[00:00.00]Some languages resist the introduction of new words. Others,like English,seem to welcome them.
[00:10.76]Robert MacNeil looks at the history of English and comes to the conclusion
[00:18.13]that its tolerance for change represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom.
[00:25.31]THE GLORIOUS MESSINESS OF ENGLISH  by Robert MacNell
[00:32.16]he story of our English language is typically one of massive stealing from other languages.
[00:40.23]That is why English today has an estimated vocabulary of over one million words,
[00:46.76]while other major languages have far fewer.
[00:51.51]French, for example, has only about 75,000 words, and that includes English expressions like snack barand hit parade.
[01:02.69]The French, however,do not like borrowing foreign words because they think it corrupts their language.
[01:11.24]The government tries to ban words from English and declares that Walkman is not desirable;
[01:19.23]so they invent a word, balladeur, which French kids are supposed to say instead but they don't.
[01:27.75]Walkman is fascinating because it isn't even English. Strictly speaking,
[01:35.14]it was invented by the Japanese manufacturers who put two simple English words together to name their product.
[01:43.47]That doesn't bother us, but it does bother the French. Such is the glorious messiness of English.
[01:52.51]That happy tolerance, that willingness to accept words from anywhere,
[01:59.07]explains the richness of English and why it has become, to a very real extent, the first truly global language.
[02:09.33]How did the language of a small island off the coast of Europe become the language of the planet
[02:16.70]more widely spoken and written than any other has ever been?
[02:22.71]The history of English is present in the first words a child learns about identity (I, me, you);
[02:32.63]possession (mine, yours); the body(eye, nose, mouth); size (tall, short); and necessities (food, water).
[02:48.78]These words all come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon English, the core of our language.
[02:57.92]Usually short and direct, these are words we still use today for the things that really matter to us.
[03:06.54]Great speakers often use Old English to arouse our emotions. For example, during World War II,
[03:16.81]Winston Churchill made this speech, stirring the courage of his people
[03:23.15]against Hitler's armies positioned to cross the English Channel:
[03:28.74]"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,
[03:35.04]we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
[03:43.56]Virtually every one of those words came from Old English,
[03:49.20]except the last-surrender, which came from Norman French. Churchill could have said,
[03:57.53]"We shall never give in," but it is one of the lovely-and powerful-opportunities of English that a writer can mix,
[04:04.85]for effect, different words from different backgrounds.
[04:11.79]Yet there is something direct to the heart that speaks to us from the earliest words in our language.
[04:19.29]When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C., English did not exist. The Celts, who inhabited the land,
[04:30.11]spoke languages that survive today mainly as Welsh.
[04:36.06]Where those languages came from is still a mystery, but there is a theory.
[04:42.02]Two centuries ago an English judge in India
[04:47.24]noticed that several words in Sanskrit closely resembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed
[04:58.37]that many modem languages descended from a common parent language, lost to us because nothing was written down.
[05:07.70]Identifying similar words,linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language,
[05:16.40]spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C.These people had common words for snow, bee and wolfbut no word for sea.
[05:31.05]So some scholars assume they lived somewhere in north-central Europe,where it was cold. Traveling east,
 1/3    1 2 3 下一页 尾页