The English language ( Encyclopedia Britannica 97)

English is the language that originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is a member of the western group of the Germanic languages (itself part of the Indo-European language family) and is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic (Dutch and Flemish).

In the 16th century, English was the mother tongue of only a few million people living in England, but owing to that nation's colonization of other parts of the globe and other historical factors, English was the native language of more than 350 million people by the late 20th century. It is thus the mother tongue of more people than any other language except Mandarin Chinese. English is the most widely taught foreign language and is also the most widely used second language--i.e., one that two people communicate in when they cannot understand each other's native speech. It became the international language of scientific and technical discourse in the 20th century and was also widely adopt ed for use in business and diplomacy. In the entire world, one person in seven speaks English as either a primary or secondary language.

English is an analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected) language, whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most European, Iranian, and North Indian languages, is synthetic, or inflected. (Inflections are changes in the form of words to indicate such distinction s as tense, person, number, and gender.) Over thousands of years, English has lost most of its inflections, while other European languages have retain ed more of theirs. Indeed, English is the only European language in which adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from determiners and endings denoting degrees of comparison.

Another characteristic is flexibility of function. This means that one word can function as various parts of speech in different contexts. For example, the word "book" can be an adjective in "book review," a noun in "read a book," or a verb in "book a room." Because other European languages retain more inflectional endings than does English, they almost never have this characteristic. A third feature, openness of vocabulary, allows English to admit words freely from other languages and to create compounds and derivatives.

Learn the words; which of them are nouns at first sight?

1. primary основной

2. include включать

3. owing to благодаря

4. adopt принимать

5. inflection / (un)inflected окончание, флексия

6. whereas в то время как

7. ancestral tongue праязык

8. distinction отличие

9. retain сохранять

10. denote указывать

11. flexibility гибкость, подвижность

12. admit допускать, принимать

13. compounds сложные слова

Translate into Russian without a dictionary:

originate, continents, official, group, century, colonization, globe, historical factors, communicate, technical discourse, diplomacy, relatively, indicate, characteristic, derivatives;

Give the English equivalents:

родной язык (2), родная речь, островные нации,,близкородственный с.., один человек из семи, время, лицо, число, род, прилагательные, окончания(2), степени сравнения, части речи,

Translate into Russian, find nouns and determine their functions:

1. English is the most widely taught foreign language and is also the most widely used second language--i.e., one that two people communicate in when they cannot understand each other's native speech

2. Inflections are changes in the form of words to indicate such distinctions as tense, person, number, and gender

3. Indeed, English is the only European language in which adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from determiners and endings denoting degrees of comparison

Answer the questions, point out the key statements from the text:

1. In which countries English is the primarily spoken language? Why is it so?

2. What group of languages does English belong to?

3. Which language has the most number of its native speakers?

4. Why is English so widely spread all over the world?

5. What are the main characteristic features that made English international?

6. What is flexibility? What is openness of vocabulary?

7. What is an inflection and what is it for? Does English have many of them? Do you know any?

Prepare to retell

1. Divide the text into parts. What titles would you give them?

2. Find the key sentences in each paragraph

3. Group necessary information around the key statements (make questions for example - it helps)

4. Add introductory expressions like “The author supposes..” or “further on it goes on saying that...” etc.

5. Get ready to produce.

Home work: Read the text below. Try to retell it in the same way as in class.

English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, chiefly because of its propensity for borrowing and because the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century introduced vast numbers of French words into the language. The vocabulary of Modern English is thus approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Romance or Italic (French and Latin), with copious importations from Greek in science and borrowings from many other languages. Almost all basic concepts and things come from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, as do most personal pronouns, all auxiliary verbs, most simple prepositions, all conjunctions, and almost all numbers. Many common nouns, adjectives, and verbs are of Scandinavian origin, a fact due to the Scandinavian invasions of Britain. The English language owes a great debt to French, which gave it many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine, politics, law, society, literature, and art. Comparison between French and English synonyms reveals the former to be more intellectual and abstract, and the latter more human and concrete. Many of the Greek compounds and derivatives in English have Latin equivalents with either similar or considerably different meanings.

The English adopted the 23-letter Latin alphabet, to which they added the letters W, J, and V. For the most part, English spelling is based on that of the 15th century. Pronunciation, however, has changed greatly since then. During the 17th and 18th centuries, fixed spellings were adopted, although there have been a few changes since that time. Numerous attempts have been made to reform English spelling, most of them unsuccessful.

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