Lecture 1 Introduction

the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Frisians – settled the coastal territories of the Netherlands, Germany, the south of Denmark and the British Isles. The languages they spoke were:

• 
  Old English – later developed into  English (national language – 16^th c.; first written records – 7^th c.);
  

– Old Saxon – later developed into a territorial dialect in Germany;

• 
  Old Frisian – later developed into  Frisian
  

• 
  High Germans – settled the southern mountainous areas of Germany and spoke Old High German that later developed into two distinctive languages:
  

 German:

• 
  is known for great dialectal diversity;
  
• 
  first written records – 8^th – 9^th c.;
  
• 
  12^th c. – literary form of the language appears.
  

 Yiddish (see classification of the Germanic Languages, Lecture 1.)

H/w:
1. Ex. 2, 6; p. 48, 49 in “История английского языка” by Т.А. Расторгуева (copies) (see also lectures on the history on the British Isles (The British Cultural Studies)).


Lecture 3
Linguistic Features of the Germanic Languages
Phonetic Features

All the Germanic Languages of the past and present have common linguistic features that are not shared by other groups of languages in the Indo-European family (Slavonic group, Romance group, etc.). These features are characteristic of the Germanic group only. They appeared during the period of the Proto-Germanic Language, before it split into a certain number of the Germanic languages. First of all we are going to discuss the common Germanic phonetic features.