In south∣work at∣the Ta∣bard as∣I lay,∣

* * * * * * * *

at night∣was come∣into∣that hos∣telry

well nine∣and twen∣ty in∣a com∣pany,

* * * * * * * *

Owing to his handsome presence, his powers and attainments, Chaucer early found favor at court. He traveled extensively on the Continent, especially in France and Italy, and had much experience as soldier, ambassador, and Member of Parliament.

Chaucer's greatest work is the Canterbury Tales. The finest part of the Canterbury Tales is the Prologue; the noblest story is probably the Knight's Tale.

Chaucer expresses, in the truest and liveliest way, the true and lively things which are set before him. He first gave to English poetry that force, vigor, life, and color which raise it above the level of mere rimed prose. All the best poems and histories in Latin, French, and Italian were well known to Chaucer.

The lesser poets of this period were William Langland (1332?-1400), who used the alliterative form, and whose principal work was Piers Plowman; John Gower (1325?-1408), author of a

poem entitled Lover's Confession, and John Barbour (1320-1396), a Scottish poet, whose best remembered work is entitled The Bruce.

15.

Form-building Means (§ 62)

§ 62. 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.

The suppletive way of form-building was inherited from ancient IE, it was restricted to a few personal pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

Compare the following forms of pronouns in Germanic and non-Germanic languages:

L	Fr	R	Gt	O Icel	OE	NE
ego	je	я	ik	ek	ic	I
mei	mon	меня	meina	min	min	my, mine
mihi	me, moi	мне	mis	mer	me	me

The principal means of form-building were inflections. The inflec­tions found in OG written records correspond to the inflections 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 variable². § 70. 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 (§ 54, 55, 57, 58).

§ 71. 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 Table 8 illustrate Germanic words, whose roots have not been found outside the group, and some word-building patterns which arose in Late PG. Those are instances of transition from compound words into derived words; they show the development of new suffixes — from root-morphemes — at the time when many old deri­vational stem-suffixes had lost their productivity and ceased to be distin­guished in the word structure. The new suffixes made up for the loss of stem-suffixes.

(Though some of these words have no direct descendants we find the same suffixes in other formations: G Irrtum, Freundschaft, NE friend­ship — the roots may be common IE but the suffixes are specifically Germanic (vis- is related to R ведать, frēond to R приятель).

17.

world-building of English and its development: Scandinavian and French influence.

Scandinavians in the English population is indicated by a large number of place-names in the northern and eastern areas. In the beginning Scandinavian loan words were dialectally restricted; they increased the range of language variation. Later due to dialect mixture they penetrated into other parts of the language space, passed into London English and the national language. The total number of Scandinavian borrowing in English is estimated at about 900 words, about 700 of them belong to standard English. It is difficult to define the semantic spheres of Scandinavian borrowing, they mostly pertain to everyday life and do not differ from native words. For instance: barda, cnearr- different types of ships, cnif- knife, lip- fleet, husbonda- husband, tacan- take. The word law is derived from Scand log which meant- that which is laid down. And was preserved together with its derivatives: ME- outlaw, NE- in law, lawyer. The word husband was originally a legal term house holder, one who owns a house.