11.What do you know about North –Sea Germanic tribal dialects?

The Germanic languages today are conventionally divided into three linguistic  groups: East  Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. There are some translation loans from the languages of Indians, such as: “pipe of peace”, “pale-faced”; from German “masterpiece”, “homesickness”, “superman”. German: yacht, dog, landscape. After a number of wars between the Germanic tribes and the Romans, these two opposing peoples came into peaceful contact. Trade is carried on, and the Germanic people gain knowledge of new things. They learn how to make butter and cheese and, as there are no words for these products in their tribal languages, they are to use the Latin words to name them. The term native is used to denote words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to British Isles from the continent in the 5^th century by the Germanic tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes and the native words represent the original stock of this particular language. All words of Anglo-Saxon origin belong to very important semantic groups. They include most of the auxiliary and modal verbs: shall, will, should, would, must, can, may; pronouns: I, you, he, my, his, who, whose; prepositions: in, out, on, under etc.The native words are further subdivided into Indo-European stock and those of common Germanic origin. By the Indo-European element are meant words of roots common to all or most languages of the Indo-European group. English words of this group denote elementary concepts without which no human communication would be possible. The following classification was given by V.D. Arakin.

1. Family relations: father, mother, brother, son, daughter.

2. Parts of human body: foot, nose, lip, heart.

3. Animals: cow, swine, goose.

4. Plants: tree, corn.

5. Time of day: day, night.

6. Heavenly bodies: sun, moon, star.

7. Numerous adjectives: red, new, glad, sad.

8. The numerals from one to a hundred.

9. Pronouns – personal, demonstrative.

The Germanic element represents words of roots common to all or most Germanic languages. Some of the main groups of Germanic words are the same as in the Indo-European element.

1. Parts of the human body: head, back, hand, arm, finger, bone.

2. Animals: bear, fox, calf.

3. Plants: oak, fir, grass.

4. Natural phenomena: rain, frost.

5. Seasons of the year: winter, spring, summer.

6. Human dwellings and furniture: house, room, bench.

7. Adjectives: green, blue, grey, white, high, good, old.

8. Verbs: see, hear, speak, tell, say, answer, drink, give, make.

12)What is the influence of Scandinavian vocabulary on the English language ?

From the end of the 8th c. to the middle of the 11th c. England underwent several Scandinavian invasions which inevitably left their trace on English vocabulary. Here are some examples of early Scandinavian borrowings: call, take, cast, die, law, husband, window, ill, loose, low, and weak. Some of the words of this group are easily recognizable as Scandinavian borrowings by the initial sk-combination, e.g. sky, skill, ski, skirt etc. There are semantic borrowings between Scandinavian and English, such as the meaning “to live” for the word “to dwell” which in Old English had the meaning “to wander”. Let’s consider another word the adjective gay was borrowed from French in several meanings at once: “noble of birth”, “bright, shining”. Rather soon it shifted its ground developing the meaning “joyful, high-spirited” in which sense it became a synonym of the native merry and in some time left it far behind in frequency and range of meaning.  Scandinavian Place-names and Personal Names in EnglandMore than 600 places bear Scandinavian names, e.g. Grimsby, Whitby, Derby, Rugby, and Thoresby, which end in –by, meaning “farm” or “town” in Danish.About 300 names contain the Scandinavian word thorp, which means “village”. An almost equal number contain the word thwaite, which means “an isolated peace of land”. Examples of the latter include Applethwaite, Braithwaite, Cowperthwaite, Langthwaite, and Satterthwaite. There are also a hundred places bearing names ending in toft, which means “a piece of ground”, e.g. Brimtoft, Eastoft, Langtoft, Lowestoft, and Nortoft. In some districts in the counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire about 75 percent of the place-names are of Scandinavian origin. A similarly high percentage of Scandinavian personal names are found, e.g. names ending in –son, like Stevenson, and Johnson, which end in the equivalent of the Old English patronymic –ing as in Browning.B. The Earliest Borrowing by Old English from the Scandinavian LanguagesThe number of Scandinavian words that appeared in Old English was small, amounting to only twenty words. The largest group was associated with sea-roving, as in barda (beaked ship), cnearr (small warship), ; (vessel; (fleet), ;mann (pirate), dreng (warrior), bātswegen (boatman), hofding (chief), orrest (battle), rān (robbery, and fylcian (to collect a force).A little later, a number of words relating to the law or the social and administrative system entered into English. Examples include the word law itself, as well as outlaw, wapentake (an administrative district), hūsting (assembly), which all come from the Danish language.In addition to the above words, there are a number of Old English words that are translations of Scandinavian terms, e.g. bōtlēas (what cannot be compensated), hāmsōcn (attacking an enemy in his house), and landcēap ( tax paid when land was bought) and other loan-translations. Such legal terminology were replaced by French terms after the Norman Conquest. The Character of Scandinavian LoanwordsAfter the Danes had begun to enter into ordinary relations with the English, Scandinavian words began to enter in number into English. These words show the varied and yet simple character of the borrowings. And they made their way into English through the give–and–take of everyday life. Among nouns were band, birth, booth, bull, calf (of leg), egg, fellow, gait, gap, guess, kid, leg, link, loan, race, root, scales, score, seat, sister, skin, skirt, sky, steak, tidings, trust, want, and window, among many others.Among adjectives we find awkward, flat, ill, loose, low, meek, odd, rotten, scant, seemly, sly, tight, and weak.A surprising number of common verbs is among the borrowings, like to bait, call, cast, clip, crave, crawl, die, gape, gasp, get, give, glitter, kindle, lift, nag, raise, rid, scare, screech, take, thrive, and thrust. Lists like the above show the familiar, everyday character of the words that the Scandinavian invasions and subsequent settlement brought into the English language.