- •1. The old germanic ls, their classification and principal features.
- •Common phonetic characteristics of the germanic languages
- •3. The chronological division of the history of english.
- •4. The scandinavian invasion and its effect on english.
- •5. The norman conquest and its effect on the history of english.
- •Oe dialects. Me dialects. The rise of the london dialect
- •7. The oe alphabets. Oe major written records in oe.
- •8. Major spelling changes in me, their causes.
- •9. The oe vowel system (monophthongs and diphthongs). Major changes.
- •12. Consonant changes in me and ne (growth of affricates, loss of certain consonants).
- •14. 15. The oe noun system (grammatical categories, major types of declension).
- •16. The oe personal pronouns, their grammatical categories and declension. Lexical replacement in me.
- •17. The oe adjective (grammatical categories and declensions).
- •18. The oe demonstrative pronouns, their grammatical categories and declension. The rise of the articles.
- •19. The oe verb (grammatical categories, morphological types).
- •20. Oe strong verbs and their further development.
- •21. Oe weak verbs and their further development.
- •22. Oe preterit-present verbs and their further development.
- •24. The rise of analytical forms in verbal system in me.
- •25. The oe infinitive and its further development. The rise of the gerund.
- •26. The origin of plural endings in Modern English nouns.
- •27.28. Types of syntactic relations in oe.
- •29. Oe vocabulary, its volume and etymological structure.
- •30. Affixation in oe.
- •31. Scandinavian loan-words in me.
3. The chronological division of the history of english.
Language is a variable social phenomenon. It changes through the time. It is a slow uninterrupted process. Changes are not evenly distributed in time: periods of intensive and vast changes may be followed by the periods of relative stability. Consequently, some changes may effect and even reconstruct the whole gr. type of a language, while others are contributing gradually to the trends existing in a language.
H. Sweet subdivided the history of the EL into 3 periods:
the period of full endings (Any vowel could be found in unstressed endings singan-sunu)
the period of leveled endings (All vowels in the unstressed endings were leveled under the letter e singen-sune)
the period of lost endings (Endings were lost all together sing-sun)
However, being a soc. phenomenon, serving for communication, language in its development is effected not only by its inner laws and principles, but by the changes in the society, by social life of the language community. RUS scholars take into consideration both extralinguistic and intralinguistic aspects. the boundaries are attached to the dates of history:
OE Period: 7th c. B.C. - Celtic Invasion (Celts), Celtic Dialects; 7th c. B.C. – 410 A.D. - Roman Invasion (Celts, Romans), Celtic Dialects, Latin; mid.5th c. – late 6th c. - Anglo-Saxon Invasion, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Celtic Dialects, OE Dialects!; 597 - Introduction of Christianity, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Celtic Dialects, OE Dialects, Latin; after 8th c. - Scandinavian Invasion, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians (Danes), Celtic Dialects, OE Dialects, Latin, Scandinavian Dialects;
ME Period : 1066 - Norman Conquest, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Normans, Celtic Dialects, ME Dialects, Latin, French; late 14th c. - English – official L of the country, the English, ME Dialects, London Dialect (standard);
NE Period: 1475 - Introduction of Printing (William Caxton), The English, English (NE); 16th – 17th c. - Expansion of the British Empire, The English, English – national L spreading overseas;
Modern English Period: 20th c. - English – a global L.
Some modern linguists distinguish Present day E., influenced by AE. The EModE was a time of great historical importance
4. The scandinavian invasion and its effect on english.
In the 8th – 9th c. Britain was raided and attacked by the Danes/Scandinavians/Vikings. Only Alfred the Great of Wessex kept them away. In 878 the Treaty of Wedmore was signed and England was divided into Wessex (belonged to Alfred) and Danelaw (belonged to the Danes). The Scandinavian dialects belonged to the Germanic group, the Danes soon linguistically merged into the local OE dialects leaving some Scandinavian elements.
Scandinavian borrowings came to English from Northern and North-Eastern Dialects.
Ways of Borrowing : Scandinavian borrowings penetrated only through oral speech .
Assimilation of Borrowings : Scandinavian borrowings were easier to assimilate as far as the Scandinavian Dialects as well as OE Dialects were Germanic dialects (they all belonged to one and the same L group). So the Ls were very similar and the assimilation was easy.
Semantic Fields: • everyday life (cake, raft, skirt, birth, dirt, fellow, root, window, to die, etc.); • military (knife, fleet, etc.); • legal matters (law, husband, etc.); • some pronouns and conjunctions (they, their, them, both, though, etc.); • essential notion (N scar, anger; V to call, to take, to want to kill, to cast, to scare; Adj happy, ill, weak, wrong; Pron same, both; Prep till, fro, etc.).
Recognition in ModE : The only distinctive Scandinavian feature in English: Scandinavian cluster [sk] (sky, skill, skin, skirt, etc.);
Scandinavian Contributions: • A lot of Scandinavian borrowings disappeared, some were left only in dialects; • Some Scandinavian borrowings replaced the native words (they, take, call, etc.); • Scandinavian borrowings enlarged the number of synonyms in English: native to blossom – Scan. borr. to bloom, native wish – Scan. borr. want, native heaven – Scan. borr. sky, etc.