Language:

According to Edward Sapir language can be defined as:

"Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols."

Language Family:

Definition:

A language family can be defined as a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family or the set of languages deriving from a common ancestor is known as language family.

The grouping of languages can be classified on the basis of the following two classes:

1-     Typological classification: it is the classification of the languages on structural similarities such as vocabulary, syntax, sounds, grammar, semantics and pronunciation.

2-     Historical classification: it is the classification of the languages on the base of the historical similarities.

From all the other families The Indo-European family is the most important and is spoken by almost three billion native speakers which is the largest number for any recognised language family. The Indo-European family accordingly falls into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian.

BALTO-SLAVIC Family:

Introduction:

The Balto-Slavic languages are spoken mainly in Eastern Europe; they were not attested until late in the first millennium AD. There are two major groups: Baltic, and Slavic. These two are generally agreed to be closely related to one another and, as a whole, they have always been spoken in the same geographic area, ranging from what is now eastern Germany to modern-day Russia. However, Baltic languages have exchanged "popularity" with Slavic languages: Baltic languages were originally spoken over a much wider area than is now the case, and Slavic languages were originally spoken in a much smaller area. Nowadays, the territory occupied by speakers of Slavic languages has expanded considerably, whereas the territory dominated by speakers of Baltic languages has shrunk to a very small region.

So we have two major language groups in Balto-Slavic Family:

·        Baltic Group

·        Slavic Group

Baltic Group:

History:

The earliest known writings in Baltic languages were quite recent compared to the earliest writings in other Indo-European languages. However, it is known that the Baltic languages were spoken as early as the late Bronze Age from Poland to the Ural Mountains in western Russia. They seem to have been very influential in Eastern Europe, and they were involved in trade with other peoples. For example they interacted with Finnic peoples to the north, who borrowed many words from Baltic languages; these words included agricultural or farming-related terms, kinship terms, and technologies. The territory occupied by Baltic Languages became smaller due to Gothic and Slavic migrations and, later, to invasions by the Teutonic Knights (German Crusaders).

The Baltic Languages are three in Numbers:

1.      Prussian

2.      Lettish

3.      Lithuanian

1. Prussian:

            Prussian language is now extinct in this group as this language having been displaced by German Language since the seventeenth century. So, we can say that Prussian Language is wiped out and German language has taken its place.

2. Lettish:

            Lettish language belongs to the Baltic Branch of the Indo-European Group. Lettish Language is spoken by the people in Lativa and it is their official language. Lettish language is also known as Latvian. It is the language of about two million people in Latvia. Latvian first appeared in Western print in the mid-16th century with the reproduction of the Lord's Prayer in Latvian in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia Universalis, in Roman script.

3. Lithuanian:

            Lithuanian is spoken by about three million people in the Baltic State of Lithuania. It is important among the Indo-European Languages because of its conservatism. The Lithuanians controlled a large empire, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from 1362 to 1569. The earliest written materials in Baltic Languages appeared only after this empire collapsed.

 It is sometimes said that a Lithuanian peasant can understand certain simple phrases in Sanskrit. While the statement implies too much, Lithuanian preserves some very old feature which have disappeared from practically all the other languages of the family. Therefore, although the Baltic languages were attested very late, their conservative nature makes them useful in Indo-European historical linguistics.

Slavic Group:
History:

          The similarities among the various languages of the Slavic group indicate that as late as the seventh or eighth century of the Christian era they were practically identical or at least were united by frequent intercourse. At the present time they fall into three divisions: East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic. The first two still cover contiguous areas, but the South Slavic in the Balkan peninsula, are now separated from the rest of by a belt of non-Slavic people, the Hungarians and the Romanians.

            The earliest form in which we possess a Slavic Language is a part of the Bible and certain liturgical texts translated by thy missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The language of these texts is South Slavic, but is probably approximates with considerable closeness with the common Slavic from which all the Slavic Languages have come. It is known as Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian and it continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and indeed well into modern times as the ecclesiastical language of the Orthodox Church.

There are three divisions of Slavic group:

1.      East Slavic

2.      West Slavic

3.      South Slavic

1. East Slavic:

East Slavic languages were so strongly influenced by Old Church Slavonic

that they did not become distinct until the 13th century and there were no large numbers of literary works in distinct East Slavic languages until about 1600. The East Slavic Languages includes the following languages:

·        Great Russian

·        White Russian

·        Little Russian or Ukrainian

Great Russian:

            Chief of East Slavic Languages is Great Russian and it is the Language of over 200 million people. It is found throughout the north, east, and central parts of the Soviet Union. It was formerly the court language and it is still the official and literary language of the country.

