- •1. When did the historical study of languages begin? Who was the first to prove the relations of many languages to each other and the existence of their common source?
- •2. What is the character of internal and external language changes?
- •3. What are considered to be the main reasons for language changes?
- •4. What groups belong to the Indo-European family of languages? What are Satem and Centum languages?
- •5. What group does English belong to? Name the closest linguistic relations of English.
- •6. What territory did the ancient Germanic tribes inhabited?
- •7. What are the distinctive features of Germanic languages that made them different from other Indo-European languages?
- •8. What is the nature of the First Consonant Shift? Who was the first to explain its regularities?
- •9. Who was the first to explain the irregularities in the First Consonant Shift?
- •Ie voiceless stop was preceded by an unstressed vowel, the voiceless fricative
- •10. How long is the history of the English language?
- •11. What periods do we distinguish in the History of the English language?
- •12. What languages were spoken in the British Isles before the Germanic invasion? Which of their descendants have survived today?
- •13. When did the Germanic invasion in the British Isles begin? What Germanic tribes came to live there?
- •14. What Germanic kingdoms existed on the British Isles?
- •15. How did the country acquire the name of England?
- •16. What important event took place at the end of the 8th century ad on the territory of the British Isles?
- •17. What alphabet did Anglo-Saxons used for their writings? What written records have survived from that time?
- •18. What vowels existed in Old English? How were they represented in writing?
- •19. What consonants existed in Old English? How were they represented in writing?
- •20. What main phonetic changes occurred during the Old English period?
- •Vowel changes
- •Consonants changes
- •21. What was the etymological composition of the oe vocabulary? What languages did the loan words come there from? Composition
- •Foreign influences on Old English
- •22. What word building patterns were common in oe?
- •23. What categories did the oe noun have?
- •24. What categories did the oe adjective have?
- •25. What were the classes of oe pronouns?
- •26. What categories did the oe verb have?
- •27. What were the most common syntactical patterns in oe?
- •28. Did there exist any analytical forms in oe?
- •29. What events of the Modern English period launched the process of forming the National English Language?
- •30. What important changes in phonetic system happened in Early ModE?
- •The Great Vowel Shift
- •31. What was the Nature of the Great Vowel Shift?
- •32. Describe the main changes in grammar system in Modern English.
- •33. Changes in the categories of nouns and adjectives. What old forms of substantive plural survived in ModE? Changes and features of ModE noun system
- •34. Describe the main changes in the ModE pronoun system.
- •35. Describe the main changes in the categories of verb in ModE. Changes and features of Early ModE verbal system
- •36. Describe the main changes in ModE syntax.
- •37. Describe the main changes in vocabulary system in Early Modern English.
16. What important event took place at the end of the 8th century ad on the territory of the British Isles?
Viking raids began in England in the late 8th century, primarily on
monasteries. The date given for the earliest Viking attack is traditionally 787,
when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, three ships from Norway sailed
into Portland Bay in Dorset. There, an agent of the king mistook the Viking sailors
for merchants and tried to get them to accompany him to the king's manor to pay a
trading tax on their goods. They murdered him instead. The first monastery to be
raided was in 793 at Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast; the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle described the Vikings as heathen men. Monasteries and minster
churches were popular targets as they were wealthy and had valuable objects that
were portable. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 840 says that Æthelwulf of
Wessex was defeated at Carhampton, Somerset, after 35 Viking ships had landed
in the area.
17. What alphabet did Anglo-Saxons used for their writings? What written records have survived from that time?
Anglo-Saxons scribes used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters
of the Latin alphabet, thus the OE letters were sometime very like and sometimes
very unlike those used in modern English.
The Anglo-Saxon runes (also Anglo-Frisian), also known as futhorc (or
fuþorc), is a runic alphabet, extended from the Elder Futhark from 24 to between
26 and 33 characters. They were used probably from the 5th century onward,
recording Old English and Old Frisian.
They remained in use in Anglo-Saxon England throughout the 6th to 10th
centuries, although runic script became increasingly confined to manuscript
tradition as a topic of antiquarian interest after the 9th century, and it disappeared
even as a learned curiosity soon after the Norman conquest.
The Old English Latin alphabet—though it had no standard orthography—
generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 9th
to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, 20 were directly adopted from the Latin
alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the
runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ). The letters K, Q and Z were not in the spelling of native
English words.
Anglo-Saxon literature encompasses literature written in Old English (also
called Anglo-Saxon) in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades
after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Cædmon's Hymn, composed in the 7th century
according to Bede, is often considered the oldest extant poem in English, whereas
the later poem, The Grave is one of the final poems written in Old English, and
presents a transitional text between Old and Middle English. Likewise, the
Peterborough Chronicle continues until the 12th century.
The poem Beowulf, which often begins the traditional canon of English
literature, is the most famous work of Old English literature. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle has also proven significant for historical study, preserving a chronology
of early English history.
In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of:
sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early
Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles and narrative history works; laws, wills
and other legal works; practical works on grammar, medicine, geography; and
poetry. Most Old English poets are anonymous, and only four names are known
with any certainty: Caedmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf.
In all there are over 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, of which about 189
are considered "major".