Henry Morris, an English professor, asks his college English classes to coun

游客2025-03-25 34

问题 Henry Morris, an English professor, asks his college English classes to count "loan words" . These are words we use that were taken directly from other languages. He jokes about the term "loan words" . "It is not like we’re going to give these words back after we’ve done with them. " he says. "Imported words" might be a better term. Simple sentences may contain 15 percent or less of these. Complex sentences may be 50 percent or more "imports". Scientific papers might use mostly loan words. "We use imports constantly," Morris says, "generally without any idea we are using them. "
Was there ever a time when people spoke just plain English? No. Scholars estimate that one-third of the world’s languages are of Indo-European origin. These include English, French, Latin, German, Dutch, Celtic, and Slavic tongues. Back around AD 450, when Julius Caesar was alive, English as we know it didn’t exist. English is relatively young. Its roots go back 1,500 years, to Britain. People there spoke Celtic. Then came Anglo-Saxon invaders. These conquerors spoke a language closely related to older forms of Dutch. Morris says Dutch words like "woord", "gras" and "man" became the English equivalents "word", "grass" and "man" . Anglo-Saxon "Anglish" became "English" .
But our story does not end there. English continued to grow and change. When Norman French invaded Britain in 1066, the English vocabulary got an enormous boost. Scholars say that nearly half of all English words are French in their origin. Words like art, orange, taxi, train and surprise are a few examples.
When English colonists came to America in the 1700s, they encountered native Americans and their languages. Words like wigwam, teepee, chipmunk, possum and tomahawk settled into the colonists’ vocabulary.
Centuries later, in the early 1900s, immigrants streamed to America’s shores. Italians taught US to say broccoli, macaroni, opera and studio. Spanish speakers added mosquito, mustang, tortilla and alligator. Bagel, kosher and pastrami came from those who spoke Yiddish. And yam, gorilla and jitterbug were taken from African language. So if you speak English, you use words from at least 35 foreign languages. [br] Many words are mentioned in the last paragraph in order to______.

选项 A、show the change of English in the history
B、explain the meaning of some imported words
C、show the impact of immigrants on the English vocabulary
D、picture the immigrants stream in the early 1900s

答案 C

解析段落思想题，最后一段主要介绍了20世纪早期的移民潮对英语词汇的丰富，由此可知，作者提及各种单词意在说明移民带给英语的新词汇。

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