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Germanic languages.
The history of English language has been reconstructed on the basis of written
records of different periods. The earliest texts in English are dated back to 7th
c.A.D.; the earliest records in other Germanic languages to the 3rd or 4th A.D. But
to say where the English language came from one must learn some facts of the
prewritten history of the Germanic group.
Certain information about the early stages of English and Germanic
history can be
found in the works of ancient historians, especially Roman. They contain the
description of Germanic tribes, personal names and place-names.
English language belongs to the
Germanic group of languages, which is one of the
twelve groups of the Indo-European linguistic family. The history of the Germanic
group begins with the appearance of what is known as the Proto-Germanic
language
which split from the Proto-Indo-European tongues between 15th and
10th c. B.C.
The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European. It
probably originated in the area north of the Black Sea. The various subgroups of
the Indo-European family include:
· Indo-Iranian languages
· Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages)
·
Germanic languages
· Celtic languages
· Baltic languages
·
Slavic languages
· Illyrian languages
· Albanian language (and extinct cousins)
· Anatolian languages (extinct, most notable was the language of the Hittites)
· Tocharian languages
·
Greek language
· Armenian language
As the Indo-Europeans spread over a larger territory, the
ancient Germans moved
further north than other tribes and settled on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.
Proto-Germanic has never been recorded. In the 19th c. it was reconstructed by the
methods of comparative linguistics from written records. Towards the beginning of
our era Germanic divided into dialectical groups which later developed into
separate languages.