英语词汇学教程课件第3章English-Lexicology-3.ppt

1、Lecture ThreeThe Development of EnglishThe 5000 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.English belongs to the Indo-European family,which includes most of the languages of Europe,the Near East,an

2、d North India.One branch of the Indo-European family is called Italic,from which Latin and later the Romance languages developed.Another is called Germanic,which is subdivided into the North Germanic branch,the East Germanic branch and the West Germanic branch.English is one of the languages in the

3、West Germanic branch.Celts are believed to be the first people who inhabited the land that was later to become England.They came to the island around the middle of the fifth millennium BC.Their languages were yet another branch of the Indo-European language family.Most of the island of Britain was o

4、ccupied by the Romans from about 43 AD until 410 AD.When the Romans withdrew from Britain,they left behind many settlements with names such as Doncaster,Gloucester,Lancaster and Worcester-all derived in part from the Latin word castra camp.After the withdrawal of the Romans,the Angles,Saxons,and Jut

5、es moved into England in about 450 AD and began to take it over.It is at this time when the English language began.The Angles were named from Engle,their land of origin.Their language was called Englisc from which the word,English derives.English spread through the island.Yet,the Highlands of Scotla

6、nd still spoke their Celtic speech,Gaelic.Wales stuck to its native tongue,Welsh.At the very beginning of English as a separate language there was no one simple standard.By the 10th century,the West Saxon dialect became the official language of Britain.Written Old English is mainly known from this p

7、eriod.It was written in an alphabet called Runic.The Latin Alphabet was brought over from Ireland by Christian missionaries.This has remained the writing system of English.The early English settlers do not seem to have made much of an effort to understand the language of the Britons.They did not lea

8、rn many words from the Celts.The English added only a handful of Celtic words to their language,like clout,cradle,crock,dun,slough,cumb(valley),torr(hill).Place names formed a large group.Thames,Wye and Avon are Celtic river names,and so are some city names like York,London,Kent.These words came int

9、o English as the result of daily contact between Celt and Anglo-Saxon.However,the Celts did not directly affect the language.A few words were introduced by Irish missionaries,who taught the Anglo-Saxons words like ancor(hermit),cross,clugge(bill),mind(diadem),dry(magician).Because of these and other

10、 influences,the English vocabulary changed enormously and became the largest and most complex in the world,and the grammar changed its emphasis from inflections to word order.The Historical Periods of EnglishThe period from 450 to 1066 is known as Old English.From 1066 to 1500 the language is known

11、as Middle English.The language from 1500 to 1800 is considered the Early Modern English period.The language since 1800 is called Modern English.Old English Period(450-1066)Old English was the speech of the earliest Germanic inhabitants of Britain.The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely German

12、ic.When the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the higher classes,much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was replaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin.About 85 percent of the words in Old English are no longer i

13、n use.Those that survive are basic elements of our vocabulary.They make up a large part of any English sentence.Apart from pronouns,prepositions,conjunctions,auxiliary verbs,and the like,they express fundamental concepts like mann(man),wf(wife,woman),cild(child);weall(wall),mete(meat,food),laf(leaf)

14、,fugol(fowl,bird),gd(good),strang(strong),etan(eat),drincan(drink).A characteristic of Old English is the frequent use of coinages known as kennings,which refers to vivid figurative descriptions often involving compounds.Famous kennings include hronrad(whale-road for the sea),banhus(bone-house for a

15、 persons body).In kennings,phrases and compound words are often used.God,for example,is described as heofonrinces weard,guardian of heavens kingdom,and as mon-cynnes weard guardian of mankind.There are many differences between the way vocabulary was used in Old English and the way it is used today.F

16、irst,the Anglo-Saxon preference for expressions that are synonymous,or nearly so,far exceeds that found in Modern English.Second,the absence of a wide-ranging vocabulary of loanwords also forces them to rely more on word-formation processes based on native elements.Third,the latter period of Old Eng

17、lish was characterized by the introduction of a number of loan translations.These lexical items are translated part-by-part into another language,e.g.as superman was translated from German bermensch.Fourthly,grammatical relationships in Old English were expressed mainly by the use of inflectional en

