HELL

Pick an Indo-European language with the biggest number of native speakers

Spanish, English, Hindi-Urdu, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi & Russian

Most of the words beginning with sk- are of which origin?

Old Norse (Scandinavian)

What must be included in a tone unit?

Tonic syllable

Which tone conveys a strong feeling of approval, disapproval or surprise?

Rise-fall

Which language is the most prominent representative of the Eastern Germanic sub-branch?

Gothic, Burgundian & Vandalic

The Vikings were called 'Ashmen' by which group of language speakers?

Germanic Groups

Which language left significant traces on the English language in the form of loanwords connected with law, warfare, sea and maritime crafts, words of everyday usage, such as bank, sister and place names with endings like –by, -thorpe, –thwaite, –toft?

Old Norse

On what materials were runes usually written and how did it impact the writing system?

Eggjum stone, Rök stone

What is Grimm's law?

Consonant change (It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages)

What, according to Verner's law, explains irregular changes in the Proto-Germanic language?

Consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives f , þ , s , h , hʷ , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives β , ð , z , ɣ , ɣʷ

Why is the Gothic translation of the Bible important for linguists?

It preserves "fossilized" grammatical features of Proto-Germanic and early Indo-European that disappeared in all other modern Germanic languages

What is comparative linguistics?

the study of similarities and differences between languages, in particular the comparison of related languages with a view to reconstructing forms in their lost parent languages.

Which languages can be classified as West Germanic Languages?

English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German, Yiddish, Scots, Luxemburgish & Frisian languages

How is the modern English morphology different from the morphology of old Germanic languages?

Fewer inflections (relies more on word order), loss of grammatical gender, simplified case system, no dual pronouns

What are language isolates?

natural language that has no demonstrable genealogical relationship with any other known language

What is a language family?

A group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language

How many living human languages are approximately distributed across language families?

Around 7,097

Which of the following best describes genetic (genealogical) relationship between languages?

Languages descended from a common ancestor

English belongs to which major language family?

Indo-European

Which group do Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian belong to?

North Germanic

What is one of the most obvious types of sound change mentioned in the lectures?

Loss and addition of a phoneme

Which sound change is illustrated by the shift from OE “hnecca” to NE “neck”?

Assimilation

Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law are important for the history of which language branch?

Germanic languages

What originally defined the term “Viking”?

A pirate or raider seeking wealth through robbery

From which region did most early Viking attacks on the British Isles originate?

Denmark

What marks the beginning of a new phase in Anglo-Saxon history?

The arrival of St Augustine’s mission in 596

Which writing systems were used in post-Roman Britain before the dominance of the Latin alphabet?

Runic and Ogham

What is one shared innovation of the Northwest Germanic languages (all but Gothic)?

Lowering of /u/ to /o/ before /a/ (a-Umlaut)

What was the main purpose of monasteries and scriptoria in early Anglo-Saxon England?

Centres of culture, education, and manuscript production

Which of the following is NOT a typical West Germanic language?

Icelandic