外国对英语的影响

Considering that all new words generally start off as slang, no word really just enters the English language immediately, all words come from different languages. Here is a list of the most common foreign language influences in English, where other languages have influenced or contributed words to EnglishFrench words for the meat of an animal, noble words (this comes from the influence of the Norman language), words referring to food - e.g. au gratin. Nearly 30% of English words (in an 80,000 word dictionary) may be of French origin. German: Main article: List of German expressions in English. Some words relating to the First World War and the Second World War, e.g. Blitz. And some food terms, such as wurst, Hamburger and Frankfurter. Also: wanderlust, schadenfreude, zeitgeist, kaputt, kindergarten, autobahn, rucksack. Scandinavian languages such as Old Norse - words such as sky and troll or, more recently, geysir. Dutch - words relating to sailing, e.g. skipper, keel etc., and civil engineering, such as dam, polder, &c. Latin words, technical or biological names, medical terminology, legal terminology. See also: Latin influence in English Greek words - medical terminology (like for instance phobias and ologies) Spanish - words relating to Spanish culture - for example paella, siesta, plaza, etc. Italian - words relating to music, piano, fortissimo. Or Italian culture, such as piazza, pizza, gondola, etc. Also: balcony. Also: Fascism Nahuatl - tomato, coyote, chocolate Afrikaans - apartheid, trek. Russian - words relating to the Cold War and the aftermath (glasnost), and also words relating to Russian culture, such as Cossack or Baboeschka. Indian - words relating to culture, originating from the colonial era, e.g.: pyjamas, bungalow, verandah, jungle and curry. Also: shampoo, khaki. [edit]See alsoLists of English words http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English2.IX. How Languages Influence Each Other LANGUAGES, like cultures, are rarely sufficient unto themselves. The necessities of intercourse bring the speakers of one language into direct or indirect contact with those of neighboring or culturally dominant languages. The intercourse may be friendly or hostile. It may move on the humdrum plane of business and trade relations or it may consist of a borrowing or interchange of spiritual goods—art, science, religion. It would be difficult to point to a completely isolated language or dialect, least of all among the primitive peoples. The tribe is often so small that intermarriages with alien tribes that speak other dialects or even totally unrelated languages are not uncommon. It may even be doubted whether intermarriage, intertribal trade, and general cultural interchanges are not of greater relative significance on primitive levels than on our own. Whatever the degree or nature of contact between neighboring peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. Frequently the influence runs heavily in one direction. The language of a people that is looked upon as a center of culture is naturally far more likely to exert an appreciable influence on other languages spoken in its vicinity than to be influenced by them. Chinese has flooded the vocabularies of Corean, Japanese, and Annamite for centuries, but has received nothing in return. In the western Europe of medieval and modern times French has exercised a similar, though probably a less overwhelming, influence. English borrowed an immense number of words from the French of the Norman invaders, later also from the court French of Isle de France, appropriated a certain number of affixed elements of derivational value (e.g., -ess of princess, -ard of drunkard, -ty of royalty), may have been somewhat stimulated in its general analytic drift by contact with French, 1 and even allowed French to modify its phonetic pattern slightly (e.g., initial v and j in words like veal and judge; in words of Anglo-Saxon origin v and j can only occur after vowels, e.g., over, hedge). But English has exerted practically no influence on French. 1 The simplest kind of influence that one language may exert on another is the “borrowing” of words. When there is cultural borrowing there is always the likelihood that the associated words may be borrowed too. When the early Germanic peoples of northern Europe first learned of wine-culture and of paved streets from their commercial or warlike contact with the Romans, it was only natural that they should adopt the Latin words for the strange beverage (vinum, English wine, German Wein) and the unfamiliar type of road (strata [via], English street, German Strasse). Later, when Christianity was introduced into England, a number of associated words, such as bishop and angel, found their way into English. And so the process has continued uninterruptedly down to the present day, each cultural wave bringing to the language a new deposit of loan-words. The careful study of such loan-words constitutes an interesting commentary on the history of culture. One can almost estimate the rôle which various peoples have played in the development and spread of cultural ideas by taking note of the extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other peoples. When we realize that an educated Japanese can hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this day Siamese and Burmese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek our argument is sure to be studded with words that have come to us from Rome and Athens, we get some inkling of what early Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Mediterranean civilization have meant in the world’s history. There are just five languages that have had an over-whelming significance as carriers of culture. They are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison with these even such culturally important languages as Hebrew and French sink into a secondary position. It is a little disappointing to learn that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but negligible. The English language itself is spreading because the English have colonized immense territories. But there is nothing to show that it is anywhere entering into the lexical heart of other languages as French has colored the English complexion or as Arabic has permeated Persian and Turkish. This fact alone is significant of the power of nationalism, cultural as well as political, during the last century. There are now psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of