The subject of my research is the English language and languages which are considered to be its relatives.
The objectives are:
- to study peculiarities of English and German;
- to study distribution, history and common features of the Germanic Languages.
The hypothesis of the research is:
Languages of one group are similar in some aspects, that’s why it’s easier to study the next foreign languages when they are from the same linguistic group.
To prove my hypothesis I intend to:
- ask my classmates to fill in a questionnaire on the problem of the choice of the second language and analyze their results;
- study the principles of linguistic analysis;
- trace the history of Germanic Languages;
- find out what makes them relative;
- choose proper examples from different sources and express my own opinion and interpretation of what I have read.
I used the following methods:
- translation from Russian into English;
- comparative analysis and synthesis;
- consulting specialists (teachers of Russian and History);
- interpretation;
- survey of students’ preferences in the investigated question.
Our teachers of English tried to find out the students’ preferences in studying the second foreign language. It turned out that the class had divided into two almost equal groups: French and German. But I got interested in the reasons of my classmates’ choice. So I tried to investigate them on my own and the results were the following (see appendix 1):
only the minority of the students approached to the problem seriously. Their preferences were based mostly on subjective likes and dislikes. The most part of the students chose the second language because they liked its sounding. Still the second reason of the choice was the one I think to be more important: relative connection between German and English (we always hope that it’s easier to study cognate languages).
I’m sure that the problem is worth studying. That’s why I devoted my first linguistic research to it. Though the question isn’t interesting for experienced language-learners, I hope that my investigation will help me and my classmates to make a good sensible choice of the second foreign language.
The Germanic Languages
(The global distribution of Germanic languages today. Solid red indicates that a majority of inhabitants speaks a Germanic language. Striped red indicates that a sizeable minority (more than 10%) speaks a Germanic language.)
The Germanic languages are a group of related languages constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family (see appendix 2). The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the latter mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early Germanic varieties enter history with the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century.
The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 380 and 120 million native speakers respectively. The group consists of other major languages, such as Dutch with 22 and Afrikaans with over 16 million speakers; and the North Germanic languages including Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese with a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages and dialects (see appendixes 2)
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Characteristics
The Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:
- The leveling of the tense and aspect system into the present tense and past tense (also called preterite).
- The use of a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense. See Germanic weak verb.
- The presence of two distinct types of verb conjugation: weak (using dental suffix) and strong (using ablaut). English has 161 strong verbs; almost all are of Germanic origin. See: Germanic strong verb.
- The use of strong and weak adjectives. Modern English adjectives don't change except for comparative and superlative; this was not the case in Old English, where adjectives were inflected differently depending on whether they were preceded by an article or demonstrative.
- The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law.
- A number of words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants of which appear in almost all Germanic languages. See Germanic substrate hypothesis.
- The shifting of stress accent onto the root of the stem and later to the first syllable of the word. Though English has an irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless of what's added to them. This is arguably the most important change.
The Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, the Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend towards analycity. Some, like German, Dutch and Icelandic, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, like English, Swedish and Afrikaans have moved towards a largely analytic type.
Another characteristic of the Germanic languages is verb second or V2 word order, which is quite uncommon cross-linguistically. This feature is shared by all Germanic languages except English, which has largely replaced the structure with an overall SVO structure.
Most Germanic languages have fairly complex vowel systems with a large phoneme inventory.
Writing
The earliest evidence of Germanic comes from names recorded in the 1st century by Tacitus (especially from his work Germania), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the 2nd century BC on the Negau helmet. From roughly the 2nd century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the runic alphabet. Early runic inscriptions are also largely limited to personal names, and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the 4th century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. However, throughout the Viking Age, runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia.
In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, various Germanic languages use a variety of accent marks and extra letters, including umlauts, the ? (Eszett), IJ, O, ?, A, ?, ?, and ? and ?, from runes. Historic printed German is frequently set in blackletter typefaces (e.g. fraktur or schwabacher).
History
The Germanic languages in Europe Dutch (Low Franconian, West Germanic) Low German (West Germanic) Central German (High German, West Germanic) Upper German (High German, West Germanic) Anglic (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic) Frisian (Anglo-Frisian, West Germanic) East Scandinavian West Scandinavian Line dividing the North and West Germanic languages.
All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, united by their having been subjected to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law. These took place probably during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from ca. 500 BC, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.
From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify.
During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties. By Early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North, and although both extremes are considered German, they are hardly mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.
The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained more unified, with the larger languages largely retaining mutual intelligibility into modern times.