[资料]大连海事英语专业词汇学 左秀兰

Chapter 2 The sources of the English Vocabulary;The English people are of a mixed blood. At the beginning of the fifth century Britain was invaded by three tribes from the Northern Europe: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. ;These three tribes landed on the British coast, drove the Britons west and north and settled down on the island. ;These three three tribes merged into one people: the English people and the three dialects they spoke naturally grew into a single language: the English language.;A Historical Overview of the English Vocabulary;English can be roughly divided into: Old English, Middle English Modern English.;Old English (450---1150) Middle English ( 1150---1500) Modern English (1500---Now); The Germanic tribes called angles, Saxons, and Jutes came in about 450 AD. Soon they took permanent control of the land, which was to be called England. Their language, historically known as Anglo-Saxon, dominated and almost totally blotted out the Celtic. ;Celtic made only a small contribution to the English vocabulary with such words as crag(颈,喉) and bin and some place names like Avon, Kent, London. Now people generally refer to Anglo-Saxon as old English. ;Two events in the Old English Period:;In the 9th century: the land was invaded again by Norwegian and Danish Vikings. They came first to plunder, then to conquer. Finally they succeeded in placing a Danish king on the throne of England. With the invaders, many scandinavian words came into English.;It is estimated that at least 900 words of Scandinavian origin have survived in modern English, such as skirt, skill, window, leg, grasp, birth, they ,their, them and egg.;Old English has a vocabulary of about 50,000 to 60,000 words. It was a highly inflected language just like modern German. Therefore, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs has complex endings or vowel changes, or both.;Foreign Influence on the old English;Germanic Influence;Influence of Latin;Scandinavian Influence