borrowing, 2 that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance. 2 Are there resistances of a more intimate nature to the borrowing of words? It is generally assumed that the nature and extent of borrowing depend entirely on the historical facts of culture relation; that if German, for instance, has borrowed less copiously than English from Latin and French it is only because Germany has had less intimate relations than England with the culture spheres of classical Rome and France. This is true to a considerable extent, but it is not the whole truth. We must not exaggerate the physical importance of the Norman invasion nor underrate the significance of the fact that Germany’s central geographical position made it peculiarly sensitive to French influences all through the Middle Ages, to humanistic influences in the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and again to the powerful French influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems very probable that the psychological attitude of the borrowing language itself towards linguistic material has much to do with its receptivity to foreign words. English has long been striving for the completely unified, unanalyzed word, regardless of whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. Such words as credible, certitude, intangible are entirely welcome in English because each represents a unitary, well-nuanced idea and because their formal analysis (cred-ible, certitude, in-tang-ible) is not a necessary act of the unconscious mind (cred-, cert-, and tang- have no real existence in English comparable to that of good- in goodness). A word like intangible, once it is acclimated, is nearly as simple a psychological entity as any radical monosyllable (say vague, thin, grasp). In German, however, polysyllabic words strive to analyze themselves into significant elements. Hence vast numbers of French and Latin words, borrowed at the height of certain cultural influences, could not maintain themselves in the language. Latin-German words like kredibel “credible” and French-German words like reussieren “to succeed” offered nothing that the unconscious mind could assimilate to its customary method of feeling and handling words. It is as though this unconscious mind said: “I am perfectly willing to accept kredibel if you will just tell me what you mean by kred-.” Hence German has generally found it easier to create new words out of its own resources, as the necessity for them arose. 3 The psychological contrast between English and German as regards the treatment of foreign material is a contrast that may be studied in all parts of the world. The Athabaskan languages of America are spoken by peoples that have had astonishingly varied cultural contacts, yet nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dialect has borrowed at all freely 3 from a neighboring language. These languages have always found it easier to create new words by compounding afresh elements ready to hand. They have for this reason been highly resistant to receiving the linguistic impress of the external cultural experiences of their speakers. Cambodgian and Tibetan offer a highly instructive contrast in their reaction to Sanskrit influence. Both are analytic languages, each totally different from the highly-wrought, inflective language of India. Cambodgian is isolating, but, unlike Chinese, it contains many polysyllabic words whose etymological analysis does not matter. Like English, therefore, in its relation to French and Latin, it welcomed immense numbers of Sanskrit loan-words, many of which are in common use to-day. There was no psychological resistance to them. Classical Tibetan literature was a slavish adaptation of Hindu Buddhist literature and nowhere has Buddhism implanted itself more firmly than in Tibet, yet it is strange how few Sanskrit words have found their way into the language. Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic words of Sanskrit because they could not automatically fall into significant syllables, as they should have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling for form. Tibetan was therefore driven to translating the great majority of these Sanskrit words into native equivalents. The Tibetan craving for form was satisfied, though the literally translated foreign terms must often have done violence to genuine Tibetan idiom. Even the proper names of the Sanskrit originals were carefully translated, element for element, into Tibetan; e.g., Suryagarbha “Sun-bosomed” was carefully Tibetanized into Nyi-mai snying-po “Sun-of heart-the, the heart (or essence) of the sun.” The study of how a language reacts to the presence of foreign words—rejecting them, translating them, or freely accepting them—may throw much valuable light in its innate formal tendencies. 4 The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic modification. There are sure to be foreign sounds or accentual peculiarities that do not fit the native phonetic habits. They are then so changed as to do as little violence as possible to these habits. Frequently we have phonetic compromises. Such an English word as the recently introduced camouflage, as now ordinarily pronounced, corresponds to the typical phonetic usage of neither English nor French. The aspirated k, the obscure vowel of the second syllable, the precise quality of the l and of the last a, and, above all, the strong accent on the first syllable, are all the results of unconscious assimilation to our English habits of pronunciation. They differentiate our camouflage clearly from the same word as pronounced by the French. On the other hand, the long, heavy vowel in the third syllable and the final position of the “zh” sound (like z in azure) are distinctly un-English, just as, in Middle English, the initial j and v 4 must have been felt at first as not strictly in accord with English usage, though the strangeness has worn off by now. In all four of these cases—initial j, initial v, final “zh,” and unaccented a of father—English has not taken on a new sound but has merely extended the use of an old one. 5 Occasionally a new sound is introduced, but it is likely to melt away before long. In Chaucer’s day the old Anglo-Saxon ü (written y) had long become unrounded to i, but a new set of ü-vowels had come in from the French (in such words as due, value, nature). The new ü did not long hold its own; it became diphthongized to iu and was amalgamated with the native iw of words like new and slew. Eventually this diphthong appears as yu, with change of stress—dew (from Anglo-Saxon deaw) like due (Chaucerian dü). Facts like these show how stubbornly a language resists radical tampering with its phonetic pattern. 