Lecture 2《英语词汇学》第二章教案

English Vocabulary：A Historical Perspective 计划学时：2 periods

教学方法：传统讲授法

参考资料：《英语词汇学教程》、《英语词汇学》 Lecture 2

教学目的和要求：通过本单元的学习，让学生对英语词

汇的形成和发展有初步的了解。

教学重点：

1) The Indo-European Language Family;

2) A Historical Overview of the English Vocabulary.

教学难点：

1) The language family English belongs to; 2) Growth of present-day English vocabulary.

1. The Eight Language Families in the World It is assumed that the world has approximately 5,615 languages. And on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammar, they can be grouped into roughly the following language families: Sino-Tibetan (汉藏语系), Indo-European (印欧语系),Semito-Hamitic (闪含语系), Bantu (班图语系), Uralic (乌拉尔语系), Altaic (阿尔泰语系),Malaya-Polynesian (马来—波利尼西亚语系)and Indian (印第安语系).

2. Indo-European language family

And Indo-European language family falls into eight principal groups: Indo-Iranian group (印度-伊朗语族); Slavic (斯拉夫语族- Russian and Polish ); Armenian (亚美尼亚语族); Hellenic (古希腊语族); Italic (意大利语族); Celtic (凯尔特语族); Albanian (阿尔巴尼亚语族); Germanic (日尔曼语族).

3. Germanic Language Group Germanic, which consists of three branches: North Germanic, East Germanic, and West Germanic. The North Germanic branch is the linguistic ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages, viz (即). Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. The East Germanic developed into Gothic (哥特语，现已不复存在). The West Germanic branch developed into Modern German, Dutch, Frisian（弗里斯兰语，荷兰西北部） and English.

4. A Historical Overview of the English Vocabulary ※① Britons: The early inhabitants of the land we

now call England were Britons, a tribe of Celts. From the Britons the island got its name of Britain, ‘ the land of Britons ’. The Britons were a primitive people living in the tribal society. They were pided into dozens of small tribes, each of which lived in a clustering of huts. Their languages were dialects of still another branch of the Indo-European--Celtic.

② Latin: The second major language known in England was the Latin of the Roman Legions. In 55 BC, the Romans invaded the Britain under the commander of Julius Caesar, the great Roman general, and for nearly 400 years Britain was under the Roman occupation. When the Roman empire began to crumble, the Germanic tribes came in. As the invading tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) took over and settled in Britain, the Celtic languages gradually retreated. As a result, Celtic made only a small contribution to the English vocabulary with such words as crag, bin and a number of place names like Avon, Kent, London, Themes. English Vocabulary：A Historical Perspective

The history of the English language is pided into three periods. The Old English (450-1100)

The Middle English (1066-1500)

The Modern English (1500-present)

After the Romans, the Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons and Jutes came in great numbers. Soon they took permanent control of the land, which was to be called England-- the land of Angles ’’ (盎格鲁人之岛). Their language, historically known as Anglo-Saxon (盎格鲁—萨克逊语), now people generally refer to Anglo-Saxon as Old English. Old English has a vocabulary of about 50,000 to 60,000 words. About 85% of Old English words are no longer in use. Many words can not be recognized as still part of modern English vocabulary, some we may have made some connection with modern English (1) The Old English (449-1066)

vocabulary, taking some words used in Old English poem Beowulf, the most important work of Old English, as example: ealle—all; ond—and; giganta—giant; lange—long; Gode—God; wis (wis)—with; mann---man; hus—house; weall—wall. Old English was a highly inflectional language just like modern German. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs had complex endings or vowel changes.

Old English began to undergo a great change when the Normans (2) Middle English: 1066—1500

invaded English from France in 1066. Until then, although there were borrowings from Latin, the influence on English was mainly Germanic. But the Norman Conquest started a continual flow of French words into English. Between 1250 and 1500 about 9000 words of French origin poured into English. 75% of them are still in use today. We can find words relating to every aspects of human society, e.g. government, social scales, law, religion, moral matters, military affairs, food, fashion and so on. Words such as: state, government, power, prince, duke, judge, court, crime, angel, mercy, peace, battle, fry, roast, dress, coat are just a few in frequent use.

1066年法国诺曼（底）人入侵英国，英国人是被征服人，但没有被斩尽杀绝，而是被降为下等公民。到13世纪末，英语逐渐回到学校、法庭和政府部门，重新获得社会地位。

随着威克利夫 (Wycliff) 用英语翻译《圣经》，以及乔叟、朗兰 (Langland) 等人用英语进行文学创作，英语最后返到重要位置，并作为一门重要的文学语言而受到尊重。 During this period, Britain had trade relations with the low countries, especially Holland（荷兰）. As a result, as many as 2,500 words of Dutch （荷兰语） origin found their way into English, e.g. deck, easel, freight, landscape, boom, etc.

