Learning goals
The aim of the course is:
- to provide students with basic knowledges of languages, civilization, culture and history of the different Germanic peoples in Late Antiquity and Middle Ages;
- to analyze the importance and the development of the mutual linguistic and cultural interferences due to the contacts between the Latin Romance civilizations and the Germanic ones;
- to study in deep the peculiarity and the development of the different linguistic areas, with focus on the origins of the English language and the German language;
- to provide students with basic means for comprehension and for linguistic and philological analysis of a text.

Expected learning outcomes
Knowledges and understandigs:
At the end of the foundamental course the students will be able:
• to recognize the peculiar linguistic features of the Germanic languages;
• to understand the phonetic, morphological and lexical structures of the old Germanic languages and their evolution in the modern Germanic languages (English and German);
• to understand the mutual linguistic interferences between Romance languages and Germanic languages in a diachronic perspective;
• to know basic notions on history, law, society and culture of the Germanic peoples, with focus on that peoples and languages from which English and German came from.
• to know the beginnings of medieval literature in the Germanic languages (Gothic, Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Norse);
• to understand the translation process from Latin to Germanic vernacular languages;