Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1 (A), University of Duisburg-Essen (Indo-European Languages), course: History of Linguistics, language: English, abstract: In this essay I will try to show similarities and differences between English and Serbo-Croatian, and to find out how it is possible, that this two languages, the one spoken in Northern Europe, the other in South-Eastern Europe, could have a common "ancestress". First I will give a survey about the historical development of the young science of linguistics in general - from the first so-called grammarians` in the antiquity up to nowadays linguistic theories, advanced by some famous linguists. Here I will mention names of persons, who left some important ideas for the following generation of linguists, especially for the comparative Indo-European studies. Then I will describe the origin of the Germanic and the Slavic language groups. This will be followed by a few words about the origin especially of English and Serbo-Croatian, and further by a description of the characteristics of the Standard forms. After some explanations about the pronunciation, the phonology, the morphology and the basic word formation and grammer patterns, I will sum up, if there are etymological connections between nowadays English and Serbo-Croatian.