Middle English retained much fewer inflections. Endings of nouns and adjectives marking distinction of number, case lost their distinctive forms. The same is true of the verb. If we say that Old English was a language of full endings, Middle English was one of leveled language.

On the whole, Middle English is closer to Modern English and it is easier for us to identify, although there are still some words that we have to straggle over. The following words are chosen from William Langland’s Piers Plowman : nall—how; wip—with; lippy—lip; pat—that; wolde—world; smyte—smite; hym—him; staf—staff; pynke—think.

(3) Modern English (1500—up to now) Many scholars consider the revolution of printing in English, which as the beginning point for the period of Modern English. Modern English is usually subpided into Early (1500—1700) and Late (1700—up to the present) Modern English. In the early period of Modern English, Europe saw a new upsurge of learning ancient Greek and Roman classics, which was known in history as the Renaissance. As a result, over 10,000 new words entered the English language, many of them were taken from Latin and Greek. Latin：habitual, exist, emphasis, external, pneumonia, etc. Greek ：lexicon, criterion, tonic, anonymous, gorilla, etc. The late Modern English period runs from the beginning of the 19th century to the present. English vocabulary of this period may be characterized by three main features: ①almost complete loss of endings, ② the unprecedented growth of scientific vocabulary, ③the assertion of American English as a dominant variety of the language.

※ Gradual loss of endings of English Old English Middle English Modern English leorn-ian lern-en learn

mon-a mone-e moon stan-as ston-es stones sun-ne sun-ne sun sun-u sun-e son

5. Growth of Present-day English Vocabulary Today new words sweep in at a rate much faster than at any other historical period of time. New words are being invented or introduced every day to express new things and new changes in society, both material and intellectual. Generally, there are three main sources of new words:

(1) Rapid growth of science and technology breeds such new words as: green revolution (绿色革命), astrobiology (天体生物学), astrochemistry (天体化学), lasercomp—激光照排, pressure cooker 高压锅, deepfreeze 快速冷冻, space shuttle (航天飞机), moon walk (月球行走), parking orbits, pen heart surgery (心内直视手术), smart bomb (激发制导炸弹), fall-out (放射性坠尘), irradiation (光渗、辐照) software, hardware, input, output, memory, on line, to process, internet cafeteria, online communication, e-mail, cyberspace, data base, programming, virtual communities…

(2) Social, economic and political change bring about an in creasing number of new words:fast food, TV dinner (加热即食的盒装电视便餐), soy milk (豆奶), Granny glasses (老奶奶眼镜), hip huggers (裤腰低及臀部的紧身上裤), disco, punk rock, soul music (爵士灵歌), talk shows (访谈节目), family movies (家庭影院), Watergate (水门), demand-pull (通货膨胀), open-university, Chairperson (主席-妇女解放运动), girlcott (抵抗、抵制), Mary Jane (大麻), soft drug (软毒品), the Fourth World—第四世界(最贫穷国家), shuttle diplomacy 穿梭外交.

(3) The influence of other cultures and languages: stir frying (煸炒), tahini (芝麻酱), falafel (豌豆泥加洋葱) 炸豆丸子, Mao jakets (毛式服装，人民装), aikido (合气道), dojo (柔道、空手道). Karaoke (Japanese), avant-garde (文学创作上的先锋派), black humor (French), cosmonaut, sputnik (Russian), paper tiger, Red Guards, open-door policy, Kungfu, Renminbi, tofu, wok (中国式的铁锅), typhoon, brainwashing (Chinese).

6. Modes of Vocabulary Development（词汇的发展方式）

On the basis of the discussion so far in this chapter, we can conclude that modern English vocabulary develops through three channels: Creation, Semantic change, borrowing.

① Creation（创词）: refers to the formation of new words by using the existing materials, namely roots, affixes and other elements. In modern times, this is the most important way of vocabulary expansion. And it will be discussed in the lecture to follow.

②Semantic（旧词新义） Change: means an old form which takes

on a new meaning to meet the new need. This does not increase the number of word forms but create many new usages of the words, thus enriching the vocabulary. This will be discussed later. ③Borrowing（借词） has played a vital role in the development of vocabulary, particularly in earlier times. Though still at work now, it can hardly compared with what it did in the past. According to the statistics, borrowed words constitute merely six to seven percent of all new words.

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