论文xxxxxxxx

毕业论文On Differences between British English and American English Vocabularies论英式英语和美式英语在词汇使用中的区别学科专业:商贸英语专业培养院所：解放军理工大学理学院姓名：李艺林指导教师：王景丽中国人民解放军理工大学2011年6月AbstractThere exists a huge range of differences between American and British English caused by their different history and culture. Even the same words or the expressions may be different. This paper is to concisely discuss about the differences between American and British English from the perspective of vocabulary. When different words in BRE and AME are used to describe the same thing or the same word has a different meaning, sometimes people will be very confused if they don't know common differences between BRE and AME in meanings and usages. It is because that there are a large number of homonyms and synonyms in BRE and AME. New media and globalization enable more and more people to participate in an active exchange of ideas and experiences and therefore the differences in the versions of English are becoming less instead of greater.Key words: culture，history，vocabulary，difference，development摘要:历史以及文化的不同导致了美式英语以及英式英语之间存在着许多差异.甚至一模一样的单词或是短语都可能有着不同的含义. 本文将从词汇的角度简要讨论美式英语以及英式英语之间的差异.当英式英语与美式英语中的不同的单词被用来描述同一种事物,或者同一个单词有着不同的含义,要是不了解这两种英语中常见的语义差异以及用法差异,人们就会感到很困惑.这是因为英式英语以及美式英语中存在着大量的同义词以及近义词. 新媒介以及全球化使越来越多的人积极进行思想与经验交流. 因而,各式英语之间的不同只会越来越少.关键词: 文化_历史_词汇_差异_发展Contents1. Introduction (3)2. Origins of BRE and AME (3)3. Development of BRE and AME (4)3.1 Old English (500-1100 AD) (4)3.2 The Norman Conquest and Middle English (1100-1500) (4)3.3 Early Modern English (1500-1800) (4)3.4 Late-Modern English (1800-Present) (4)4. Characteristics of BRE and AME (5)4.1 Everyday Oral language (5)4.2 Written language (5)4.3 Loan words (5)4.4 Idioms (7)4.5 Punctuations and measurement units (8)5. Differences between AME and BRE vocabularies (8)5.1 Classifications (8)5.2 Analyses (8)5.3 Examples (9)6.Discussion (9)6.1 Loan words in America (9)6.2 Social and cultural influences on the vocabulary of BRE and AME (10)6.3 New characteristics and trends in today's use in AME and BRE vocabularies (11)7. Conclusion (12)8. Bibliography (12)On Differences between British English and AmericanEnglish vocabularies1. IntroductionBertrand Russell, who wrote a satire about the English language and social class, said that the Americans and the English are "two peoples separated by a common language".There exists a huge range of differences between American and British English caused by their different history and culture. Even the same words or the expressions may be different. This paper is to concisely discuss about the differences between American and British English from the perspective of vocabulary.2. Origins of BRE and AMEEnglish is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-European family includes several major branches:Latin and the modern Romance languages;The Germanic languages;The Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and Sanskrit;The Slavic languages;The Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian (but not Estonian);The Celtic languages;And Greek.Two of these branches plays an important in the development of English, namely the Germanic and the Romance. English is in the Germanic group of languages. This group was originally a common language in the Elbe river region about 3,000 years ago. Around the 2nd century BC, this Common Germanic language split into three sub-groups:1) East Germanic was spoken by those who migrated back to southeastern Europe. But it is no longer spoken today, and only Gothic survives as a written East Germanic language.2) North Germanic evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.3) West Germanic is the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.3.Development of BRE and AME1)Old English (500-1100 AD)West Germanic invaders from Jutland and southern Denmark: the Angles (whose name is the source of the words England and English), Saxons, and Jutes, began populating theBritish Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. They spoke a mutually intelligible language, similar to modern Frisian–the language of northeastern region of the Netherlands–that is called Old English.The English colonization of North America began around 1600 AD and subsequently a distinct American dialect was c reated. Some pronunciations and usages “froze” when English settlers reached the American shore.2)The Norman Conquest and Middle English (1100-1500)William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 AD. (The Bayeux Tapestry, details of which form the navigation buttons on this site, is perhaps the most famous graphical depiction of the Norman Conquest.) The new overlords spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman. The Normans were also of Germanic stock (“Norman” comes from “Norseman”) and Anglo-Norman was a French dialect that had considerable Germanic influences in addition to the basic Latin roots. Prior to the Norman Conquest, Latin had been only a minor influence on the English language, mainly through vestiges of the Roman occupation and from the conversion of Britain to Christianity in the seventh century (ecclesiastical terms such as priest, vicar, and mass came into the language this way), but now there was a wholesale infusion o f Romance (Anglo-Norman) words.3)Early Modern English (1500-1800)The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language.4)Late-Modern English (1800-Present)The principal distinction between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are largely the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words. These words are the result of two historical factors. The first is the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the technological society. This necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed. The second was the British Empire. At its height, Britain ruled one quarter of t he earth’s surface, and