THE CURRENT PROBLEMS OF GERMANIC PHILOLOGY IN THE 21st CENTURY (A Panel Discussion Commemorating the 100th Birth Anniversary of Irina Alexandrovna Yershova)

: The publication contains a survey of the reports presented at the panel held in commemoration of the 100th birth anniversary of the well known Germanist I.A. Yershova, who taught at the Department of Germanic Philology since 1951. Among the panel were professors, teachers and postgraduate students of the Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology, as well as scholars from the Donetsk State University (L.N. Yagupova), the Samara National Research University (S.I. Dubinin) and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (N.S. Babenko, A.Y. Mankov). The memorial part was dedicated to I.A. Yershova’s pedagogical and academic achievements, and the Gothic seminar for postgraduate students that was lead by her. A number of reports were devoted to the problems of historical lexicology of Germanic languages. The comparison of Jan van Ruysbroek’s treatises written in Middle Dutch with their translations into Middle High German allowed to establish the reasons for choosing a synonym for the verb “stream” which was etymologically different from the original. Evidence was produced for the grammatical marking of the “original speaker’s” utterance by the use of the synthetic form of subjunctive I in modern literary German, particularly in the journalistic genre and the mass media. Corpus material was used to analyze the use and compatibility of the Middle High German lexeme gebët(e) in religious texts. The changes in the meaning of the Middle High German adjective heimlîch and its derivatives were shown on Middle and early New High German texts of Tristan tradition. Analysis was made of the equivalents for the Old Norse nouns describing landscapes in the translation of the Eddaic song “Skirnir’s Journey” into modern Scandinavian languages. Examined were Old Norse names for unusual animals, also used for naming “a walrus” and “a hippopotamus”. A survey of unpublished archive sources on the Swedish dialects of Estonia of the first half of the 20th century was presented. Examined were some of the development tendencies of the modern Scandinavian languages. Danish modal particles were analyzed in imperative speech acts as used in Danish translations from Russian. The phonomorphological potential of the final -s in Swedish was scrutinized; the influence of extralinguistic factors on the formation of new words in the Swedish language of the early 21st century was examined; the use of compounds in formal Swedish and the ways of translating them into Russian were demonstrated; the changes in the system of Danish pronouns, connected with the loss of coordination, were revealed.