A group of people speaking Old Norse who sacked the monasteries in the British Isles and who signed a PEACE treaty with King Alfred to settle on the island.
What are the Vikings?
100
The [r] is “rolled” and [k] and [g] at the beginning of words are pronounced.
What are some particularities of the Old English pronunciation?
100
It is an assumed prehistoric language (and therefore
extinct) from which various attested descendants have
sprung.
What is a protolanguage?
200
A theory according to which language started with words naming the things of the surrounding world by mimicking the sounds these things made.
What is the Natural Sound Source theory?
200
English, Yiddish, Dutch, German.
What are some Germanic languages?
200
What are the two ways in which the Christian Church and Latin contributed to Old English?
By creating such words as altar and mass and introducing the Latin alphabet (to replace ultimately the runic alphabet).
What are the two ways in which the Christian Church and Latin contributed to Old English?
200
It functions with cases, the order in which words appear is flexible and strong and weak forms of adjectives are distinguished.
What are some grammatical and syntactic particularities of Old English?
200
A law that shows that (p), (k), (d) and (g) in Indo-European languages became became (f) , (h), (t), (k) in Germanic languages.
What is the Grimm's law?
300
A theory according to which human beings developed (through evolution) some physical features that distinguished them from primates and enabled them to speak.
What is the physical adaptation source theory?
300
A language in which the function of a word is “encoded” in its ending.
What is a synthetic language?
300
People who spoke various dialects of a unified German language and whose descendants conceived of themselves and their language as englisc.
Who are the Angles, Saxons and Jutes?
300
It brought words that start with the sound [sk].
What is the influence of Old Norse on Old English?
300
A method where equivalents from different languages are compared to see if there share any similarities in order to postulate a common ancestor.
What is the linguistic comparative method?
400
A theory according to which humans developed a capacity for language as they developed their motor skills in building tools because the speech center in the brain is closely connected to the zone dealing with complex movement.
What are some languages from Proto-Indo-European family (PIE)?
400
War, law and food.
What are the main spheres of the influence of Old French on Old English?
400
The final [e] as well as [k] and [g] at the beginning of words are not pronounced anymore.
What are some features of Early Modern English?
400
A reason for change in language that is rooted in the human beings' need for order and patterns.
What is analogy?
500
A theory according to which language originated with the mimicking of sounds of spontaneous emotional responses.
What is the Natural Sound Source theory?
500
A language in which a word’s grammatical function is conveyed through its position in a sentence.
What is an analytical language?
500
Moose, moccasin, turban, bungalow.
What are some words borrowed from different nations following the period of colonization?
500
The endings of Old English progressively disappear and [h] before a consonant is not pronounced anymore.
What are some features of Middle English?
500
A reason for change in language that is rooted in people's tendency to reinforce the words they use when these appear too short, not powerful enough or prone to creating some ambiguity.
What is the reason for change "emphasis and clarity"?