Brьder Grimm

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine Sumy State University Ye. V. Popova Regional Linguistics and Geography of English Speaking Countries LECTURE NOTES Sumy Sumy State University 2016 0 Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine Sumy State University Regional Linguistics and Geography of English Speaking Countries LECTURE NOTES for students of specialty 6.020303 “Philology” of full-time course of study Approved at the meeting of the Department of Germanic Philology as lecture notes on discipline “Research Work”. Minutes № 2 from 06.09.2016. Sumy Sumy State University 2016 1 Regional Linguistics and Geography of English Speaking Countries : lecture notes / compiler Ye. V. Popova. – Sumy : Sumy State University, 2016. – 125 p. Department of Germanic Philology 2 CONTENT P. INTRODUCTION……………………………………….. 4 The UK Lecture 1. History of Great Britain………………………. 5 Recommended Resources………………………. 21 Lecture 2. The UK Today and Tomorrow………..……… 22 Recommended Resources………………………. 35 Lecture 3. The UK System of Government……….……... 36 Recommended Resources………………………. 46 Lecture 4. The System of Education in Great Britain…… 47 Recommended Resources………………………. 57 Lecture 5. Cultural Life in the UK………………............. 58 Recommended Resources………………………. 69 The USA Lecture 6. History of the USA…………………………… 70 Recommended Resources………………………. 82 Lecture 7. The USA as They Are………………………... 83 Recommended Resources………………………. 94 Lecture 8. The US System of Government……….……… 95 Recommended Resources………………………. 104 Lecture 9. The System of Education in the USA………... 105 Recommended Resources………………………. 113 Lecture 10. Cultural Life in the USA……………............. 114 Recommended Resources………………………. 124 3 INTRODUCTION Lecture notes are designed for lecture classes in “Culturally Oriented Linguistics of English Speaking Countries” for the students of the first year within specialty 6.020303 “Philology” of the full- time course of study. The lecture notes contain thematic materials revealing basic information on geography, political and educational structures of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America. The designed lecture notes are: – to give basic information about two countries, homelands of two variants of the English language (British English and American English); – to deepen the knowledge of students within geography, history, political and educational systems of the two countries; – to develop the skill of language analysis due to the background knowledge on the geography, history, political and educational systems of the two countries; – to find historical and political threads within cultures of the two countries as the basic aspect for further successful translation/interpretation from and into English; – to develop the skills of foreign language comprehension and audio perceiving. The present issue of the lecture notes may be used as an additional source of studying material not only for “Practical Course of English” but also for “Practice of Translation”, “Stylistics”, “Lexicology” and “History of the English Language. 4 Lecture 1 HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN Prehistoric period Britain has not always been an island. It became one only after the end of the last ice age. The temperature rose and the ice cap melted, flooding the lower-lying land that is now under the North Sea and the English Channel. The Ice Age was not just one long equally cold period. There were warmer times when the ice cap retreated and colder periods when the ice cap reached as far south as the River Thames. Our first evidence of human life is a few stone tools, dating from one of the warmer periods, about 250,000 BC. The ice advanced again and Britain became hardly habitable until another milder period, probably around 50,000 BC. During this time a new type of human being seems to have arrived, who was the ancestor of the modern British. These people looked similar tо the modern British but were probably smaller and had a life span of only about thirty years. Around 10,000 BC, as the Ice Age drew to a close, Britain was peopled by small groups of hunters, gatherers and fishers. Few had settled homes, and they seemed to have followed herds of deer which provided them with food and clothing. By about 5000 BC Britain had finally become an island and had also become heavily forested. For the wanderer-hunter culture this was a disaster, for the cold-loving deer and other animals on which they lived largely died out. About 3000 BC Neolithic (or New Stone Age) people crossed the narrow sea from Europe. They probably came from either the Iberian (Spanish) peninsula or even the North African coast. They were small, dark, and long-headed people, and may be the forefathers of dark-haired inhabitants of Wales and Cornwall today. These were the first of several waves of invaders before the first arrival of the Romans in 55 BC. After 3000 BC the chalk land people started building great circles of earth banks and ditches. 