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Germanic languages

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when traced back to the earliest records. This suggests that they all derive from a still earlier common ancestor, which is traditionally referred to as Proto-Germanic and which is believed to have broken from the other Indo-European languages before 500 B.C. Although no writing in Proto-Germanic has survived, the language has been substantially reconstructed by using the oldest records that exist of the Germanic tongue. The Germanic languages today are conventionally divided into three linguistic groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. This division had begun by the 4th cent. A.D. The East Germanic group, to which such dead languages as Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic belong, is…
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Full text Article Germanic languages

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic languages are closely related; moreover, they become progressively closer grammatically and lexically when…
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Full text Article Germanic languages

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Branch of the Indo-European language family, comprising languages descended from Proto-Germanic. These are divided into West Germanic, including English , German , Frisian , Dutch , Afrikaans , and Yiddish ; North Germanic, including Danish , Swedish , Icelandic , …
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Full text Article Germanic languages

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Branch of the Indo-European language family, divided into East Germanic (Gothic, now extinct), North Germanic (Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish), and West Germanic (Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Flemish, Frisian, German, Yiddish). The Germanic languages differ from the other Indo-European…
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Full text Article Germanic languages

From Philip's Encyclopedia
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Full text Article Indo-Germanic languages

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
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Full text Article Gothic language

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Gothic has special value for the linguist because it was recorded several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all the other…
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Full text Article gold

From Word Origins
Gold gets its name from its colour. The perception of what this is has varied. In the ancient Germanic languages, red was often used as a poetic epithet for ‘gold’, and in English this survives into the present day as an archaism. And Latin aurum ‘gold’, source of French or and Italian and Spanish…
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Full text Article Dutch

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
a. Of or relating to the Netherlands or its people or culture. b. Of or relating to the Dutch language. Archaic a. German. b. Of or relating to any of the Germanic peoples or languages. Of or relating to the Pennsylvania Dutch. n. …
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Full text Article eleven

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
The cardinal number equal to 10 + 1. The 11th in a set or sequence. Something with 11 parts or members, especially a football team. [Middle English elleven, from Old English endleofan; see oi-no- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] e•lev'en adj. & pron. Word History: It is fairly easy to…
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Full text Article Stiernhielm, Georg

From Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature
(b. 1598–d. 1672) Swedish scholar, poet A Swedish Renaisssance man , Stiernhielm mastered much of his epoch's body of knowledge as it related to archaeology, jurisprudence, the ancient and modern Germanic languages, Greek, Latin, mathematics, natural science, and philosophy. He came to be regarded, …
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