第1个回答 2024-06-17
1. In 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered the Kingdom of England, becoming its king. The Norman conquest resulted in the near-total replacement of the English nobility with Frenchmen, and intermarriage between French and English nobility was common.
2. Over the three centuries following the Norman conquest, English monarchs and the nobility spoke French, while clergymen used Latin and early forms of English. By approximately 1500, these early forms of English had evolved into Modern English.
3. The alphabet used in Modern English consists of 26 letters, entirely derived from the Roman alphabet. The "English alphabet" is, in fact, the alphabet used by the ancient Romans. England began adopting the Latin alphabet as its writing system during the Anglo-Saxon period around the sixth century AD.
4. Missionaries introduced letters to record local languages, facing the challenge that early English had over 40 different pronunciations, which the Latin alphabet could not accommodate. As a result, they resorted to adding additional letters, applying diacritical marks to letters, and using letter combinations to represent various sounds. Gradually, a writing system based on the 26 Latin letters plus some spelling rules emerged in Old English.
Additional Information:
1. Vocabulary: The English language boasts a vast vocabulary of approximately 990,000 words. However, pinpointing an exact number requires determining which words should be considered distinct vocabulary items. Unlike other languages, there is no authoritative academic institution that defines which words are formal. Words from medical, scientific, and technological fields are continually updated, with new terms entering everyday usage, while others are only used within specific groups. Loanwords from immigrant languages also frequently integrate into English.
2. Grammar: English grammar is rooted in the Germanic language family. Despite attempts by scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries to apply the grammar of French and Latin to English, these efforts were not successful. Compared to other languages in the Indo-European language family, English has less complex inflections and has lost almost all distinctions between cases and genders, except for personal pronouns. English places a greater emphasis on the fixed order of words, indicating a trend toward analytic syntax.