英语发展史1

The history of a language is intimately bound up with the history of the peoples who speak it. Political, social, and cultural forces influence a language. These forces shape the language in every aspect, most obviously in the number and spread of its speakers, and in what is called “sociology of language,” but also in the meanings of words, in the accents of the spoken language, and even in the structure of the grammar.

Influences at Work on Language

• The Roman Christianizing of Britain in 597 brought England into contact with Latin civilization and

made significant additions to the vocabulary of English. • The Scandinavian invasions resulted in a considerable mixture of the two peoples and their languages. • The Norman Conquest made English for two centuries the language only of the lower classes while the

nobles and those associated with them used French on almost all occasions. • When English once more regained supremacy as the language of all elements of the population, it was an

English greatly changed in both form and vocabulary from what it had been in 1066.

• The hundred years’ war, the rise of an important middle class, the Renaissance, the development of

England as a maritime power, the expansion of the British Empire, and the growth of commerce and industry, of science and literature, have, each in their way contributed to the development of the language.

Growth and Decay

When a language ceases to change, we call it a dead language. Classical Latin is a dead language.

The change that is constantly going on in a living language can be most easily seen in the vocabulary. Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meaning.

Nice in Shakespeare’s day meant foolish.

English as a World Language

That the world is fully alive to the need for an international language is evident from the number of attempts that have been made to supply that need artificially.

The official languages of the United Nations are English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Now more scientific research is probably published in English than in any other language, and the preeminence of English in commercial use is undoubted.

A Family of Languages

A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancester, called proto-language of that language.

Most of the world's languages are known to belong to language families. Those that are not (or for which any family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are isolate languages.

Indo-European Languages

The Indo-European languages are a family (or phylum) of several hundred related languages and dialects,[1] including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia (安纳托利亚(亚洲西部半岛小亚细亚的旧称)and Central Asia. Attested since the Bronze Age, in the form of Mycenaean Greek and Anatolian languages, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the longest recorded history after the Afro-Asiatic family.

The languages of the Indo-European group are spoken by approximately three billion native speakers, the

largest number of the recognised families of languages. (The Sino-an family has the second-largest number of speakers.)

Branches of the Indo-European Family Tree

India Iranian

Armenian (亚美尼亚语)

Hellenic (希腊语[he’li:nik]) Albanian Italic

Balto-Slavic 波罗的海(斯拉夫)语系 Germanic日尔曼语言

Celtic凯尔特人(语): formed at one time one of the most extensive groups in the Indo-European family. At the beginning of Christian era the Celts were found in Gaul and Spain, in Great Britain, in western Germany and northern Italy. Hittite 希泰语

Tocharian: 吐火罗语族 the language of this people, known from records in a N Indian script of the 7th and 8th centuries ad.