At first glance, there may seem little reason to think of English
and German as variant forms of a single language. There are
enormous differences between the two in pronunciation, vocabulary,
and grammar, and a monolingual speaker of one cannot understand the
other at all. Yet modern English and German have many points in
common, and if we go back to the earliest texts available in the
two languages, the similarities are even more notable. How do we
account for these similarities? The generally accepted explanation
is that English and German are divergent continuations of a common
ancestor, a Germanic language now lost. This book surveys the
linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the earliest kown Germanic
languages, members of what has traditionally been known as the
English family tree: Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old
Frisian, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German. For each
language, the author provides a brief history of the people who
spoke it, an overview of the important texts in the language,
sample passages with full glossary and word-by-word translations, a
section on orthography and grammar, and discussion of linguistic or
philological topics relevant to all the early Germanic languaes but
best exemplified by the particular language under consideration.
These topics inclued the pronunciation of older languages; the
runic inscriptions; Germanic alliterative pietry; historical
syntax, borrowing, analogy, and drift; textual transmission; and
dialect variation.
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