2020-2021学年人教版（2019）选择性必修第一册 英语的起源-学案.docxVIP

选择性必修一 英语的起源 英语的起源（上） When we talk about English, we often think of it as a single language but what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other or with the writing of Chaucer? And how are any of them related to the strange words in Beowulf? The answer is that like most languages, English has evolved through generations of speakers, undergoing major changes over time. By undoing these changes, we can trace the language from the present day back to its ancient roots. While modern English shares many similar words with Latin-derived romance languages, like French and Spanish. Most of those words were not originally part of it. Instead, they started coming into the language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066.When the French-speaking Normans conquered England and became its ruling class. They brought their speech with them, adding a massive amount of French and Latin vocabulary to the English language previously spoken there. Today. We call that language Old English. This is the language of Beowulf. It probably doesnt look very familiar, but it might be more recognizable if you know some German. That’s because Old English belongs to the Germanic language family, first brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles Saxons and Jutes. The Germanic dialects they spoke would become known as Anglo-Saxon. Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from Old Norse into the mix. It may be hard to see the roots of modern English underneath all the words borrowed from French, Latin, Old Norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by focusing on grammatical structure, patterns of sound changes and certain core vocabulary. For example, after the 6th century, German words starting with p systematically shifted to a pf sound while their old English counterparts kept the p unchanged. In another split, words that have sk sounds in Swedish developed an sh s