英语词汇学-chapter2解析.docVIP

The Development of the English Vocabulary英语词汇的发展 In the study of words, it is important to know about the origin and growth of the vocabulary. The vocabulary of the language develops as the language develops. The English language is not the language of the early inhabitants 住户of the British Isles岛. But where does it come from? Why is it known as English? In what way is English related to other languages? What is the size of the vocabulary of the first settlers殖民者? How has it developed into what is now a huge modern vocabulary? This chapter will give an answer to all these questions. 2.1 The Indo-European Language Family印欧语系 It is assumed that the world has approximately 3,000(some put it 5,000) languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammer. The Indo-European is one of them. It is made up of most of the languages of Europe, the Near East, and India. The prehistoric Ingo-European parent language is thought to be a highly inflected language. It was a language in which the various forms of a given word showed its relationship to other words in a sentence When groups of this language moved away from the original homeland, believed to be somewhere in the easternmost part of Europe, the language of each group grew and developed along different lines in much the same way that American and Australian English now show differences from the language of England. Over very long periods of complete isolation from each other these dialects of a single language changed so much that they became separate languages. Speakers of one were not understood by speakers of another. 假定世界上有将近三千（一些人说是五千）种语言，可以在词储和语法相似的基础上分为将近300个语系。印欧语系是其中之一。它包括欧洲，近东，和印度的大多数语言。史前印欧语系的父语被认为是一种高度转折的语言。在这语言中一个给定单词的不同形式表示在句子中它和其他词的关系。当这种语群离开发源的大陆。相信是欧洲东部的某地，每个语群的语言沿着不同的道路发展，很多和现在美国和澳洲英语与英国的英语区别相似。经过漫长的时间完成分离独立的任务，这些同一种语言的不同方言改变了很多，以至于变成了独立的语言。一种语言的使用者不能被其他语言的使用者所理解。 The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to on