Final Assessment Questions on “Theoretical phonetics” Card-1 Connection of Phonetics with Other Sciences

Card-34
1.The information about the Germanic and Roman tribes.
The Germanic peoples were historical groups of people that once occupied Central Europe and Scandinavia during antiquity and into the early Middle Ages.The Germanic people were a diverse group of migratory tribes with common linguistic and cultural roots who dominated much of Europe during the Iron Age. When the Roman Empire lost strength during the 5th century, Germanic peoples migrated into Great Britain and Western Europe, and their settlements became fixed territories. Various Germanic tribes migrated into Italy, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. Many Germanic tribes merged, including the Jutes with the Danes in Denmark, the Geats and Gutes with the Swedes in Sweden, and the Angles with the Saxons in England. The first Roman tribes were probably ethnic in origin and consisted of the Titienses (Tities), Ramnenses (Ramnes), and Luceres. They were superseded by the creation of new local tribes (date uncertain) consisting of 4 urban tribes and 16 rural, or rustic, tribes. To know the origin of the English language we should remember the introduction to special philology which gave the information about ancient Germanic languages and their structure. It has been estimated that there are more than 5,700 distinct languages to be found in the world to-day, and all these fall into linguistic groups which are part of linguistic families which may have appeared in different parts of the globe simultaneously.
2.Old English Grammar. Noun and pronoun. / Noun Classes. Like adjectives and pronouns, Old English nouns are declined: different endings are attached to the stem of a word, and these endings indicate what case a word belongs to (and therefore, what grammatical function that word is fulfilling in a sentence.Old English nouns are divided into three main groups, strong, weak, and "minor," based on the noun's stem and the endings that each noun takes in different grammatical cases.A useful rule of thumb is that nouns whose stems end with a consonant are strong, while nouns whose stems end with a vowell (except for "u") are weak (we'll go over the paradigms for weak nouns in the next chapter).The strong declension is itself subdivided into first, second, and third declensions, which are also called "masculine," "neuter," and "feminine." Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender; in the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders. Additionally, Old English pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, for example "we two" or "you two" or "they two"). These were uncommon even then, but remained in use throughout the period.Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case ēower became "your", ūre became "our", mīn became "mine".The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin, modern German or Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases. In addition, the dual was distinguished from the more modern singular and plural. Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when accusative and dative pronouns merged into a single objective pronoun."Who" and "whom", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", etc. are remnants of both the old nominative versus accusative and also of nominative versus dative. In other words, "her" serves as both the dative and accusative version of the nominative pronoun "she". In Old English as well as modern German, these cases had distinct pronouns.Personal pronouns in Old English had three persons, three numbers in the 1st and 2nd person, (two numbers in the 3rd) and three genders in the 3rd person. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person had suppletive forms like their parallels in other Indo-European languages. The pronouns of the 3rd person, having originated from demonstrative pronouns, had many affinities with the latter.