The english vocabulary - статья на английском языке

For many centuries after the English language had come into being, it was spoken by a comparatively small number of people. In its earliest form, now called either Old English or Anglo-Saxon, it was the speech of some Germanic peoples who came to England after A. D. 450, having been invited over from their continental homes to give military assistance to some of the inhabitants of Britain. These newcomers were the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. <...>
The exact extent of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is not known. Scholars are certain that the entire vocabulary is not exhibited in the records that have survived to the present day. Through the loss of many manuscripts a part at least of the vocabulary has perished. <...>
Toward the close of the eighth century, in A. D. 787, Scandinavian sea-rovers began to harry the northern coast of England. <...> The result of these invasions, however, was not at all disastrous to the supremacy of that speech. Many Scandinavian words became embedded in the native language, and thus the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary was made more composite than ever. Words like awe, both, call, get, raise, scare, skin, sly, swain, thwart, window are derived from Scandinavian.
In 1066 an event of much greater importance for the native English vocabulary took place. This event was the Norman invasion. The number of followers that William the Conqueror brought with him into England is not known. <...> All of these newcomers spoke French in some form or other. They did not care to learn Anglo-Saxon, and many of the native Englishmen forsook their own speech and used French instead. No schools survived in which the native speech was cultivated. Very few literary works were produced in Anglo-Saxon, and in the few that were written it is easy to see that French words were penetrating into the vocabulary. French was the language of culture and polite society. Anglo-Saxon was for about two centuries confined largely to rustics.
The supremacy of French did not endure permanently, of course.
After a while the tide began to turn in favour of the native tongue. <...>
The English which appeared in the writings of the thirteenth century was quite different in vocabulary from that which had existed a few centuries earlier. A great part of the old vocabulary had disappeared entirely and hundreds of words from French had come in. Among them are such words as cruel, coward, dangerous, false, jealous, gentle, mountain, simple, etc. The influence of French continued vigorously for several centuries. <...> During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were hundreds of words taken over directly from Latin. Some of these had already been borrowed from French or were taken over likewise in their French forms. <...> Early in the seventeenth century English colonists came to America and began to live in surroundings that greatly influenced their language. In the first place, these colonists had contacts sooner or later with the native Indians and with people from many different parts of the world. One result of this mingling of many peoples in America was the bringing into the English vocabulary of a large number of new words. From the North American Indians have come such words as caribou, catalpa, pone, squaw, tomahawk, etc. <...> About the time English colonists were coming to America English trading companies were sending ships to India. Early in the seventeenth century there were words from India making their appearance in English. <...>
Within the past three hundred years English explorers and colonists have had dealings of some sort with practically all the major races on the earth, and one result of this wide range of contacts is the appearance in English of words from all quarters of the globe.
(From "A Survey of English Dictionaries", by M. Mathews)