18、dings.This period is sometimes described as the period of full inflections,because the endings of the noun,the adjective,and the verb are preserved more or less umimpaired.Finally,Old English is believed to contain about 24,000 different lexical items.Only about 3 per cent of words in Old English ar

19、e loanwords.Old English vocabulary was predominantly Germanic.The Middle English Period(1066-1500)The Middle English period was marked by extensive changes.In 1066 the Normans conquered Britain.The changes in this period affected English both in its grammar and its vocabulary.In grammar,English chan

20、ged from a highly inflected language to an analytical one.The English vocabulary was characterized by the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock and the addition of thousands of words from French and Latin.Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class,the words for mos

21、t domestic animals are English(ox,cow,calf,sheep,swine,deer)while the words for the meats derived from them are French(beef,veal,mutton,pork,bacon,venison).French also affected spelling so that the cw sound came to be written as qu(eg.cween became queen).The Germanic form of plurals(house,housen;sho

22、e,shoen)was eventually displaced by the French method of making plurals:adding an s(house,houses;shoe,shoes).Only a few words have retained their Germanic plurals:men,oxen,feet,teeth,children.In the 14th century,English became dominant in Britain again.By the end of the 14th century,the dialect of L

23、ondon had emerged as the standard dialect of what we now call Middle English.Chaucer wrote in this language.Inflections,which had begun to break down toward the end of the Old English period,were greatly reduced in Middle English.Thus,this period is also known as the period of leveled inflections.En

24、dings of the noun and adjectives marking distinctions of number,case and gender were lost.The generalized plural marker became-s,but it still competed with-n.Adjectives lost agreement with the noun,but the weak ending-e still remained.The comparative form became-er and the superlative became-est.The

25、 adverb ending-li became-ly;however,some flat adverbs did not add the-ly:fast,late,and hard.Middle English is particularly characterized by intensive and extensive borrowing from other languages.In particular the Norman Conquest of 1066 paved the way for a massive borrowing of French words into the

26、English vocabulary.Several French words(around 10,000)were borrowed into English between 1250 and 1500.Many of the words were related to government(e.g.sovereign,empire),law(e.g.judge,jury,justice,attorney,felony,larceny),social life(e.g.fashion,embroidery,cuisine,appetite)and learning(e.g.poet,logi

27、c,physician).Furthermore,the legal system retained parts of French word order(the adjective following the noun)in such terms as fee simple,attorney general and accounts payable.In early Middle English,over 90 per cent of the lexicon was of native English(Anglo-Saxon)origin.By the end of the Middle E

28、nglish period,this proportion had fallen to around 75 per cent.However,loanwords were by no means the only way in which the vocabulary of Middle English increased.The processes of word formation,such as compounding and affixation,which were already established in Old English,continued to be used,and

29、 were extended in various ways.Early Modern English Period(1500-1800)This period is the transitional period from Middle English to Modern English.The advent of the printing revolution marked its beginning.In 1476,William Caxton set up his press in Westminster.The printing press helped to standardize

30、 the spelling of English in its modern stages.Printing played a major role in fostering the norms of spelling and pronunciation.In the sixteenth century,scholars began seriously to talk about their language,making observations on grammar,vocabulary,the writing system and style.This period includes t

31、he Renaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century until around 1650.English vocabulary grew extremely fast during the period between 1530 and the Restoration in 1660.This period witnessed large-scale lexical growth through extensive borrowing and expansion of word-formation patterns.The major

32、source language was Latin,but loans from other languages,in particular French,were also frequent.Many words were added to English as writers created new words by using Greek and Latin affixes.Some words,such as devulgate,attemptate and dispraise,are no longer used in English,but several words were a

33、lso borrowed from other languages as well as from Chaucers works.The increase in foreign borrowings is the most distinctive feature of the Renaissance for English.Writers began to borrow from other European languages to express the new concepts,techniques and inventions that first came from Europe.W

