|
Have you ever wondered why some of the basic words in various European languages seem so similar?Why do doctors and botanists use so many words that are derived from Latin? Why are some words associated with the law based on French borrowings (treason, judge, court)?Why do the French themselves use English borrowings like le weekend or le parking? Why did Shakespeare and Chaucer use thou and thee and why don’t we today? Why are there these strange inconsistencies in English where -ough can be pronounced so many ways (bough, cough, tough, though, thorough, through)? The answers to these and other questions lie in where English words come from. The study of the historical development of the English vocabulary should not be treated in isolation from the history and the growth of the English language itself. Understanding the history may give us an insight into the nature of English: extremely rich and heterogeneous, a heavy borrower, full of synonyms, a global language. As useful preliminaries, we shall first place English in the context of world languages and discuss the historical development of English vocabulary from the Old English to the modern English periods.  The Indo-European Language Family The 5,000 or so languages of the world can be grouped into about 300 language families, on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammars. One of these families, the Indo-European includes most of the European languages spoken today, and English is also a member of this family. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: In the Eastern set, there are the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Indo-Iranian languages (Persian, Hindietc.). In the Western set, there are the Germanic languages (Swedish, German, English etc.); the Italic languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French etc.); the Celtic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish etc.); Hellenic (Greek).  Before 449 AD, the primary inhabitants of the British Isles were Celts, who had invaded from the east hundreds of years earlier and driven out earlier, non-Indo-European tribes. They spoke Celtic languages: Welsh, Manx, Gaelic, and Briton. In fact, before the Roman Empire began to seriously expand around 125 BC, most of Europe was inhabited by Celts. In 55 BC the Romans finally got around to invading Britain. Caesar’s first invasion wasn’t successful, but a century later Romans came again. They ruled southern Britain from 43 AD to 410 AD. The Celtic Britons under Roman rule were converted to Christianity by Roman missionaries, but they otherwise retained their own essentially separate identities and language during this period. The Romans left Britainin the late fourth and early fifth centuries, partly because their empire was under attack in mainland Europe from rebelling Germanic tribes: Goths, Franks and Vandals, all former Roman allies, were now attacking the Romans. In 410, Visigoths, led by their king, Alaric,burned Rome. The departure of the Romans left the Britons without the military shield they’d become used to. In that same year, 410, they were being attacked by Picts and Scots, other Celtic tribes who lived inScotland. The Britons begged Rome for military aid, but Rome had no resources to spare. The beleaguered Britons, looking around for allies, noticed that just across the Channel, three Germanic tribes—the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles—had military strength to spare. In 449 the Britons invited them to come over and help protect Britain against the northerners, in exchange for a piece of land in the east. Old English (450-1100) West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark, the Angles (whose name is the source of the words Englandand English), Saxons, and Jutes, began to settle in the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian—the language of the northeastern region of the Netherlands—that is called Old English, which has a vocabulary of 50,000 to 60,000. Four major dialects of Old English emerged, Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the Midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the Southeast. These invaders pushed the original, Celtic-speaking inhabitants out of what is now England into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, leaving behind a few Celtic words. These Celtic languages survive today in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Irelandand in Welsh. Cornish, unfortunately, is, in linguistic terms, now a dead language. Also influencing English at this time were the Vikings. Norse invasions and settlement, beginning around 850, brought many North Germanic words into the language, particularly in the north ofEngland. One example is the word dream, which had meant joy until the Vikings imparted its current meaning on it from the Scandinavian cognate draumr. The majority of words in modern English come from foreign, not Old English roots. In fact, only about one sixth of the known Old English words have descendants surviving today. But this is deceptive; Old English is much more important than these statistics would indicate. About half of the most commonly used words in modern English have Old English roots. Words like be, water, and strong, for example, derive from Old English roots.  Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, whose best known surviving example is the poem“Beowulf”, lasted until about 1100, shortly after the most important event in the development and history of the English language, the Norman Conquest. Middle English (1100-1500) William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered Englandand the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman.  Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language, mainly through vestiges of the Roman occupation and from the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the seventh century (ecclesiastical terms such as priest, vicar,and mass came into the language this way), but now there was a wholesale infusion of Romance (Anglo-Norman) words. The influence of the Normans can be illustrated by looking at two words, beef and cow. Beef, commonly eaten by the aristocracy, derives from the Anglo-Norman, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle, retained the Germanic cow. Many legal terms, such as indict, jury,and verdict have Anglo-Norman roots because the Normans ran the courts. This split, where words commonly used by the aristocracy have Romantic roots and words frequently used by the Anglo-Saxon commoners have Germanic roots, can be seen in many instances. Sometimes French words replaced Old English words; crime replaced firen, and uncle replaced eam; other times, French and Old English components combined to form a new word, as the French gentle and the Germanic man formed gentleman; other times, two different words with roughly the same meaning survive into modern English. Thus we have the Germanic doom and the French judgment, or wish and desire. In 1204, King John lost the province of Normandy to the King of France. This began a process where the Norman nobles of England became increasingly estranged from their French cousins.England became the chief concern of the nobility, rather than their estates in France, and consequently the nobility adopted a modified English as their native tongue. About 150 years later, the Black Death (1349-50) killed about one third of the English population. And as a result of this the laboring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance, and along with them English increased in importance compared to Anglo-Norman. This mixture of the two languages came to be known as Middle English. The most famous example of Middle English is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Unlike Old English, Middle English can be read, albeit with difficulty, by modern English-speaking people. By 1362, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. In that year, the Statute of Pleading was adopted, which made English the language of the courts and it began to be used in Parliament. The Middle English period came to a close around 1500 with the rise of Modern English. Early Modern English (1500-1800) The transition from Middle to Modern English is not marked by any specific cultural event but rather by a linguistic event: the Great Vowel Shift. This shift resulted in vowels either being raised on the vowel chart or becoming diphthongs. One way that vowels can be classified is according to how high the tongue is placed in the mouth when the vowel is articulated. What happened between Middle and Early Modern English is that in certain words, vowels began to be replaced by vowels pronounced higher in the mouth.  From the 16th century the British had contact with many peoples from around the world.This, together with the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published. Late Modern English (1800-Present) The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth’s surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries. The industrial and scientific revolutions created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries. For this, English relied heavily on Latin and Greek. Words like oxygen, protein, nuclear, and vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, but they were created from Latin and Greek roots. Such neologisms were not exclusively created from classical roots,though, English roots were used for such terms as horsepower, airplane, and typewriter. Also, the rise of the British Empire and the growth of global trade served not only to introduce English to the world, but to introduce words into English. Hindi, and the other languages of the Indian subcontinent, provided many words, such as pundit, shampoo, pajamas, and juggernaut. Virtually every language on Earth has contributed to the development of English, from Finnish (sauna) and Japanese (tycoon) to the vast contributions of French and Latin. With the continued development and prosperity of the colonies in America,India,Australia,Canada,New Zealand, and Africa, English became a true world language. Despite the variety, speakers of English are able to communicate with more people now than has ever before been possible. Among modern languages, English is now one of the superpowers. 本文选自 北京大学出版社出版 《英语词汇学教程》 作者：夏洋 邵林 |
|
|
