大学英语 2 Unit 7温柔的反义词是什么
The story of our English language is typically one of massive stealing from other languages. That is why English today has an estimated vocabulary of over one million words, while other major languages have far fewer.
2 French, for example, has only about 75,000 words, and that includes English expressions 新公共服务like snack bar and hitparade. The French, however, do not like borrowing foreign words becau they think it corrupts their language. The government tries to ban words from English and declares that Walkman is not desirable; so they invent a word, balladeur, which French kids are suppod to say instead—but they don't.
3 Walkman is fascinating becau it isn't even English. Strictly speaking, it was invented by the Japane manufacturers who put two simple English words together to name their product. That doesn't bother us, but it does bother the French. Such is the glorious messiness of English. That happy tolerance, that willingness to accept words from anywhere, explains the richness of English and why it has become, to a very real extent, th
e first truly global language.
4 How did the language of a small island off the coast of Europe become the language of the planet—more widely spoken and written than any other has ever been? The history of English is prent in the first words a child learns about identity (/, me, you); posssion (mine, yours); the body (eye, no, mouth); size (tall, short); and necessities (food, water). The words all come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon English, the core of our language. Usually short and direct, the are words we still u today for the things that really matter to us.
5 Great speakers often u Old English to arou our emotions. For example, during World War n, Winston Churchill made this speech, stirring the courage of his people against Hitler's armies positioned to cross the English Channel: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."
6 Virtually every one of tho words came from Old English, except the last均田制的内容—surrend
er, which came from Norman French. Churchill could have said, "We shall never give in," but it is one of the lovely—and powerful— opportunities of English that a writer can mix, for effect, different words from different backgrounds. Yet there is something direct to the heart that speaks to us from the earliest words in our language.
7 When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C., English did not exist. The Celts, who inhabited the land, spoke languages that survive today mainly as Welsh. Where tho languages came from is still a mystery, but there is a theory.
8 Two centuries ago an English judge in India noticed that veral words in Sanskrit cloly rembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed that many modern languages descended from a common parent language, lost to us becau nothing was written down.鸡排
9 Identifying similar words, linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language, spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C. The people had common words for snow, bee and wolfbut no word for a. So some scholars assume they lived so
mewhere in north-central Europe, where好喝的酸奶 it was cold. Traveling east, some established the languages of India and Pakistan, and others drifted west toward the gentler climates of Europe. Some who made the earliest move westward became known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in Britain.
10 New words came with the Germanic tribes—the Angles, the Saxons, etc.—that slipped across the North Sea to ttle in Britain in the 5th century. Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.
11 The Anglo-Saxons pasd on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work. They must have also enjoyed themlves becau they gave us the word laughter.女肉畜
12 The next big influence on English was Christianity. It enriched the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with some 400 to 500 words from Greek and Latin, including angel, disciple Fenton试剂and martyr.
13 Then into this relatively peaceful land came the Vikings from Scandinavia. They also brought to English many words that begin withs&, like sky andskirt. But Old Nor and English both survived, and so you can rear a child (English) or rai a child (Nor). Other such pairs survive: wish and want, craft and skill, hide and skin. Each such addition gave English more richness, more variety.
14 Another flood of new vocabulary occurred in 1066, when the Normans conquered England. The country now had three languages: French for the nobles, Latin for the churches and English for the common people. With three languages competing, there were sometimes different terms for the same thing. For example, Anglo-Saxons had the word kingly, but after the Normans, royal and sovereign entered the language as alternatives. The extraordinary thing was that French did not replace English. Over three centuries English gradually swallowed French, and by the end of the 15th400ai century what had developed was a modified, greatly enriched language—Middle English—with about 10,000 "borrowed" French words.
