大学英语综合教程 第二册 unit 7A

[05:41.05]some established the languages of India and Pakistan, and others drifted west toward the gentler climates of Europe.
[05:51.09]Some who made the earliest move westward became known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in Britain.
[06:00.57]New words came with the Germanic tribes-the Angles,the Saxons, etc
[06:07.60]that slipped across the North Sea to settle in Britain in the 52 century.
[06:14.26]Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.
[06:20.50]The Anglo-Saxons passed on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work.
[06:31.76]They must have also enjoyed themselves because they gave us the word laughter.
[06:38.71]The next big influence on English was Christianity.
[06:44.14]It enriched the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with some 400 to 500 words from Greek and Latin,
[06:52.53]including angel, disciple and martyr
[06:57.99]Then into this relatively peaceful land came the Vikings from Scandinavia.
[07:05.17]They also brought to English many words that begin withsk, like sky and skirt.
[07:13.32]But Old Norse and English both survived, and so you can rear a child (English) or raise a child (Norse).
[07:24.34]Other such pairs survive: wish and want, craft and skill, hide and skin.
[07:33.80]Each such addition gave English more richness, more variety.
[07:40.85]Another flood of new vocabulary occurred in 1066, when the Normans conquered England.
[07:48.79]The country now had three languages: French for the nobles, Latin for the churches and English for the common people.
[07:59.11]With three languages competing, there were sometimes different terms for the same thing.
[08:05.96]For example, Anglo-Saxons had the word kingly, but after the Normans,
[08:13.61]royal and sovereign entered the language as alternatives. The extraordinary thing was that French did not replace English.
[08:23.59]Over three centuries English gradually swallowed French,
[08:29.78]and by the end of the 15th century what had developed was amodified,
[08:36.39]greatly enriched language-Middle English-with about 10,000 "borrowed" French words.
[08:44.85]Around1476 William Caxton set up a printing press in England and started acommunications revolution.
[08:54.83]Printing brought into English the wealth of new thinking that sprang from the European Renaissance.
[09:02.25]Translations of Greek and Roman classics were poured onto the printed page,
[09:08.55]and with them thousands of Latin words likecapsule andhabitual, and Greek words like catastrophe and thermometer.
[09:18.52]Today we still borrow from Latin and Greek to name new inventions, like video, television and cyberspace. 
[09:28.74]As settlers landed in North America and established the United States,English found itself with two sources-American and British
[09:39.60]Scholars in Britain worried that the language was out of control,
[09:45.27]and some wanted to set up an academy to decide
[09:51.46]which words were proper and which were not. Fortunately their idea has never been put into practice.
[09:59.01]That tolerance for change also represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom.
[10:05.86]Danish scholar Otto Jespersen wrote in 1905, "The English language would not have been what it is
[10:14.77]if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual
[10:22.39]and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself."
[10:28.69]I like that idea. Consider that the same cultural soil producing the English language
[10:36.66]also nourished the great principles of freedom and fights of man in the modem world. The first shoots sprang up in England,
[10:46.53]and they grew stronger in America.
[10:50.53]The English-speaking peoples have defeated all efforts to build fences around their language.
[10:57.82]Indeed, the English language is not the special preserve of grammarians,language police, teachers,
[11:05.44]writers or the intellectual elite. English is, and always has been, the tongue of the common man.