Subtheme 1. The Indo-European family of languages

Lecture № 1

Theme: Germanic Languages in the Indo-European family of languages.

Activity descriptions:

I. Speaking about Germanic Languages. Modern Germanic Languages and their origin.

II. Presentation of the three main types of Germanic Language.

III. Presentation of the linguistic terms and the lecture.

Questions for brainstorming:

1. What groups of languages do you know?

2. What Indo-European languages do you know?

3. What languages belong to Germanic Languages?

4. To what groups of languages English belong?

Lists of literature:

1. Расторгуева Т.А.История английского языка. М., 2003.
2. Смирницкий А.И. Хрестоматия по истории английского языка. - М.,1953.
3. Смирницкий А.И. Древнеанглийский язык, М., 1958 .
4. Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П. История английского языка. - М., 1976.
5. Ильиш Б.А. История английского языка,. -Л.,1973 .
6. Ayapova T.T. History of English ( электрон.версия) КазУМО иМЯ 2002 г.
7. Brigit Viney. The History of the English Language. Oxford University Press., 2008

Subtheme 1. The Indo-European family of languages

The languages spoken in the world are so numerous that their exact number is hardly known. The scholars estimate this number as varying between 2,5 and 5 thousand. It is only natural that such a vast majority makes the problem of classification one of the first problems of the language science.

By now linguisticshas worked out several classifications of world languages. Theyare classified by different approaches depending on the aims of the study. When dealing with the history of a language it is convenient to make use of the classification based on the origin of the languages. This classification is called genealogical. It establishes the degree of relation between different languages and helps the students to understand their ancestry.

The genealogical classification divides the languages into big classes which are called families. The families fall into branches, the branches may consist of several groups, and the groups split into languages.

Most of the languages spoken in Europe belong to the Indo-European family. It means that all of them originated from one and the same parent language which is called Proto-Indo-European. It was spoken about 4500 - 5000 years ago by people who lived in a primitive tribal community. With the course of time the community of Proto-Indo-European people split into several tribes. In search of food and better conditions for living these tribes migrated in different directions and lost ties with each other. As a result the parent language first split into several tribal dialects which later on developed into separate languages. The process of migration kept on, the new languages split into more dialects and these dialects gave rise to new languages.

Thus, by the time of the first written records the parent language of the Indo-European family had split into dozens of languages united in eleven branches.

These languages were spoken by people inhabiting vast areas which stretched from the European coast of the Atlantic up to the territories of modern India (hence the name of the family, Indo-European).

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 439 languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate, about half (221) belonging to the Indo-Aryan subbranch. It includes most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the Indian Subcontinent, and was also predominant in ancient Anatolia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afro-Asiatic family.

Indo-European languages are spoken by almost 3 billion native speakers, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of native speakers according to SIL Ethnologue, 12 are Indo- European: Spanish, English,Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Punjabi, Marathi, French, Urdu, and Italian, accounting for over 1.7 billion native speakers. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other major language families.

Subtheme 2. The Germanic languages as a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family.

The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1^st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire in the second century BC.

The historically attested Germanic languages provide evidence to justify the construct "Germanic" when we find in them common innovations not shared by other Indo-European languages. It is possible that the primal seed of the Germanic languages was gently sown when an unknown number of Indo-Europeans started articulating voiceless stops as fricatives (e.g., */t/ > */þ/); later on, hitherto voiced stops lost voicing (*/d/ > */t/); and some time thereafter, aspirated voiced stops came to be realised as voiced fricatives, then later in most Germanic dialects as voiced stops (*/dh/ > */ð/ > */d/). This three-part "chain shift" is known famously as Grimm's Law and marks among the first Germanic innovations -- preserved in all languages of the family, being essential and limited to them. Further sound changes paralleled innovations in intonation, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary, increasingly differentiating Proto-Germanic as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). During this time, it seems also to have shared innovations with other, geographically proximate PIE dialects, while they yet remained mutually intelligible.

However, at some point Proto-Germanic had come to assume the character of a new language. In their reconstructions of this unattested language, linguists attempt to arrest it at its most advanced age -- before any split into Germanic tongues -- as the last stage of Proto-Germanic. On the other hand, assigning a linguistic "beginning" to Proto-Germanic is something of a moot point, given its origin as a PIE dialect: where linguists draw the boundary between dialect and language is often a matter of opinion.

Theories regarding the geographic location of Proto-Germanic will remain speculative as long as conflicting evidence from history, linguistics, and archaeology leaves conclusions in doubt. Most proposals locate the language community in northern continental Europe, where the majority of Germanic languages have been spoken throughout recorded history; more specific programmes assign the language variously to south Scandinavia, the north European plain, and elsewhere.