Conclusion

Fill in the blanks with the suitable answer

1.     It is well known that the English language belongs to ___________of the Indo-European family of languages.

• the Germanic subdivision

• the tribes

• the Balto-Slavic

The direct and indirect evidence that we have concerning Old Germanic tribes and dialects is approximately ________old.

• forty centuries

• twenty centuries

• thirty centuries

• tenth centuries

We know that at the beginning of AD Germanic tribes occupied vast territories in ____________ Europe. The tribes and the dialects they spoke at that time were generally much alike, but the degree of similarity varied.

• western, central and northern

• eastern part of

• southern part of

It is common to speak about the East Germanic group of dialects – mainly spoken in central Europe – Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian; North Germanic group of dialects – Old Norwegian, Old Danish, Old Swedish, Old Icelandic; and the West Germanic group of dialects – the dialects of Angels, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others, originally spoken in ____________

The first knowledge of these tribes comes from the Greek and Roman authors which together with archeological data, allows obtaining information on the structure of their society, habits, customs and languages. The principal East Germanic language is ___________.

At the beginning of our era the Goths lived on a territory from Vistula to the shores of the Black sea. The knowledge of Gothic we have now is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by__________, a missionary who Christianized the Gothic tribes. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it is the earliest record of Germanic language we possess.

• Verner

• Franz Bopp of Germany

• Ulfilas

For a time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, making extensive conquests in Italy and Spain. In these districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin, and even elsewhere it seems not to have maintained a very tenacious existence. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century. North Germanic is found in ________.

• Italy

• Scandinavia and Denmark

• India

Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. ___________languages fall into two groups: an eastern group 6 including Swedish and Danish and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic.

• The Scandinavian

• The Balto-Slavic

• The Tocharian

West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is subdivided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German) Sound Shift analogues to that described below as Grimm’s Law. This change, by which West Germanic ____________etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of Germanic area, but did not take place in the lowlands to the north.

• v,f,b,t

• b,d,g,t

• p, t, k, d

High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible into it (1522 – 1532), and since the sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of___________.