English adopted many foreign words and made them its own.4.Characteristics of BRE and AME4.1.Everyday Oral languageThe spoken language of BRE varies far more than that of other English-speaking countries, and a uniform notion of BRE is made more difficult to be applied to the spoken language.Nevertheless, the AME oral language is featured as general uniformity throughout the country, for dialects are confined to recent immigrants.4.2.Written languageThere are slight regional variations in formal written language of BRE.However the written AME differs very little, so a textbook in the US can also be used in UK, Australia, South Africa, etc.The most distinct difference in written English between the two is the use of slang or informal English.4.3.Loan wordsMany of the following loan words have entered English through military channel relating to war, conflict or the political climate or cultural contact relating to food, sport, music and popular culture:Politics and Conflict1939 blitz - German1975 refusenik - Russian1920 putsch - Swiss German1986 glasnost - Russian1941 apparatchik - Russian1927 apartheid - Afrikaans1933 czar - Russian (the word had been used in English for centuries to describe the occupant of the Russian throne, but this is the first citing of its modern usage as in "drugs czar" etc.) 1920 bolshy - Russian (we've broadened the meaning from the Russian word Bolshevik and it's now more commonly used as an adjective to describe a teenager than to describe a political revolutionary)Culinary terms1984 balti- Hindi1935 pizza- Italian1975 nouvelle cuisine - French1985 ciabatta- Italian1958 baguette- French1928 croissant- French1905 aperitif - French1926 haute cuisine - French1932 bagel- Yiddish1960 tsatsiki - Turkish1922 bistro- French1945 espresso- Italian1927 pavlova- Russian1954 deli- German (first cited usage of abbreviation from delicatessen)1926 smorgasbord- Swedish1952 wok- Cantonese1958 doner kebab- Turkish1903 chow mein- Cantonese1934 satay- Malaysian1910 taramasalata- Turkish1949 nacho- Mexican Spanish1949 taco- Mexican Spanish1946 langoustine- French1989 latte- Italian1948cappuccino- ItalianSporting terms1927 langlauf- German1938 lutz- Swiss1905 luge- French1921 salchow- Swedish1967 tae kwon do- Korean1955 karate - Japanese1966 kung fu- Cantonese1929 piste- French1954 après-sk - French1921 slalom- NorwegianPopular culture1981 paparazzi- Italian1947bikini - Marshall Islands1979 karaoke- Japanese1981walkman- 'Japanese English' ( Note the morphological structure - if this were a 'natural' compound word, then it would probably have been 'walking-man'. Note also the plural walkmans, not walkmen!)1966 art deco- French (abbreviation of art dÃcoratif)1924 anorak- Greenland eskimo1997 tamagotchi- Japanese1980 Rubik's cube- Hungarian1957 lego- Danish1915 yo-yo - Philippines4.4.IdiomsThere are no radical differences in practical use of idioms. The main differences lie in the situations where idiomatic expressions are used. AME absorbs and creates new idioms faster than BRE. Also the idioms of AME tend to prevail faster and farther. But British idioms tend to stay within the British Isles and are rarely used in the U.S.The future of idiomatic expressions in the English language seems certain. They are more and more based on American English. This development will continue through new mediums like the Internet and interactive mediums.4.5.Punctuation and measurement unitsAME used to include commas and periods inside the quotation marks, regardless of whether they are part of the quoted sentence, while the British style places them in or outside of the quotation marks according to whether or not the punctuation is part o f the quoted phrase.Many American units of weights and measures are based on units in use in Great Britain before 1824, when the British Imperial System was established. Since the Mendenhall Order of 1893, the U.S. yard and pound and all other units derived from them have been defined in terms of the metric units of length and mass, the meter and the kilogram; thus, there is no longer any direct relationship between American units and British units of the same name. In 1959 an international agreement was reached among English-speaking nations to use the same metric equivalents for the yard and pound for purposes of science and technology; these values are 1 yd=0.9144 meter (m) and 1 lb=0.45359237 kilogram (kg). In the United States, the older definition of the yard as 3,600/3,937 m is still used for surveying, the corresponding foot (1,200/3,937 m) being known as the survey foot.5.Differences between AME and BRE vocabularies5.1C lassificationsWhen different words in BRE and AME are used to describe the same thing or same word has a different meaning, sometimes people will be very confused if they don't knowcommon differences between BRE and AME in meanings and usages. It is because that there are a large number of homonyms and synonyms in BRE and AME.5.1AnalysesThe analysis of variation within a language is a research area of Linguistics. The technical term for a vocabulary is a lexicon. Research into lexical variation (the variation in words used) between two dialects of the same language employs several methods, including empirical inquiry into the actual language used by an appropriate sample of speakers and statistical corpus analysis (analysis of large bodies of 'naturally occurring' data, i.e. the lexical content ('words') of books, television, newspapers, etc)5.2Examples1) Different words used to describe the same thingring call 打电话flat apartment 单元房underground subway 地铁post mail 邮递lift elevator 电梯holiday vacation 假日engine motor timetable schedule 时刻表2) Same words expressing different meaningspublic school在英国实际上指私立学校(美国英语为private school),而在美国才指公立学校(英国英语为council school).再如cupboard在英国是壁橱(美国英语为closet),英国成语a skeleton in the cupboard(家丑)中的cup本board就是壁橱,而在美国英语中cupboard一词则指厨房或吃饭间的食橱。