34、ords also came into English from North America,Africa and Asia.Some came directly,while others came indirectly via other European languages.Furthermore,thousands of Latin and Greek words were introduced,especially in fields such as medicine and theology.There are two most important influences on the

35、 development of the English language during the last decades of the Renaissance:the works of William Shakespeare(1564-1616)and the King James Bible of 1611.Shakespeares poems and plays introduced or popularized thousands of new words in the language.There are many phrases in the King James Bible tha

36、t have entered the language as idioms,e.g.an eye for an eye,fight the good fight,if the blind lead the blind,a wolf in sheeps clothing,in the twinkling of an eye,money is the root of all evil,new wine in old bottles,the skin of my teeth,the straight and narrow,a thorn in the flesh.By 1750 most of th

37、e Old English irregular verbs had either dropped out of use or become regular:help and holp had become help and helped;wash and wesh had become wash and washed,etc.Some authors were writing blowed instead of blew,throwed instead of threw,etc.In this period,adjectives lost all endings except for in t

38、he comparative and superlative forms.The neuter pronoun it was first used as well as who as a relative pronoun.The class distinctions between formal and informal you were decreasing.The third person singular form became-(e)s instead of-(e)th.There was a more limited use of the progressive and auxili

39、ary verbs than there is now,however.Negatives followed the verb and multiple negatives were still used.Because of the rapid change of English,efforts were made to produce grammars,spelling guides,pronunciation manuals and dictionaries,from which it was expected that standards of correctness would em

40、erge.In 1604,Robert Cawdrey published the first dictionary of hard words,which had about 3000 entries of hard vsuall English wordes,mostly borrowings,such as abettors(counsellors),and abbruiat(to shorten).It was in fact the first synonym dictionary.In 1755,Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of

41、the English Language.This dictionary is the first attempt at a truly principled lexicography.It was also the first accurate description of the complexity of the lexicon and of word usage.The Modern English Period(1800-present)Jackson and Amvela(2000)characterize three main features of Modern English

42、 as the unprecedented growth of scientific vocabulary,the assertion of American English as a dominant variety of the language,and the emergence of other varieties known as New Englishes.Since the time of Shakespeare,English has continued to change.Settlers from Britain moved across the world-to the

43、USA,Australia,New Zealand,India,Asia and Africa,and in each place,the language changed and developed,and took in words from other local languages.With the increase in communication,travel,radio and television,all these different types of English have mixed.Words from many other languages-French,Germ

44、an,Spanish,Arabic,even Nepali-have been borrowed.So English continues to change and develop,with hundreds of new words arriving every year.English has become the language of science,air traffic control,the world of computers,and most of the Internet.English scientific and technical vocabulary has be

45、en growing steadily since the Renaissance.As a result of the industrial revolution and the subsequent period of scientific exploration and discovery,the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in this domain.Some sciences,such as chemistry,physics and biology,made spectacular lexical developm

46、ents during this period.As the USA emerged as one of the economic powers of the twentieth century,American English has become a dominant variety of the language.The characteristics of American English can be felt directly in the areas of pronunciation and grammar,but more especially at the lexical l

47、evel.American EnglishIn the early part of the seventeenth century English settlers began to bring their language to America.American English began simply as earlier British English.However,the new life,the new habits of thought,the new influences operative in America made the language spoken in Amer

48、ica unlike that spoken in England.Familiar English words were put to new uses.For example,robin was used for the American bird that somewhat resembles the English bird so name.Words from Indian languages were borrowed for animals,plants and artifacts never encountered in the mother country,e.g.shunk

49、,tomahawk,eggplant.They also added to English such words as hickory,persimmon,raccoons and woodchucks.Later they borrowed other words from settlers from other countries,e.g.chowder and prairie from the French,scow and sleigh from the Dutch.They also made new combinations of English words,such as bac

50、kwoods and bullfrog,or gave old English words new meanings,such as lumber(which in British English means approximately junk)and corn(which in British means any grain,especially wheat).The differences of vocabulary are the most striking.In American English Indian place-names are found,e.g.,Potomac,Ni