., ВШ, 2006; Аракин А.Д. Очерки истории английского языка. М., ВШ, 1982; O. Jespersen. Growth and structure of the English language. Oxford, OUP, 1967; R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, S. Leech, I. Svartvick. “A Grammar of Contemporary English”. Oxford, 2004. 

Questions and tasks for discussion

1. What can you say about the prehistory of the tribes or peoples who spoke English?
2. Describe the borders of the linguistic space where the English language was used?
3. What are the main features of the phonetic structure of the English language? 
4. What are the essential features of the grammatical structure of the English language?
5. What main events in the social history of the peoples speaking the English language can you name?
6. What can you say about the earliest written records in English language?
7. How are the linguistic data belonging to the earliest stages of the English language reconstructured?
8. What phonetic laws can you illustrate from the linguistic facts of the English language?
9. What can you say about the chronological limits of the periods in the history of the English language?
10. What can you say about the features of the periods in the history of the English language?
11. What are the main principles of the periodisation of the history of the English language?  
12. Name the authors whose works made a great contribution to the development of the literary norm of the English language? 
13. Give instances illustrating the processes of integration and differentiation in the development of the English language? 
14. What can you say about the future of the language?

VOCABULARY COMPARISON

Several of the terms in the table below have had semantic drift. For example, the form 'Sterben' and other terms for 'die' are cognate with the English word 'starve'. There is also at least one example of a common borrowing from a Non-Germanic source (ounce and its cognates from Latin).

Eng-lish	Frisian	Afri-kaans	Dutch	Ger-man	Gothic	Ice-landic	Faro-ese	Swe-dish	Da-nish	Norwe-gian
	
Apple	appel	appel	appel	apfel	aplus	Epli	Epl[i]	Дpple	Жble	Eple	
board	board	bord	bord	bord	brett	baъrd	borр	borр	brжt	bord	
beech	Boeke/
Boekebeam	beuk	beuk	buche	Bхka/-
bagms	bуk	Bуk	bok	Bog	bшk	
book	boek	boek	boek	buch	bфka	bуk	bуk	bok	Bog	bok	
breast	boarst	bors	borst	brust	brusts	brjуst	brуst	brцst	bryst	bryst	
brown	brъn	bruin	bruin	braun	bruns	brъnn	brъnur	brun	brun	brun	
day	dei	dag	dag	tag	dags	dagur	dagur	dag	dag	dag	
dead	dea	dood	dood	tot	dauюs	dauрur	deyрur	dцd	dшd	dшd	
die	stjerre	sterf	sterven	sterben	diwan	deyja	doyggia	dц	dш	dш	
enough	genфg	genoeg	genug	ganфhs	nуg	Nуg
Nуgmi
kiр	nog	nok	nok	nok	
finger	finger	vinger	vinger	finger	figgrs	fingur	fingur	finger	finger	finger	
give	jan	gee	geven	geben	giban	gefa	geva	Giva/
ge	give	gi	
glass	glкs	glas	glas	glas		gler	glas	glas	glas	glass	
gold	goud	goud	goud	gold	gulю	gull	gull	Guld/
gull	guld	dull	
hand	hвn	hand	hand	hand	handus	hцnd	hond	hand	hеnd	hеnd	
head	holle	Hoof /
kop	Hoofd/
kop	Haupt
/kopf	hбubiю	hцfuр	Hшvd/
hшvur	huvud	hoved	hode	
high	heech	hoog	hoog	hoch	hбuh	hбr	Hшg/ur	hцg	hшj	hшy	
home	hiem	Heim/
Tuis	Heim/
thuis	heim	hбimфю	heim	heim	hem	hjem	hjem	
hook	hoek	haak	haak	haken	Krappa/
krampa	krуkur	Krуkur/
ongul	Hake/
krok	Hage/
krok	Hake/
krok	
house	hыs	huis	huis	haus	hыs	hъs	hъs	hus	hus	hus	
many	menich	menige	menige	manch	manags	margir	Mangir/
nуgvir	mеnga	mange	mange	
moon	moanne	maan	maan	mond	mзna	Tungl/
mбni	Tungl/
mбni	mеne	mеne	mеne	
night	nacht	nag	nacht	nacht	nуtt	nуtt	natt	natt	nat	natt	
no	nee	nee	Nee(n)	Nein/
Nц/
Nee	nз	Nei	Nei	Nej	Nej	Nei	
old	вld	oud	Oud,
gammel	alt	sineigs	Gamall,
(but:
Eldri;
Elstur)	Gamal,
(but:
Eldri;
Elstur)	Gam-mal,
(but:
дldre;
дldst)	Gam-mel,
(but:
жldre;
жldst)	Gammel,
(but:
Eldre;
Eldst)	
one	ien	een	een	eins	бins	einn	ein	en	en	en	
ounce	ons	ons	ons	unze	unkja	ъnsa	ъnsa	uns	unse	unse	
snow	snie	sneeu	sneeuw	schnee	snбiws	snjуr	Kavi/
snjуgv	snц	sne	snш	
stone	stien	steen	steen	stein	stбins	steinn	steinur	sten	sten	sten	
that	dat	dit	Dat,
die	das	юata	юaр	taр	det	det	det	
two	twa	twee	twee	Zwei/
zwo	twбi	Tveir/
Tvжr/
tvц	Tveir
(/tvе)
	tvе	To	To	
who	wie	wie	wie	wer	Was
(hwas)	Hver	hvшr	vem	hvem	hvem	
worm	wjirm	wurm	Wurm/
worm	wurm	maюa	Maрkur,
ormur	Maрkur/
ormur	Mask/
orm	orm	Mark/
orm	

