History of Germanic Languages
Plan. 1. Introduction 2. History of germanic languages. 3.1. The Indo-European languages 3.2. Historical Germanic Languages 3.3. Present day Germanic languages 3. The chronological division of the History of English. 4. Conclusion. 5. Bibliography.
1. Introduction. This paper is dedicated to the history of germanic languages. Germanic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a still earlier common ancestor, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic and which is believed to have broken from the other Indo-European languages before 500 B.C. Although no writing in Proto-Germanic has survived, the language has been substantially reconstructed by using the oldest records that exist of the Germanic tongue.
2. History of germanic languages.
The family of Germanic languages is a branch of the Indo-European language family (see the table below: Indo-European language tree). All languages within this family are derived from a parent Indo-European language of early migrants to Europe from southwestern Asia. The major subdivisions within the present day Indo-European languages spoken in Europe are Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic (Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish) and Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian) languages.
From the middle of the 1st millennium BC, there is evidence of Germanic populations in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their migrations from the 2nd century BC onwards are recorded in history. The linguistic and archaeological data seem to indicate that the last linguistic changes affecting all of the Germanic languages took place in an area which
1. Introduction. This paper is dedicated to the history of germanic languages. Germanic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a still earlier common ancestor, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic and which is believed to have broken from the other Indo-European languages before 500 B.C. Although no writing in Proto-Germanic has survived, the language has been substantially reconstructed by using the oldest records that exist of the Germanic tongue.
2. History of germanic languages.
The family of Germanic languages is a branch of the Indo-European language family (see the table below: Indo-European language tree). All languages within this family are derived from a parent Indo-European language of early migrants to Europe from southwestern Asia. The major subdivisions within the present day Indo-European languages spoken in Europe are Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic (Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish) and Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian) languages.
From the middle of the 1st millennium BC, there is evidence of Germanic populations in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their migrations from the 2nd century BC onwards are recorded in history. The linguistic and archaeological data seem to indicate that the last linguistic changes affecting all of the Germanic languages took place in an area which
Bibliography: 1.Joseph Salmons. A History of German: What the past reveals about today 's language. Oxford University Press, 2012. 2. A. L. Streadbeck, A Short Introduction to Germanic Linguistics (1966); 3 4. T. L. Markey, Germanic and Its Dialects (1977); H. F. Nielsen, The Germanic Languages (rev. ed. 1989).