Chapter 2 The Development of the English Vocabulary
In the study of words, it is of paramount (最重要的；至高无上的) importance to know something about the origin and growth of the vocabulary. As we know, a language's vocabulary develops with the development of the language, which in its turn grows in connection to other languages. The English language is not the language of the early inhabitants (居民) of the British Isles. Then where does it come from? In what way is English related to other languages? A synchronic（共时的） overview of the Indo-European Language Family will answer these questions. Modern English is derived from a collection of Germanic dialects, sometimes called Teutonic dialects(条顿方言), that were first brought to the British Islands in the fourth and fifth centuries. Why is it known as English now? What is the size of the vocabulary of the first settlers (居民)? How has it developed into what is now a huge modern vocabulary? What influence do other languages have on English? This chapter will give a brief answer to all these questions.
2.1 The Indo-European Language Family
It is assumed (估计；主观认为) that the world has 3 000 (some put it 5 000) languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammar. The Indo-European, one of these, is made up of most languages of Europe, the Near East, and India. The prehistoric Indo-European parent language, thought to be a highly inflected language（高度屈折的）, can now only be reconstructed by studying the languages derived from it. It was a language in which the various forms of a given word showed its relationship to other words in a sentence. When groups of this language moved away from the original homeland, believed to be somewhere in the eastern most part of Europe, the language of each group grew and developed along different lines in much the same way that American and Australian English now show differences from the language of England. Over very long periods of complete isolation from each other, these dialects of a single language changed so much that they became separate languages. Speakers of one were unintelligible（听不懂） to speakers of another. Further population shifts resulted in still other divisions (分支) and subdivisions (次分支).
The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution (分布). They accordingly fall into ten principal groups（族）, which fall into an Eastern set: Balto-Slavic(波罗斯拉夫语族), Indo-Iranian(印伊语族), Armenian and Albanian(亚美尼亚语族和阿尔巴尼亚语族); a Western set: Celtic(凯尔特语族), Italic（意大利语族）, Hellenic(希腊语族), Germanic（日耳曼语族）, Hittite(希泰语族), and Tocharian(吐火罗语族).
In the Eastern set, Armenian and Albanian are the sole modern languages in the two respective families. The Balto-Slavic comprises (包括) such modern languages as Prussian(普鲁士语), Lithuanian(立陶宛语), Polish(波兰语), Czech(捷克语), Bulgarian(保加利亚语), Slovenian(斯洛文尼亚语) and Russian. In the Indo-Iranian are found Persian（波斯语）, Bengali(孟加拉语), Hindi(印地语), Romany(吉普赛语), the last three of which are derived from the dead language Sanskrit(梵语).
In the Western set, Hittite and Tocharian (吐火鲁语)find no descendants (后代) of their own and Greek is the modern language derived from Hellenic(希腊语族). In the Celtic, we find Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish(康沃尔语), Breton(布列塔语) and Pictish(皮克特语). The five Romance languages(罗曼语), namely, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Roumanian(罗马尼亚语), all belong to the Italic through an intermediate language (中介语)Latin. Finally comes the Germanic family, which is our chief concern as English and its nearest relations are all members of this family. First, we have the four Northern European Languages: Norwegian, Icelandic(冰岛语), Danish(丹麦语) and Swedish(瑞典语), which are generally known as Scandinavian languages(斯堪的纳维亚语). Then come German, Dutch, Flemish (弗兰德语) and English.
All these languages are important to English to a greater or lesser extent because as we shall see later each has lent words into the English language. Some of them have played a considerably great role in the course of the development of the English vocabulary.
