全国英语专业八级考试听力复习材料
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MINI-LECTURE
In this section, you will hear a mini-lecture. You willhear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening,takenotes on the important points. Your notes will not bemarked, but you will need them to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture isover,you’ll be given two minutes to check yournotes, and another 10 minutes to complete thegap-filling task. Now listen to the mini-lecture.
In this lecture, we’ll discuss English vocabulary. First, let’s define the term “vocabulary”. Whatis vocabulary? It usually refers to a complete inventory of the words in a language. But it mayalso refer to the words and phrases used in the variants of a language, such as dialect,register, terminology, etc. The vocabulary can be divided into active vocabulary and passivevocabulary. The active vocabulary refers to lexical items which a person uses. The passivevocabulary refers to the words which he understands. The English vocabulary is characterizedby a mixture of native words and borrowed words. First, about the native words. Most of thenative words are of Anglo-Saxon origin. They form the basic word stock of the Englishlanguage. In the native stock, we find words denoting the commonest things necessary for life,such as those words denoting natural phenomena,divisions of the year, parts of the body,animals, foodstuffs, trees, fruits, human activity. And also other words denoting the mostindispensable things. The native stock also includes auxiliary and modal verbs, pronouns,most numerals, prepositions and conjunctions. Though they are small in number, these wordsplay no small part in linguistic performance and communication. Next, we come to borrowedwords. Borrowed words are also known as loan-words. They refer to linguistic forms takenover by one language or dialect from another. The English vocabulary has replenished itself bycontinually taking over words from other languages over the centuries. The adoption of foreignwords into the English language began even before the English came to England. We know thatthe Angles and Saxons formed a part of the Germanic people. Long before the Anglo-Saxonscame to England, the Germanic people had been in contact with the civilization of Rome. Thus,Words of Latin origin denoting objects belonging to the Roman civilization gradually found theirway into the English language. For example, wine, butter, cheese, inch, mile, mint, etc. Whenthe English, or the Anglo-Saxons, were settled in England, they continued to borrow wordsfrom Latin, especially after Roman Christianity was introduced into the island in the sixth andseventh centuries. A considerable number of Latin words were adopted into the Englishlanguage. These words chiefly signify things connected with religion or the services of thechurch, such as bishop, candle, creed, monk, priest, and a great many others. The Englishvocabulary also owes a great deal to the Danes and Northmen. From these settlers, Englishadopted a surprising number of words of Scandinavian origin that belong to the core-vocabulary today. Such as they, them, their, both, ill, die, egg, knife, low, skill, take, till, though,want, etc. The Norman Conquest in 1066 introduced a large number of French words into theEnglish vocabulary. French adoptions were found in almost every section of the vocabulary. Forexample, in the section of law, there are such words as justice, evidence, pardon; in thesection of warfare, there are conquer, victory; in religion, there are grace, repent, sacrifice;in architecture, there are castle, pillar, tower; in finance, there are pay, rent, ransom; in rank,there are prince, princess; in clothing, there are collar, mantlet; in food, there are dinner, feast,sauce, etc. In the first 43 lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, there are 39words of French origin. We can see the English vocabulary takes in so many words from French.And in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Renaissance swept Europe. It wasa revival of art and literature based on ancient Greek learning. The Renaissance opened up anew source for the English vocabulary to enrich itself. And English borrowed many words fromGreek through the medium of Latin, such as crisis, topic, coma, etc. a wide range of learnedaffixes are also from Greek, such as bio-, geo-, hydro-, auto-, homo-, para-, -ism, -logy, -graph, -meter, -gram and many others. From the sixteenth century forward, there was a greatincrease in the number of languages, and English borrowed many words from these languages.French continued to provide a considerable number of new words, for example, trophy, vase,moustache, unique, soup. English borrowed a lot of words from Italian in the field of art, musicand literature, for example, model, sonnet, opera, quartet, etc. there was also a Spanishelement in English, for example, potato, cargo, parade, cigar. Besides, German, Portugueseand Dutch were also fertile sources of loan words, for example, dock, zinc and plunder arefrom German; cobra, buffalo and pagoda are from Portuguese; tackle, buoy and skipper arefrom Dutch. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a growth ofinternational trade and the urge to colonize the known world, English made a number of directadoptions from languages spoken outside Europe. Some examples are: sultan and ghoul fromArabic, lichi and typhoon from Chinese, shah and shawl from Persian, yoghurt from Turkish,czar from Russian. Since the end of the Second World War, still more loan words have beenincorporated into the English vocabulary For example, cuisine from French, sushi from Japanese,mao tai from Chinese, and many others. In the twentieth century, it should be observed thatEnglish has created many words out of Latin and Greek elements, especially in the field ofscience and technology, such as antibiotic, astronaut, auto-visual, autolysis, etc. Although allthese Latin and Greek derived words are distinctly learned or technical, they do not seem and,in this respect, they are very different from the recent loanwords from living languages, such ascappuccino, angst, and sputnik. Thus, for the Modern English period a distinction must bemade between the adoptions from living languages and the formations derived from the twoclassical languages. That’s the end of today’s lecture. Next time we’ll concentrate on Englishword formation. Thank you for your attention!
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