Lecture 2《英语词汇学》第二章教案

Lecture 2

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》

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 V ocabulary.

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

※①Britons: 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

divided 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.

②Latin: 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 divided into three periods.

⏹The Old English (450-1100)

⏹The Middle English (1066-1500)

⏹The Modern English (1500-present)

(1)The Old English (449-1066)

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