Subject matter and goals of hel
The facts of the language can be analysed synchronically (the Language system at a certain stage of its development), or diachronically (a historical development of the system in general). HEL deals with a historical development of the language, because its modern state can be only explained by different historical causes. However, the history of the English language is so complicated that it must be confined to the fundamentals which are necessary to understand the present state of the English language. It studies the rise and development of English, its structure and peculiarities in the old days, its similarity to other languages of the same family and its unique, specific features. It is a diachronistic view of the language that is aimed at understanding the very essence of the language that seems to be so unique in many respects today.
The subject matter of HEL is the changing nature of the language through more than 15 hundred years of the existence. It starts with a close view at the beginnings of the language, originally the dialects of a comparatively small number of related tribes that migrated from the continent onto the British Isles, the dialects of the IE family – synthetic, inflected language with a well-developed system of noun forms, a rather poorly represented system of verbal categories, with free word order and a vocabulary that consisted almost entirely of words of native origin.
Research methods applied in HEL
English in I.E. language family
The English language is a language of the Indo-European language family, and that is why it is correlated with many other languages of Europe and Western Asia. All these languages originate from one common source, the Common Indo-European language, which was spoken by nomads on the territory of present day Ukraine and Southern Russia 5000 years ago.
The IE language family consists of many groups and separate languages. English is a West-Germanic language.
Old-Germanic languages form three areal groups:
East-Germanic: Gothic, which is represented by the Bible translation made by Wulfila in the 4th century AD All the East-Germanic languages are dead now.
North-Germanic (Scandinavian) y is represented by runic inscriptions of the 3rd century. It includes Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish.
West-Germanic includes Old High-Germanic language - the oldest written monuments dated back to the 8th century; Old-Saxon - its written monument "HELIAND" dates back to the 11th century; Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) - the language of Angles and Saxons later it became the language of the greater part of Great Britain.
Modern Germanic languages are divided into two groups:
a) North-Germanic (Scandinavian) which includes:
1. Danish - in Denmark
2. Swedish - in Sweden
3. Icelandic - in Iceland
4. Norwegian - in Norway
5. Faroese - in the Faroe Islands
b) West-Germanic group . -
1. English - in Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and in most of the former colonies of the British Empire.
2. Frisian - in some provinces of the Netherlands
3. German - in Germany, Switzerland, Austria
4. Dutch - in the Netherlands and former colonies
5. Afrikaans – in South Africa
6. Flemish - in Belgium
Intra- and extralinguistic factors of a language change
5. Periodization of English Languages History
The commonly accepted, traditional periodization divides English language history into three periods:
Old English (OE);
Middle English (ME);
New or Modern English (NE, Mod E).