Unit09素材文档

College English Creative Reading 3 跨文化交际英语·阅读教程3 Unit 9 English Words

Note on the Topic

Learning Objectives

1.Get to know the reason why English has the largest vocabulary in the world;

2.Be aware of the majority of the English lexicon of which items are high-frequency and which are not and which lexicon items may be needed for active production when writing and speaking as opposed to lexical items only needed for recognition when listening and reading;

3.Create your own compound words in the final activity.

Before You Read

1.Watch the following video and discuss the following questions with

a partner.

2.Discuss the following questions with a partner.

1.In the year 400 C.E., the Celts in Britain were ruled by Romans. This

had one benefit for the Celts, what is it?

The Romans protected them from the barbarian Saxon tribes of Northern Europe.

2.How long was French the language of the British royalty?

French was the language of the British royalty for three centuries. 3.When Norman king was at English throne, society in Britain came to have two levels, what were they?

They are French-speaking aristocracy and Old English-speaking peasants.

4.As the language expanded, what did English speakers realize if they wanted to sound sophisticated? And why?

They would use words that had come from French or Latin. Because Anglo Saxon words seemed so plain like the Anglo Saxon peasants who spoke them.

5.What’s the speaker’s purpose of offering the scenes and questions at the very beginning?

She wants to tell us that whether we realize it consciously or only subconsciously, our history lives in the words we speak and hear.

Reading A

The Biggest Vocabulary in the World

Well, hello everybody and welcome to this talk about the English language. Let me begin by making a statement, which I’ll then try to defend with evidence and examples. My opening statement is: the English language is a thief. It steals words — the polite term is loan words —from other languages, and this is one reason why it has the largest lexicon of all languages — about 700,000 different items and growing by the day. English takes words from almost anywhere — shampoo from the Hindi language of India, caucus from the Algonquin Indian language of North America, ketchup from Chinese, potato from the Haitian language, sofa from Arabic, and boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philippines.

参考译文：

世界上最大的词汇表

大家好，欢迎来听这个关于英语的讲座。首先我要提出一个观点，接下来我会举例对它进行阐释说明。我的观点是：英语这门语言是个贼，它从别的语言中窃取词汇，说得好听点是“借用”。为什么英语拥有的词汇量是所有语言中最庞大的——有70万条不同的词条，且到目前为止仍在不断增加，这是一方面的原因。英语几乎从各种语言中获取词汇：shampoo(洗发香波)取自印度的印地语，caucus(议会党团成员会议)取自北美的阿冈昆印第安语，ketchup(番茄酱)取自汉语，potato(土豆)取自海地语，sofa(沙发)取自阿拉伯语，boondocks(荒野)取自菲律宾的他加禄语。

Reading B