White Russian:

White Russian is the language of about 9 million people in the Belorussian S.S.R and adjacent parts of the Poland. It was the official language of the Lithuanian principality afterwards merged in Poland and hence was under strong Polish influence.

Little Russian or Ukrainian:

            Ukrainian or Little Russian is spoken by about 40 million people in the south. Nationalist ambitions in the past have led the Ukrainians to stress the difference between their language and Russian, a difference which, from the point of view of mutual intelligibility, causes some difficulty with the spoken language. The Little Russian dialect claims to be a literary language; it has established this claim in Galicia, but its use as such is much restricted in Russia.

            Great, White and Little Russian constitute the largest and the most important group of the Slavic Languages.

2. West Slavic:

West Slavic languages are those that have been least influenced by Old Church Slavonic; this is because Old Church Slavonic spread from the region of the Southern Slavs, and Hungary separated speakers of Western Slavic languages from that region. In addition, Old Church Slavonic was the liturgical (religious) language of the East Orthodox Church. Since speakers of West Slavic languages were converted to Roman Catholicism rather than to East Orthodox Christianity, Latin was generally used as their liturgical language instead of Old Church Slavonic. The earliest full-length texts in West Slavic languages generally seem to date to the 14th century.

           

West Slavic language includes four languages:

·        Polish

·        Czech

·        Slovak

·        Sorbian or Wendish

Polish:

            Out of the four West Slavic Languages, Polish is the largest spoken language by about 36 million people within Poland, by about three million in the United States, and by smaller numbers in the Soviet Union and other countries. Polish is the third most widely spoken Slavic Language today and the most widely spoken West Slavic Language.

Czech:

            Czech is the one of the official languages of Czechoslovakia and is spoken by about 10 million people.

Slovak:

            Slovak is the other official language spoken in Czechoslovakia and it is spoken by about 5 million people.

Sorbian or Wendish:

            Sorbian or Wendish is spoken by only a little over 100,000 people in Germany, in a district a little northeast of Dresden.

3. South Slavic:

            Like the East Slavic languages, the South Slavic languages were strongly influenced by Old Church Slavonic. In fact Old Church Slavonic is often considered to be a South Slavic language, though it also seems to be closely related to the Proto-Slavic language from which all Slavic languages descended. The first modern South Slavic language to be written appears to be Slovenian, in the 10th century.

South Slavic Languages include:

·        Bulgarian

·        Serbo-Croatian

·        Solvenian

Bulgarian:

            Old Bulgarian was spoken in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula when the region was overrun by a non-Slavic race. But the conqueror was absorbed by the conquered and adopted his language. Modern Bulgarian has borrowed extensively from Turkish for the language of everyday use, while the literary language is even more heavily indebted to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian:

            Serbo-Croatian represents the Union of Serbian, formerly the language of Serbia. Croatian, spoken before World War I by the Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. The two languages are practically identical.

Solvenian:

            Solvenian is spoken by about a million and a half people at the head of the Adriatic. Serbo-Croatian and most of the Solvenian are within the territory of Yugoslavia.

Conclusion:

            Balto-Slavic group constitute a more homogeneous group than the languages of some of the other branches. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to the period of common development.

Characteristics of Old English

Introduction:

Old English is an old form of the English language that was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. An Examination of the words in an Old English dictionary shows that about 85 percent of them are no longer in use.

            The English Language has undergone so many changes that one cannot read Old English without special study. Following are some important characteristics of Old English.

Spelling and Pronunciation:

            Spellings and Pronunciation of Old English words commonly differs somewhat from that of their modern equivalents. In Old English the vowels were different from that of Modern English. Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs; ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions.

Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts. Long vowels in particular have undergone considerable modification. The Old English word stān is the same word as Modern English stone. Some other examples are: rāp—rope, bāt — boat.

Other vowels have also undergone some changes for example; changes in fōt (foot), cēne (keen), metan (mete), but the identity of these words with their modern descendants is still readily apparent.

