Linguistic features of the 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.
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 (cf. R д ó мом, дом á, домовничать, д ó ма).
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: 'Liebe, 'lieben 'lieble, ge'liebt, 'lieberhaft, 'Liebling.
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 inflections, sound interchanges and suppletion.
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The suppletive way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE, it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.
Periodisation in the history of the English language
- Old English;
- Middle English;
- New English.
OE begins with the Germanic settlement of Britain (5th c.) or with the beginning of writing (7th c.) and ends with the Norman Conquest (1066).
ME begins with the Norman Conquest and ends on the introduction of printing (1475)
Modern or NE – 1475 till our days.
H. Swect divided English into
- Early;
- Classical;
- Late.
Division into chronological periods should take into account both aspect: external and internal. The history of English language is divided into seven periods differing in linguistic situation and the nature of linguistic changes.
The first period Early Old English.
I from the West Germanic invasions of Britain till the beginning of writing, from 5th to the clode of the 7th c.
The evolution of the language in this period is hypothetical. It was the period of transition from PG to written OE.
II Historical period – from the 8th c. till the end of 11th (Old English or Anglo-Saxon or Writen OE)
The tribal dialects gradually changed into local or regional dialects.
The prevalence of West Saxon in writing is tied up with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex to political and cultural prominence. OE was a typical OG language with a purely Germanic vocabulary and few foreign borrowings. It was synthetic language with a well-developed system of morphological categories.
III Period Early Middle English starts after 1066 (the Norm Conquest) and covers 12th, 13th and half of 14th c. It was a stage of the greatest dialectal divergence cause by the feudal system and by foreign influences (Scandinavian and French).
Under Norman rule the official language in English was French. The local dialect were mainly used for oral communication.
Early ME was a time of great changes English absorbed two layers of lexical borrowings: Scandinavian and the French element in the speech of towns people.
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IV period – Late of Classical ME from the later 14th c. till the end of 15th – embraces the age of Chaucer. It was the time of the restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language and the time of literary flourishing. The main dialect – mixed dialect of London.
V period – Early New English – from 1475 to 1660 the age of Shakespeare.
The first printed book in English was published by William Caxton in 1475. It was a time of changes, especially lexical and phonetic.
VI period – “the age on normalization and correctness” – from the mid 17th to the close of 18thc.
This age witnessed the establishment of “norms”. The norms were fixed as rules and prescription of correct usage in the numerous dictionaries and grammar-books published at the time and were spread trough education and writing.
VII period – Late New English or Modern English 19th-20th c.
The classical languages of literature was strictly distinguished from the local dialects and the dialects of lower social ranks. The dialects were used in oral communication and, as a rule, had no literary tradition. English has spread to all the inhabited continents.
Old English written records
The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic one, which cannot be found in other Indo-European languages. The shape of preferred, this is due to the fact that all runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone, wood.
The number of runes in different Old Germanic languages greatly varied from 28 to 33 runes in Britain against 16 or 24 on the mainland. Runes were used only for short inscriptions on the objects in order to bestow some special power or magic on them and they were not used in writing.
The two best known runic inscriptions in England are “Franks Casket”, and “Ruth well Cross”. Both records are in Northumbrian dialect.
The first English manuscripts were written in Latin letters. The center of learning was monasteries and the monks were practically the only literate people. The religious services were conducted in Latin and the first English writings appeared in Latin letters. English scribes modified the Latin script to suit their needs: the shape of some letters was changed and new symbols which indicated the English sounds, for which Latin had no equivalents, were added.
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The first English words were personal names and place names inserted in Latin texts, and then came glosses and longer textual insertions.
The first official documents were written in Latin, but later they were written in local dialects, because not many people knew Latin. Among the earliest insertions in Latin texts are pieces of poetry. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum written in Latin in the 8 th c. contains an English fragment of five lines known as “Bede’s Death Song” and a religious poem of nine lines, “Cadmon’s Hymn” Old English poetry is mainly restricted to three subjects: heroic, religious and lyrical. Most of poetry is believed to be composed at that time when there was no writing and they existed in oral form and handed down from one generation to another.
The greatest poem of the Old English period was Beowulf, an epic of the 7th c. As some linguists and historians Consider this epic was composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but came to the present time in West Saxon dialect. Beowulf consists of several songs arranged in three chapters (over 3 000 lines in all). It is based on old legends about the ancient Teutons. It depicts the life and fight of the legendary hero Beowulf, some extracts of the epic describes the real historical events.
Old English poetry is characterized by the so-called system of versification Old Germanic alliterative verse. The structure of this verse is this: the line is divided into two halves with two strongly stressed syllables in each half and is bound together by the use of the same sound at the beginning of two stressed syllables in the line. The lines are not rhymed and the number of the syllables in a line is pee.
The earliest sample of prose works are: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles which are of no great importance as a literary work but are of great interest for the linguists because they were written in spoken language and they are much better than sophisticated Translations from Latin.
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ФОНЕТИКА
1 . Phonetics as a science is concerned with the human noises by which the thought is actualized or given audible shape: the nature of these noises, their combinations, and their functions in relation to the meaning. The term “phonetics” comes from the Greek word “phone” translated as “sounds”.
Phonetics studies the sound system of the language, that is segmental phonemes, word-stress, syllabic structure and intonation
Phonetics is a basic branch of linguistics; neither linguistic theory nor linguistic practice can do without phonetics and no language description is complete without phonetics, the science concerned with the spoken medium of language. That is why phonetics claims to be of equal importance with grammar or lexicology.
Phonetics has 2 main divisions: on the one hand “phonology”, the study of the sound patterns of languages, of how a spoken language functions as a “code”, and on the other - the study of substance, that carries the code (p.7). Phonology is the branch of phonetics that studies the linguistic function of consonant and vowel sounds, syllabic structure, word accent and prosodic features, such as pitch, stress and tempo (p.11-12). The phoneticians are interested in the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language, how they are utilized in that language and what part they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language.
There are 3 branches of phonetics each corresponding to a different stage in the communication process:
The branch of phonetics that studies the way in which the air is set in motion, the movements of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the pronunciation of single sounds and trains of sounds is called articulatory phonetics.
Acoustic phonetics studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker’s mouth and the listener’s ear. The means by which we discriminate sounds-quality, sensations of pitch, loudness, length are relevant here. This branch of phonetics is of great interest to anyone who teaches or studies pronunciation.
The branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process is known as auditory phonetics. Its interests lie more in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity, than in the physiological working of the ear or the nervous activity between the ear and the brain (p.10-11).
Phonetics is in itself divided into two major components: segmental phonetics, which is concerned with individual sounds (i.e. “segments” of speech) and suprasegmental phonetics whose domain is the larger units of connected speech: syllables, words, phrases and texts.
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