LITERATURE

1.	Арсеньева В.А. et. al. Введение в германскую филологию. М.ВШ.1983.
2.	Чемоданов Н.С. Введение в германскую филологию. М.ВШ.1982.
3.	Жирмунский В.М. История немецкого языка. М.ВШ.1978.
4.	Прокош Р. Сравнительная грамматика германских языков. М.1958.  
5.	А.Мeйе. Введение в сравнительное изучение индоевропейских языков. М.1933.
6.	Гухман М.М. Готский язык. М.1963.
7.	Лайонз Дж. Введение в теоретическую лингвистику. М. Прогресс.1976.
8.	Rask R. Investigation on the origin of Old Norse or Icelandic. 1818. 
9.	Grimm J. Deutsche Grammatik. 1819.
10.	 Berezin F.M. Lectures on Linguistics. M., 1969.
11.	Buslayev F.I. On teaching the natural language. M.1844.
12.	Borgstrom C. Internal Reconstruction of Pre-Indo-European word forms. (Word, 1954, v.10N 2.3p.278).
13.	Swadesh M. Lexicostatistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. – Proceedings of the American. Philosophical society, v 96. P.453.1956.
14.	Schleicher A. Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European languages. 1861.
15.	Schmidt I. The Relationships of the Indo-European languages. 2002.
16.	American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the 3rd ed. Boston, 2003.
17.	Baldi P. An Introduction to the Indo-European languages. Carbondale, Illinois. 1998.
18.	Campbell. Old English Grammar. Oxford. 2001.
19.	Decsy G. The Indo-European Protolanguage: a computational reconstruction. Indiana. 1991.
20.	Encyclopedia Americana, 30 volumes, New-York, 2000.
21.	Glendening P.J. Icelandic, New-York. 1983.
22.	Mallory J.R. In search of the Indo-Europeans, London. 2001. 
23.	Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.), Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1981, (in Yiddish and English).
24.	Frakes, Jerold C., Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
25.	Herzog, Marvin, et.al. ed., YIVO, The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 3 vol., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 1992-2000.
26.	 Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.
27.	Katz, Dovid, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Basic Books, New York, 2004.
28.	Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006.
29.	 www.uz.ref.uz
30.	 www.kitoblar.uz
31.	 http://dissertation1.narod.ru
32.	 www.uzswlu.datasite.uz
33.	 www.philology.ru
34.	 www.ewiki.info
35.	 www.bestreferat.ru
36.	 www.bankreferatov.ru
37.	 www.studentex.com
38.	 www.linguistlist.org
39.	 www.homeenglish.ru
40.	www.adelaide.edu.au/archives/articles/list.html
41.	 http://teachers.net