            There was a difference of spellings in Old English as compared to Modern English. Old English made use of two characters to represent the sound of th: Þ and ð, as in the words wiÞ (with) or ðā (then). Old English represented the sounds of sh by sc, as in scēap (sheep) or scēotan (shoot), and the sound of k by c, as in cynn (kin) or nacod (naked).

Vocabulary:

The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Germanic. A large part of this vocabulary, moreover has disappeared from the language. When the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the higher classes, much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was displaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin. Many of these words were inherited by English together with some other Indo-European languages from the same common source.

Old English   New English      Latin          Russian

modor            mother              mater          мать

niht                night                 nox            ночь

neowe            new                   novus        новый

beran              bear                  ferre           брать

Some words were inherited by English and other Germanic languages from the same common Germanic source.

Old English    New English German

eorQe             earth              Erde

land               land               Land

Grammar:

            One of the important feature of the Old English that distinguishes it from Modern English is of its grammar. Inflectional languages falls into two classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one which indicates the relation of words is a sentence largely my means of inflections while the languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic language and Old English is a synthetic language. Old English resembles Modern German in its grammar. Old English inflections can be illustrated as below:

• The Noun:

              The inflection of the Old English noun indicates distinctions of number (singular and plural) and case. There are four main grammatical cases in Old English, known by the Latin terms; Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. The Nominative is used for the Subject, the Accusative is used for the Direct Object, the Genitive is used to express possession and the Dative is used for the Indirect Object. Old English nouns had grammatical gender, singular and plural number, and were also classified as "strong" or "weak" according to the distinctness of their inflectional endings.

Example:

            Singular

Nominative                 stān                  gief-u                hunt-a
Accusative                  stān                  gief-e                hunt-an
Genitive                      stān-es             gief-e                hunt-an
Dative                                     stān-e               gief-e                hunt-an

Plural

Nominative                 stān-as             gief-a                hunt-an
Accusative                  stān-as             gief-a                hunt-an
Genitive                      stān-a               gief-a                hunt-ena
Dative                         stān-um            gief-um hunt-um

It can be seen from these examples that the inflection of the noun was much more elaborate in Old English than it is today.

• Grammatical Gender:

                       The gender of Old English is not dependent upon considerations of sex. Old English nouns belong to one of three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. stān is masculine, cwēn ‘queen’ is feminine and wīf ‘wife’ is a neuter.

• The Adjective:

                      One of the features that distinguish Germanic languages is the use of two sets of declension for adjectives; one the strong declension used with nouns when not accompanied by a definite article or similar word and the other the weak declension, used when the noun is preceded by such a word. Same is the case with the Old English for example we have in Old English gōd mann (good man) and sē gōda mann (the good man). We can have another example; the good kings, as opposed to Good kings, or the kings are good.

• The Definite Article:

                     Old English possessed a fully inflected definite article just as in German Language which is its sister language of today. Following is an example of the definite article in Old English:

                                              Masculine         Feminine         Neutral

Nominative                               sē                      sēo                 ðæt

The ordinary meaning of sē, sēo, ðæt is ‘the’, the word is really a demonstrative pronoun and survives in the Modern English demonstrative that.

• The Personal Pronoun:

                    In Old English Personal pronouns had first, second and third person forms; singular, dual, and plural numbers and were declined according to the standard cases i.e. nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative.

Singular                                Nominative       Accusative      Genitive          Dative

1st person                              ic                        mē                    mīn                   mē

2nd person                             þū                       þē                    þīn                    þē

3rd person masculine.             hē                       hine                  his                    him

3rd person feminine.               hēo                     hīe                    hire                   hire

3rd person neutral.                 hit                       hit                     his                    him

In the nominative case, the Old English forms are; ic ("I"), þū ("you" singular), hē ("he"), hēo ("she"), hit ("it"), we ("we"), gē ("you" plural), hie ("they"). Old English not only shows having tendency in distinctive forms for practically all genders, persons and cases but also in preserving in addition to the ordinary two numbers, singular and plural and a set of forms for two people or two things – the dual number for example in the nominative case, “wit” (we two).

·        The Verb:

               Old English verbs have only two tenses: present and past. The present tense was also used for the future, while the past perfect was signalled by the past tense with the adverb ǣr ‘formerly’: Ic lufode ‘I loved’, Ic lufode ǣr ‘I had loved’. However, Old English verbs also have three moods: the Indicative, used for statements of fact (I love him), the Imperative, used for commands (Love me!), and the Subjunctive, used for hypothetical statements (If I loved you) and reported speech (He said he loved me).

