English Literature--Chapter I
Terms
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- Name 5 facts that show the dominance of English today.
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1. Only Chinese can count more speakers than English.
2. Three-quarters of the world's mail is in English.
3. More than half of the world's technical and scientific magazines are in English.
4. Eighty percent of the information stored in computers is in English.
5. English is the official language of the Olympics and the Miss Universe competition. - Who is generally given credit for "discovering" the Indo-European connection between languages?
- Sir William Jones
- Name 7 Indo-European languages.
- Spanish, Italian, Latin, Afrikaans, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek
- What percent of the English vocabulary is borrowed from other languages?
- More than 50%
- What percent of the 100 most common English worlds come from the Anglo-Saxons?
- 100%
- In what order did the following groups of people appear in England: Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Romans, Stonehenge people, Vikings
- Stonehenge people; Celts; Romans; Anglo-Saxons; Vikings
- How much did the Celtic language contribute to English:
- very little
- How did the arrival of Christianity influence the English language?
- Added many Latin words and gave current terms a deeper meaning than before
- In what way did the Vikings influence the English language?
- Added pronouns and eliminated inflection
- Why is the spelling in English sometimes confusing?
- Because Old English had sounds for which there was no equivalent in the Roman alphabet
- Who were Edward's choices for the next king of England?
- Harald Haardraada of Norway, William of Normandy, Harold of Wessex
- Who did Edward choose to be the next king of England and why?
- He chose the Earl of Wessex because he spoke the native tonuge and because he had been running the country while Eadward was busy praying.
- Why had William of Normandy not attacked earlier in the summer?
- The winds were not favorable
- Why do you think the English lost so disastrously at the Battle of Hastings?
- exhaustion of troops, Harold's poor spirits, the disintegration of the English lines
- What happened to the last Anglo-Saxon king of England?
- He was supposedly shot through the eye with an arrow, hacked to pieces, and buried without ceremony on a high cliff overlooking the sea with a sarcastic epitaph on the stone marking the spot.
- Despite the fact that the Normans completely subjugated the Anglo-Saxons, how did English manage to survive?
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1. The stubbornness of the native English speakers;
2. The Normans bbegan to intermarry with the native English speakers;
3. The Norman lords lost their French lands and began to view England as home;
4. The Hundred Years War with France made speaking English a patriotic act;
5. The Black Death wiped the learned scholars who spoke French - Name 6 key changes from Old English to Middle English.
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1. No more inflections
2. Prepositions were added
3. Loss of grammaticval gender
4. Old English prefixes and suffixes were abandoned and largely replaced by Latin ones
5. A gain of 10,000+ words
6. Multiple words for the same term served to enrich the language - Name 8 ways English acquires new vocabulary.
- Borrowing from foreign sources; making two existing words into one; blending existing words; coining new terms; making proper names into new words; using brand names; inventing new words representing discoveries in science; using words acquired in the study of other languages
- What was one of the drawbacks of the influx of foreign words?
- There were no real rules for parts of speech, word order, spelling, etc.
- What is the responsibility of the Academy of scholars?
- The aAcademy of scholars oversees the growth of English to "render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences."
- What is the etymology of the word GESTAPO?
- a German word abbreviated from GE(HEIME) STA(ATS) PO(LIZEI) which means "secret state police"
- What is the etymology of the word BIKINI?
- dreived from the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, sit of atomic bomb tests
- What is the etymology of the word SHRAPNEL?
- named after H. Shrapnel, a British general, who invented it
- What is the etymology of the word JEEP?
- originally military slang, after a creature (Eugene the Jeep) with extraordinary powers in a comic strip. Also associated with G.P., an abbreviation for General Purpose Car
- What is the etymology of the word RADAR?
- an acronym for ra(dio) d(etecting) a(nd) r(anging)
- What is the etymology of the word HUSBAND?
- from the Middle English word meaning "householder," from the Indo-European root word meaning "bondage"