5 Inside, they built wooden buildings and stone circles. These "henges", as they are called, were centers of religious, political and economic power. Stonehenge was produced by a culture that left no written records. Many aspects of Stonehenge remain the subject to debate. A number of myths surround the stones. Stonehenge was built in separate stages over a period of more than a thousand years. It was almost certainly a sort of capital, to which the chiefs of other groups came from all over Britain. Around 700 BC, another group of people began to arrive. Many of them were tall and had fair or red hair and blue eyes. These were the Celts, who probably came from central Europe or further east, from southern Russia, and had moved slowly westwards in earlier centuries. The Celts were technically advanced. They knew how to work with iron and could make better weapons than the people who used bronze. It is possible that they drove many of the older inhabitants westwards into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Celts began to control all the lowland areas of Britain, and were joined by new arrivals from the European mainland. They continued 6 to arrive in one wave after another over the next seven hundred years. The Celts are important in British history because they are the ancestors of many of the people in Highland Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall today. The Iberian people of Wales and Cornwall took on the new Celtic culture. Celtic languages, which have been continuously used in some areas since that time, are still spoken. The British today are often described as Anglo-Saxon. It would be better to call them Anglo-Celt. The Celtic tribes were ruled over by a warrior class, of which the priests, or Druids, seem to have been particularly important members. These Druids could not read or write, but they memorized all the religious teachings, the tribal laws, history, medicine and other knowledge necessary in Celtic society. We know little of their kind of worship except that at times it included human sacrifice. During the Celtic period women may have had more independence than they had again for hundreds of years. When the Romans invaded Britain two of the largest tribes were ruled by women who fought from their chariots. The most powerful Celt to stand up to the Romans was a woman, Boadicea. Romans The name "Britain" comes from the word "Pretani", the Greco-Roman word for the inhabitants of Britain. The Romans mispronounced the word and called the island "Britannia". The Roman province of Britannia covered most of the present-day England and Wales. In 55 BC, the Roman general Julius Caesar lands in Britain with an expeditionary force, wins a battle, and leaves. The first “date” in popular British history. And only in 43 AD the Romans come to stay. The Romans established a Romano-British culture across the southern half of Britain but could not conquer "Caledonia", as they called Scotland, although they spent over a century trying to do so. At last they built a strong wall along the northern border, named after 7 the Emperor Hadrian who planned it. At the time, Hadrian's Wall was simply intended to keep out raiders from the north. But it also marked the border between the two later countries, England and Scotland. Hadrian's Wall, also called the Roman Wall, Picts' Wall, or Vallum Hadriani in Latin, was a defensive fortification in the Roman province of Britannia, begun in 122 AD during the reign of the emperor Hadrian. It ran from the banks of the River Tyne near the North Sea to the Solway Firth on the Irish Sea. It had a stone base and a stone wall. There were mile castles. There was a fort about every five Roman miles. From north to south, the wall comprised a ditch, wall, military way and vallum (another ditch with adjoining mounds). It is thought that the mile castles were staffed with static garrisons, whereas the forts had fighting garrisons of infantry and cavalry. In addition to the wall's defensive military role, its gates may have been used as customs posts. The Romans brought the skills of reading and writing to Britain. The written word was important for spreading ideas and also 8 for establishing power. While the Celtic peasantry remained illiterate and only Celtic-speaking, a number of town dwellers spoke Latin and Greek with ease, and the richer landowners in the country almost certainly used Latin. But Latin completely disappeared both in its spoken and written forms when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the 5th century AD. Britain was probably more literate under the Romans than it was to be again until the fifteenth century. Thus, the remarkable thing about the Romans is that, despite their long occupation of Britain, they left very little behind. Most of their villas, baths, temples, their impressive network of roads and cities, including Londinium (London), were soon destroyed or fell into disrepair.

Load more