6 Nevertheless, we know that languages do influence each other in phonetic respects, and that quite aside from the taking over of foreign sounds with borrowed words. One of the most curious facts that linguistics has to note is the occurrence of striking phonetic parallels in totally unrelated or very remotely related languages of a restricted geographical area. These parallels become especially impressive when they are seen contrastively from a wide phonetic perspective. Here are a few examples. The Germanic languages as a whole have not developed nasalized vowels. Certain Upper German (Suabian) dialects, however, have now nasalized vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant (n). Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in proximity to French, which makes abundant use of nasalized vowels? Again, there are certain general phonetic features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in contrast, say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects. One of these is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops (p, t, k), which have a precise, metallic quality reminiscent of the corresponding French sounds, but which contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of English, North German, and Danish. Even if we assume that the unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are the unmodified descendants of the old Germanic consonants, is it not perhaps a significant historical fact that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of French, were inhibited from modifying these consonants in accordance with what seems to have been a general Germanic phonetic drift? Even more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages 5 of the Volga region. The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as “yeri” 6 has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of Slavic. We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels. One of the most puzzling cases of phonetic parallelism is afforded by a large number of American Indian languages spoken west of the Rockies. Even at the most radical estimate there are at least four totally unrelated linguistic stocks represented in the region from southern Alaska to central California. Nevertheless all, or practically all, the languages of this immense area have some important phonetic features in common. Chief of these is the presence of a “glottalized” series of stopped consonants of very distinctive formation and of quite unusual acoustic effect. 7 In the northern part of the area all the languages, whether related or not, also possess various voiceless l-sounds and a series of “velar” (backguttural) stopped consonants which are etymologically distinct from the ordinary k-series. It is difficult to believe that three such peculiar phonetic features as I have mentioned could have evolved independently in neighboring groups of languages. 7 How are we to explain these and hundreds of similar phonetic convergences? In particular cases we may really be dealing with archaic similarities due to a genetic relationship that it is beyond our present power to demonstrate. But this interpretation will not get us far. It must be ruled entirely out of court, for instance, in two of the three European examples I have instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic “yeri” are demonstrably of secondary origin in Indo-European. However we envisage the process in detail, we cannot avoid the inference that there is a tendency for speech sounds or certain distinctive manners of articulation to spread over a continuous area in somewhat the same way that elements of culture ray out from a geographical center. We may suppose that individual variations arising at linguistic borderlands—whether by the unconscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habits or by the actual transfer of foreign sounds into the speech of bilingual individuals—have gradually been incorporated into the phonetic drift of a language. So long as its main phonetic concern is the preservation of its sound patterning, not of its sounds as such, there is really no reason why a language may not unconsciously assimilate foreign sounds that have succeeded in working their way into its gamut of individual variations, provided always that these new variations (or reinforced old variations) are in the direction of the native drift. 8 A simple illustration will throw light on this conception. Let us suppose that two neighboring and unrelated languages, A and B, each possess voiceless l-sounds (compare Welsh ll). We surmise that this is not an accident. Perhaps comparative study reveals the fact that in language A the voiceless l-sounds correspond to a sibilant series in other related languages, that an old alternation s: sh has been shifted to the new alternation l (voiceless): s. 8 Does it follow that the voiceless l of language B has had the same history? Not in the least. Perhaps B has a strong tendency toward audible breath release at the end of a word, so that the final l, like a final vowel, was originally followed by a marked aspiration. Individuals perhaps tended to anticipate a little the voiceless release and to “unvoice” the latter part of the final l-sound (very much as the l of English words like felt tends to be partly voiceless in anticipation of the voicelessness of the t). Yet this final l with its latent tendency to unvoicing might never have actually developed into a fully voiceless l had not the presence of voiceless l-sounds in A acted as an unconscious stimulus or suggestive push toward a more radical change in the line of B’s own drift. Once the final voiceless l emerged, its alternation in related words with medial voiced l is very likely to have led to its analogical spread. The result would be that both A and B have an important phonetic trait in common. Eventually their phonetic systems, judged as mere assemblages of sounds, might even become completely assimilated to each other, though this is an extreme case hardly ever realized in practice. The highly significant thing about such phonetic interinfluencings is the strong tendency of each language to keep its phonetic pattern intact. So long as the respective ali

美国文化扩大了英语的广泛度 ～～使英语底蕴更加丰富拉～！～wonderful~```~ it is a success~ colourful!

