十分钟英国史字幕.docxVIP

【The History of English in Ten Minutes】No.1 Anglo-SaxonThe History of English in Ten Minutes. Chapter 1. Anglo-Saxon or whatever happen to the Jutes.The English language begins with the phrase ‘Up Yours Caesar!’ as the Romans leave Britain and a lot of Germanic tribes start flooding in, tribes such as the Angles and the Saxons – who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jutes – who didn’t.The Romans left some very straight roads behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Anglo-Saxon vocab was much more useful as it was mainly words for simple everyday things like ‘house’, ‘woman’, ‘loaf’ and ‘werewolf’.Four of our days of the week - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were named in honour of Anglo-Saxon gods, but they didn’t bother with Saturday, Sunday and Monday as they had all gone off for a long weekend. While they were away, Christian missionaries stole in bringing with them leaflets about jumble sales and more Latin. Christianity was a hit with the locals and made them much happier to take on funky new words like ‘martyr’, ‘bishop’ and ‘font’.Along came the Vikings, with their action-man words like ‘drag’, ‘ransack’, ‘thrust’ and ‘die’, and a love of pickled herring. They may have raped and pillaged but there were also into ‘give’ and ‘take’ – two of around 2000 words that they gave English, as well as the phrase ‘watch out for that man with the enormous axe.’【The History of English in Ten Minutes】No.2 The Norman ConquestThe History of English in Ten Minutes. Chapter Two, The Norman Conquest or Excuse My English.1066. True to his name, William the Conqueror invades England, bringing new concepts from across the channel, like the French language, the Doomsday Book and the duty-free Galoiss multipack.French was de rigueur for all official business, with words like judge, jury, evidence and justice coming in and giving John Grishams career a kick-start. Latin was still used ad nauseam in church, but the common man spoke English, able to commun