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UNIT 7
Learning about English
Part I Pre-Reading Task
Listen to the recording two or three times and then think over the following questions:
1. What is the passage about?
2. What's your impression of the English language?
3. Can you give one or two examples to illustrate（说明）the messiness of the English language?
4. Can you guess what the texts in this unit are going to be about?
The following words in the recording may be new to you:
eggplant
n. 茄子
pineapple
n. 菠萝
hamburger
n. 汉堡牛肉饼，汉堡包
Part II
Text A
Some languages resist the introduction of new words. Others, like English, seem to welcome them. Robert MacNeil looks at the history of English and comes to the conclusion that its tolerance for change represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom.
THE GLORIOUS MESSINESS OF ENGLISH
Robert MacNeil
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.
French, for example, has only about 75,000 words, and that includes English expressions like snack bar and hit parade. The French, however, do not like borrowing foreign words because 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 supposed to say instead — but they don't.
Walkman is fascinating because it isn't even English. Strictly speaking, it was invented by the Japanese 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, the first truly globallanguage.
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 present in the first words a child learns about identity (I, me, you); possession (mine, yours); the body (eye, nose, mouth); size (tall, short); and necessities (food, water). These words all come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon English, the core of our language. Usually short and direct, these are words we still use today for the things that really matter to us.
Great speakers often use Old English to arouse our emotions. For example, during World War II, 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."
Virtually every one of those words came from Old English, except the last — surrender, 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.
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 those languages came from is still a mystery, but there is a theory.
Two centuries ago an English judge in India noticed that several words in Sanskrit closely resembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed that many modern languages descended from a commonparent language, lost to us because nothing was written down.
Identifying similar words, linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language, spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C. These people had common words for snow, bee and wolf but no word for sea. So some scholars assume they lived somewhere in north-central Europe, where 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.
New words came with the Germanic tribes — the Angles, the Saxons, etc. — that slipped across the North Sea to settle in Britain in the 5th century. Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.
The Anglo-Saxons passed on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work. They must have also enjoyed themselves because they gave us the word laughter.
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 and martyr.
Then into this relatively peaceful land came the Vikings from Scandinavia. They also brought to English many words that begin with sk, like sky and skirt. But Old Norse and English both survived, and so you can rear a child (English) or raise a child (Norse). Other such pairs survive: wish and want, craft and skill, hide and skin. Each such addition gave English more richness, more variety.
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 15th century what had developed was a modified, greatly enriched language — Middle English — with about 10,000 "borrowed" French words.
Around 1476 William Caxton set up a printing press in England and started a communications revolution. Printing brought into English the wealth of new thinking that sprang from the European Renaissance. Translations of Greek and Roman classics were poured onto the printed page, and with them thousands of Latin words like capsule and habitual, and Greek words like catastrophe and thermometer. Today we still borrow from Latin and Greek to name new inventions, like video, television and cyberspace.
As settlers landed in North America and established the United States, English found itself with two sources — American and British. Scholars in Britain worried that the language was out of control, and some wanted to set up an academy to decide which words were proper and which were not. Fortunately their idea has never been put into practice.
That tolerance for change also represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom. Danish scholar Otto Jespersen wrote in 1905, "The English language would not have been what it is if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself."
I like that idea. Consider that the same cultural soil producing the English language also nourished the great principles of freedom and rights of man in the modern world. The first shoots sprang up in England, and they grew stronger in America. The English-speaking peoples have defeated all efforts to build fences around their language.
Indeed, the English language is not the special preserve of grammarians, language police, teachers, writers or the intellectual elite. English is, and always has been, the tongue of the common man.
(1155 words)