英语(论坛)是当今世界上主要的国际通用语言从全世界来看，说英语的人数已经超过了任何语言的人数，10多个国家以英语为母语，45个国家的官方语言是英语，世界三分之一的人口（二十几亿）讲英语。比如在日本，除了他们的本国母语——日语之外，英语是他们的第二语言，很多高层次的日本人以会说英语为荣。二、英语的使用范围非常广泛全世界75％的电视节目是英语，四分之三的邮件是用英语书写，电脑键盘是英语键盘，任何一个会议敢号称是国际会议，其会议工作语言一定要用英语，也是联合国的正式工作语言。我们看到，很多官方的、政府性质的活动、文件、交流方式都使用英语。外贸行业也把英语作为通用语言，外贸交往、国际礼仪、书信函电、进出口文件、还有银行文件语言等等，统统以英语作为标准通用语言。大多数国家的高等学府，大学院校，都开设英语语言文学专业，仅在中国，就有一百多所大学设有英语专业或英语相关专业。电脑和互联网，也是建立在英语的基础上，这个行业的语言，就是英语。此外，在医学领域、建筑领域、文学领域，都与英语有极大的关联。三、国家发展和国际合作需要英语中国在近几十年的确发生了翻天覆地的变化，各方面都发展得很快。但是，不容置疑的是，我们在很多技术方面仍然落后于西方先进国家。要发展，要进步，要在较短的时间内掌握各种技术，我们不可能单靠自己搞研究，必须学习发达国家先进的技术，而学习的必要前提便是要掌握世界通用技术交流语言－英语。就计算机程序开发为例，虽然目前的计算机操作系统已经有中文版，但要进行应用程序开发，程序还是用英语编写的。高新技术资料大部分都是以英语编写。印度虽然在很多方面的发展比不上中国，但印度的软件开发业却比中国发达很多，造成这种差距的一个重要原因就是印度程序员普遍英语应用水平比中国程序员高。我们在学习别人先进技术，经验的同时，也需要与世界各国展开各种技术上和经济上的合作。如果不懂英语，便无法与合作方沟通交流，也更谈不上合作了。譬如某公司开发了一个具有世界水平的产品，如果能打开国际市场，前途将是一片光明。但偏偏公司人员不懂英语，无法很好地与国外客户沟通，无法将产品的优良性能展示出来，这将是一个惨重的损失。除上述重要性外，学好英语这门语言，对于学生而来说，还有如下好处：第一、从小培养良好的英语的听说读写的基础，为在相关企业迎接更为复杂困难的英语学习大有裨益；第二、一旦毕业，选择英语类专业工作将使得我们的成功几率大为增加，比如：除了英语类专业之外，相关专业还有：国际经济法专业、国际贸易类、商务专业、医学专业、国际政治专业、历史专业、考古专业、传媒专业、舞蹈专业、财务专业、文学专业、师范专业、数学专业、工程专业、电子专业、生物技术专业、软件和信息技术专业等，都离不开英语的学习或国外文献资料的查阅，没有良好的英语基础，这些专业领域是不会取得重大建树的。第三、对于某些重点学校，或者与国外建立了友好交流关系的学校，只有那些具有优势英语的学生才有可能被录取参加国外友好学校的交流活动；第四、英语作为中考、高考(微博)的必选重点科目，其得分的高低，直接影响到是否在全班全年级占据优势，被名牌大学录取；第五、 即使是有偏科倾向的学生，如果她的英语口语或者写作或者翻译有一技之长，将来即使是没有考上大学，他也会被社会广泛需要的，比如从事翻译、口译、英语教师、幼儿园老师、外贸行业等。第六、 语言好的学生，其右脑的智商相对更高，反应更灵敏、沟通更快捷易懂、给人印象更深刻，在竞争激烈的社会中，更有优势，更容易夺得一些机会。第七、如果你想将来出国，就不会在语言关方面花费很多金钱、时间和精力去补课，而是一站式通达国外，获得更多良好教育的机会，也更容易引起外国机构的青睐，收到意想不到的效果。可见，英语的应用无处不在，我们已经身处在一个开口就是英语的时代和地方，英语对于我们而言，就像一日三餐，对于人类而言不可或缺，只要这个地球存在，英语就会永远存续下去