hi, i have to write an essay on the following topic:

What do you understand by the term 'Germanic Language'? In what ways does Old English reveal itself to be 'Germanic'?

Please help, i dont have a clue where to start!

Thanx

Some informtion here:

[www.wordorigins.org] />
[www.krysstal.com] />

Les

A germanic language is any of the languages derived from Germanic (which in its turn is one of the Indo-European languages). It includes among others english, dutch, german, swedish, danish, and frisian.

They all have some things in common (especially in their older forms):

-cases (nominativ, genitiv, dativ and accusativ, and before even some more). This old english surely has and you can write loads of essays on that topic.

- word order. (if there are cases, the word order tends to be more "free". But be careful, there are still rules. Also check out whether old english is a SOV or SVO language (Subject Object Verb or Subject Verb Object)

-Stress (germanic language are stress based, whereas latin languages tend to be length based (all the syllables have the same length). The placing of stress can actually change the meaning of the word and/or sentence.

- pronunciation. Old english is before the great vowel change in the 16 hundreds. That means the pronounciation of the vowels was very similar to modern german and dutch (and probably the other germanic languages, but I can't vouch for those).

If you give me an outline of what you want to focus on, I'll be more than happy to help you further, but I won't be available until monday.