Passage Two
How many languages do you speak? One, maybe, two, you say? Wrong! If you speak English, you use words from at least 3 5 foreign languages. Surprised?
You shouldn’t be. Tim Morris is an English professor at the University of Texas, Arlinton. He says that when we speak English, we are using bits and pieces of many languages. 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 didn’t exist. English is relatively young. Its roots go back l,500 years to Britain. People there spoke Celtic. Then came Anglo-Saxon invaders.“These conquerors spoke languages closely related to older forms of Dutch.” Morris says. Dutch words like “woord”, “gas” and “man”, became the English equivalents “word”, “grass” and “man”. Anglo-Saxon “Anglish” became “English”.
But our story doesn’t 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, tree 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, tortilloa, and alligator. Bagel, kosher, and pastrami came from those who spoke Yiddish. And yam, gorilla, and jitterbug were taken from African languages.
It’s impossible to say exactly how big the English language is. Even counting all the words in a dictionary won’t give you an accurate figure. But you may be interested to know that college-size editions like Merriam-Webster’s 10th Collegiate contain about 90,000 “headwords”. Headwords are main entries in bold print. Under a headword are plurals and various forms of that word, along with definitions. In a large dictionary, like the Oxford English Dictionary, are more than 250,000 headwords. Some say the true number of English words is twice of that. That’s a lot of words! But even a highly educated person uses only about 10% of them.
Questions 6-10 are based on Passage Two.
6. From the passage we know that ______.
A. English belongs to Sino-Tibetan family
B. English belongs to Indo-European family
C. English was spoken by people before AD 450
D. English was spoken by the Anglo-Saxon invaders
7. According to the passage, the origin of English can be dated back to ______.
A. the late 1700s B. the year 1066
C. the early 1900s D. 1,500 years ago
8. Of the following words, ______ is of Yiddish origin.
A. kosher B. tortilloa
C. possum D. woord
9. A large dictionary, like the Oxford English Dictionary, ______.
A. tells the true number of English words
B.gives 250,000 headwords without definition
C. fails to tell the true number of English words
D. fails to give the plural or singular form of headwords
10. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. In the mid-1900s, Italian immigrants streamed to America.
B.It’s quite common to come across an Italian word in English.
C. One-third of English words are borrowed from other languages.
D. Native American languages failed to exert any influence on English.
