English Language
Ural Scientific Centre (LYCEUM).
Ural Gorky University
Scientific work
Performed by:
Pupil of 11e form of LYCEUM
Pokrovsky Pavel
Director:
Stolyarova Nelli Aleksandrovna
Teacher of English language of LYCEUM.
Yekaterinburg.
1998.
Table of contents.
1.English
Language..................................................................
..................................3
2.Vocabulary..............................................................
.................................................3
3.Spelling................................................................
....................................................4
4.Role of
Phonemes..................................................................
.................................4
5.Stress, Pitches and
Juncture..................................................................
................5
6.Inflection..............................................................
....................................................5
7.Parts of
speech....................................................................
...................................5
8.Development of the
language..................................................................
...............6
8.1.Old English
Period....................................................................
...........................6
8.2.Middle English
Period....................................................................
......................7
8.3.The Great Vowel
Shift.....................................................................
.................... 8
8.4.Modern English
Period....................................................................
....................9
8.5.20-th century
English...................................................................
.......................10
8.6.American
English...................................................................
.............................10
8.7.Basic
English...................................................................
....................................11
8.8.Pidgin
English...................................................................
...................................11
8.9.Future Of English
Language..................................................................
..............12
1.English Language.
English Language, chief medium of communication of people in the United
Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations
in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of
them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and
by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.
English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the
Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages. It is
related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to
Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects,
and more distantly to Modern High German. Its parent, Proto-Indo-European,
was spoken around 5,000 years ago by nomads who are thought to have roamed
the south-east European plains.
2.Vocabulary
The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1,500 years of
development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the
Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols., 1933), a revised edition of A New
English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vols., 1884-1933;
supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that
the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words,
including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms,
many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The
English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the
world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-
building capacity equal to that of English. It is, approximately half
Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French
and Latin) and extensive, constant borrowing from every major language,
especially from Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and
from numerous minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in
the English vocabulary. From Old English have come cardinal and ordinal
numbers, personal pronouns, and numerous nouns and adjectives: from French
have come intellectual and abstract terms, as well as terms of rank and
status, such as duke, marquis, and baron. In addition, certain processes
have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment
of patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia,
or the imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp
and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either
native, such as mis- and -ness, or borrowed, such as ex- and -ist; the
combination of parts of words, such as in brunch, composed of parts of
breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as bonehead and
downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously
existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were
derived from the earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and
functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another,
for example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that
have probably added the largest number of words are affixation and
especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of
English syntactical structure.
3.Spelling
English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the
world. The written representation of English is not phonetically exact for
two main reasons. First, the spelling of words has changed to a lesser
extent than their sounds; for example, the k in knife and the gh in right
were formerly pronounced (see Middle English Period below). Second, certain
spelling conventions acquired from foreign sources have been perpetuated;
for example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly
spelled doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word.
Outstanding examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation
are the six different pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough,
thought, through, and rough; the spellings are kept from a time when the gh
represented a back fricative consonant that was pronounced in these words.
Other obvious discrepancies are the 14 different spellings of the sh sound,
for example, as in anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.
4.Role of Phonemes
Theoretically, the spelling of phonemes, the simplest sound elements used
to distinguish one word from another, should indicate precisely the sound
characteristics of the language. For example, in English, at contains two
phonemes, mat three, and mast four. Very frequently, however, the spelling
of English words does not conform to the number of phonemes. Enough, for
example, which has four phonemes (enuf), is spelled with six letters, as is
breath, which also has four phonemes (breu) and six letters. See Phonetics.
The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the
italicized letters in the following words: bit, beat, bet, bate, bat, but,
botany, bought, boat, boot, book, and burr. These phonemes are
distinguished from one another by the position of articulation in the
mouth. Four vowel sounds, or complex nuclei, of English are diphthongs
formed by gliding from a low position of articulation to a higher one.
These diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from o of botany to ea of
beat), the ou of bout (from o of botany to oo of boot), the oy of boy (from
ou of bought to ea of beat), and the u of butte (from ea of beat to oo of
boot). The exact starting point and ending point of the glide varies within
the English-speaking world.
5.Stress, Pitches, and Juncture
Other means to phonemic differentiation in English, apart from the
pronunciation of distinct vowels and consonants, are stress, pitch, and
juncture. Stress is the sound difference achieved by pronouncing one
syllable more forcefully than another, for example, the difference between
' record (noun) and re' cord (verb). Pitch is, for example, the difference
between the pronunciation of John and John? Juncture or disjuncture of
words causes such differences in sound as that created by the pronunciation