            A peculiar feature of the Germanic Languages was the division of the verb into two great classes, the weak and the strong, often known in Modern English as regular and irregular verbs, the weak verbs are those that require 'ed' at the end but the vowel remain same, and strong verbs are those in which vowel is changed or modified. Example of weak verb is walk, walked, walked and the example of strong verb is sing, sang, sung.

• Self-explaining Compounds:

                    These are the compound words that are formed by combining two individual words having individual meanings, to form one new word, such as, railroad, steamboat and drying room etc. in Old English many words were formed on this pattern, Such as word lēohtfæt meaning lamp (lēoht=light + fæt = vessel). Similarly medu-heall(mead-hall), dægred(dawn). As a result of this pattern old English seemed to never have been at a loss for a word.

• Prefixes and Suffixes:

                        A part of the flexibility of the Old English vocabulary comes from the generous use made of prefixes and suffixes to form new words from old words or to modify or extend the root idea. In this respect it also resembles modern German. Some examples of Suffixes are –ig, –full, –lēas, –lice, –nes and –ung. Some adjective suffixes are: –sum (wynsum) and –wis (rihtwis).

            Some prefixes that are frequently used in Old English are; ā_, be_, for_, fore_, ge_, mis_, of_, ofer_, etc. Thus with the help of prefix, the verb 'settan'(to set) can become 'āsettan'(place), besettan(appoint) etc.

Conclusion:

            Old English Language has many differences as compared to the Modern English Language. The main differences which we noticed between Old and Modern English concern spelling and pronunciation, the vocabulary and the grammar.

The Romantics outline

1.     William Wordsworth

·        Ode to duty

·        Ode on the intimations of immortality

·        Excursion

·        Prelude

·        Lyrical Ballad

·        Small happenings of Country Life

·        The talk of doings and feelings of ordinary people

2.     S.T Coleridge

·        The Ancient Mariner

·        Kubla Khan

·        Christabel

·        Ode to dejection

·        Ode to France

3.     Robert Southey

·        Thalaba

·        Madoc

·        The curse of Kehana

·        Don Spain Roderick

4.     Walter Scott:

·        Marmion

·        Lady of lake

·        Lady of the last minstrel

·        Rokeby

·        The lost of Isles

5.     Lord Byron

·        Hours of Idleness

·        English bards and Scottish reviewers

·        Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

·        The prisoner of Chillon

·        Don Juan

6.     P.B Shelley

·        Queen Mab

·        The Revolt of Islam

·        Alastor or the spirit of Solitude

·        Prometheus unbound

·        The Cenci

·        Swell foot

·        The Tyrant

·        Epipsychidion

·        Adonais

·        Hellas

·        The triumph of life

·        Ozymandias

7.     John Keats

·        Sensousness

·        Love of beauty

·        Hellenism

·        Endymion

·        Isabella

·        The Eve of St.Agnes

·        The Eve of the St. Mark

·        Ode to Nightingale

Pre-Raphaelite Group outline

1.     D.G Rossetti

·        Ballads

·        Translated Dante’s famous work

·        And translated some fragments of old Italian Poets

2.     Christina Rossetti

·        Short Poems

·        Goblin Market

3.     William Morris

·        Life and Death of Jason

·        The earthly paradise

·        The defense of governors

·        By the way

4.     A.C Swinburne

·        Poems and Ballads

·        Tristam of Lyonese

·        Critical works

5.     George Meredith

• Modern Love
• Poems and Lyrics of the joy of Earth
• Reading of Earth
• Odes

Mid Victorian Novel outline

1.     Mrs. Gaskell

·        Marry Barton

·        North and South

·        Ruth

·        Cranford

2.     Charles Kingsley

·        Yeast

·        Alton

·        Hypatia

·        Westward. Ho

3.     George Elliot

·        The Mill on the floss

·        Adam Bede

·        Scenes from Clerical life

4.     Wikkie Colins

·        The woman in white

·        Moonstone

5.     Anthony Trollope

·        The Warden

·        The Barchester Tower

6.     George Meredith

·        The showing of Shagpot

·        The Ordeal of Richard Feveral

·        Vittoria

·        Beauchamp’s Career

·        Egoist

·        Diana of the Cro