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1、 The Development of English VocabularyBroadly speaking, all the words in a language together constitute what is known as its vocabulary. Just as a building cannot be constructed without the building materials, no language is conceivable without vocabulary. In the study of words, it is important to k
2、now about the origin and growth of the vocabulary. The English language is not the language of the early inhabitants of the British Isles. Where does it come from? Why is it known as English? In what way is English related to other languages? How many periods is English been divided? How has it deve
3、loped into what is now a greatly huge modern vocabulary? This article will give answers to these questions.It is assumed that the world has approximately 3000 languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammar. The In
4、do-European is one of them. English is the most important language in the Indo-European. The study of the historical development of the English vocabulary should not be treated in isolation from the growth of the English language itself. The history of the English language begins with the conquest a
5、nd settlement of what is now England by the Angles, Saxons and the Jutes from about 450AD. The language they spoke was Anglo Saxon, which replaced the Celtic spoken by the former inhabitants. The next seven hundred years (449-1100) are known as the Old English (OE) or Anglo-Saxon (AS) period of the
6、English language. The vocabulary of Old English contains some fifty or sixty thousand words, which were chiefly Anglo-Saxon with a small mixture of Old Norse words as a result of the Scandinavian or the Danish conquests of England in the ninth century. Besides these, long before their invasion of En
7、gland the Angles and Saxons had had various contacts with Romans, through which they borrowed a considerable number of Latin words. During most of this period the case endings of the noun, the adjective, and the conjugation of the verb were not wakened.The transitional period from Old English to Mod
8、ern English is known as Middle English (ME1100-1500), which is character by the strong influence of French following the Norman Conquest in 1066. Since the French-speaking Normans were the ruling class, French was used for all state affairs and for most social and cultural matters; but the masses co
9、ntinued to speak English. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century did English become once more the language of the whole country. However, the language the emerged at that time showed vast and significant changes in the English vocabulary-the loss of a large part of the Old English word-stock
10、and the adoption of thousands of French words. At the same time, Latin words continued to come in, but in small numbers. The very core of the vocabulary, however, remained English. The English were defeated but not kill off, nor were they driven from their country. The situation of three languages (
11、French, Latin, English) existing simultaneously continued for over a century. Between 1250 and 1500 about 9,000 words of French origin poured into English. 75% of them are still in use today. However, by the end of the 13th century, English gradually came back into the schools, the law courts, and g
12、overnment and regained social status. Middle English retained much few inflections. Endings of nouns and adjectives marking distinction of number, case and often of gender lost their distinctive forms. The same is true of the verb.The English language from 1500 to the present is called Modern Englis
13、h. Modern English began with the establishment of printing in England. Considering the changes in vocabulary, it is necessary to subdivide into Early Modern English (1500-1700) and Late Modern English (1700- ). In the early period of Modern English, a new upsurge of learning ancient Greek and Roman
14、classics-the Renaissance brought great to the vocabulary. In the period, the studies of classics were stressed and the result was the wholesale borrowing from Latin. (The Latin loan words were now mostly connected with science and abstract ideas, and many of them have become part of the everyday spe
15、ech of the English people. The renewed study of Greek in the Renaissance not only led to the borrowing of Greek words indirectly through the medium of Latin, but also led to the introduction of some Greek words directly into the English vocabulary. From the sixteenth century onward, English borrowed
16、 words from an increasing number of languages, the major ones being the three Romance languages, French, Spanish and Italian. Besides these resources, English also adopted words from other European languages, such as, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Russian. The late Modern English period started after 1770. From the mid-seventeenth century, England experienced the Bourgeois Revolution followed by the Industrial Revolution and rose to be a great economic power. With the growth of co
