Nguồn gốc của tiếng Anh

Phần 2

Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from Old Norse into the mix. It may be hard to see the …(9)…of modern English underneath all the words borrowed from French, Latin, Old Norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by …(10)…on grammatical structure, patterns of …(11)…changes, and certain core vocabulary. For example, after the 6th century, German words starting with “p”, systematically shifted to a "pf" sound while their Old English counterparts kept the "p" unchanged.

In another split, words that have "sk" sounds in Swedish …(12)…an "sh" sound in English. There are still some English words with "sk” like "skirt," and "skull" but they're direct borrowings from Old Norse that came after the "sk" to "sh" shift.

These examples show us that just as the various Romance languages descended from Latin, English, …(13)…, German, and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E.

Because this …(14)…language was never written down, we can only reconstruct it by …(15)…its descendants, which is possible thanks to the consistency of the changes.We can even use the same process to go back one step further, and trace the origins of Proto-Germanic to a language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 6000 years ago on the Pontic steppe in modern day Ukraine and Russia.

>>Làm tiếp phần 3
>>Xem đáp án phần 2

Từ mới:

invaders: kẻ xâm lược

descended: có nguồn gốc

consistency: tính nhất quán, tính bền vững

Pontic steppe: thảo nguyên Hắc Hải

Phiêu Linh