Origins & Development of Germanic Languages: English & Others, Lecture notes of English Language

Download Origins & Development of Germanic Languages: English & Others and more Lecture notes English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Alright, finally we have Gemanic branch which is the closest relative of English in the Indo-European family, as we see on the family tree. Technically, the Germanic group is particularly important for us because it includes English. Over many centuries, certain radical developments occurred in the language spoke by those Indo-European speakers living in Denmark and the regions thereabout. Proto-Germanic (or simply Germanic), our term for that language, was relatively unified and distinctive in many of its sounds, inflections, accentual system, and word stock. Unfortunately for us, those who spoke this particular development of Indo European did not write. Proto-Germanic is to German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and English as Latin is to Italian, French, and Spanish. But Proto Germanic, which was probably being spoken shortly before the beginning of the Christian era, must be reconstructed just like Indo-European, whereas Latin is amply recorded. Because Germanic was spread over a large area, it eventually developed marked dialectal differences leading to a division into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic. The North Germanic languages are Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (no we gian), Icelandic, and Faeroese (pherose i) (very similar to Icelandic and spoken in the Faeroe Islands of the North Atlantic between Iceland and Great Britain). The West Germanic languages are High German, Low German (Plattdeutsch), Dutch (and the practically identical Flemish), Frisian, English, Pennsylvania Dutch, Luxembourgish, Yiddish and Afrikaans, along with a variety of disparate languages that often get lumped together as German or Dutch dialects. But I’m just going to focus on some of the main languages. To make everything clear for you guys, Germanic is not the same as German but German is also on the Germanic branch. English comes from the Low Germanic branch, and this branch are dramatic languages of the flat lowlands of Northern Germany, Netherlands and their descendants. Overall, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. A group of West Germanic dialects brought English to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century. To understand about Anglo-Saxon, we also have another presenter to talk about this later.