Практика английского по видео: Why is English so confusing - Arika Okrent
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- It was June 2010.0:06
- Inside the script's national spelling bee, contestants between 8 and 15 years old wrestled words like brachydactylis and plegulean.0:09
- Outside, a crowd protested the complexity of English spelling conventions.0:19
- Indeed, spelling reformers have been around for centuries advocating for overarching changes to make English spelling more intuitive.0:25
- The English language is chock full of irregularities.0:34
- One commonly used example of this, take the G -H sound from enough, the O sound from women, and the T -I sound from action, and you could argue that0:38
- G -H -O -T -I spells fish.0:50
- So, how did English get like this?0:55
- English arose from old Germanic tribes that invaded the British Isles more than 1 ,500 years ago.0:59
- Their languages coalesced and evolved into old English.1:07
- When Roman missionaries arrived around 600 CE, they devised ways to write it down using the Latin alphabet, supplementing it with some Germanic runes for sounds they didn't have letters1:12
- for.1:24
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- Then came the Norman invasion of 1066, when French speakers conquered England.1:25
- French became the language of authority and high society, but English remained the dominant spoken language.1:31
- Over time, those descended from French speakers also became English speakers, but some French words snuck into the language.1:39
- Some English speakers were also familiar with Latin through the Church and for more education.1:47
- By the mid -1400s, people were writing in English again, but it was unstandardized.1:53
- They used a mix of influences to determine word choice and spelling, including the French they knew, the Latin they studied, and the English they spoke.1:59
- So, things were already pretty messy.2:09
- Then, in 1476, the printing press arrived in England.2:12
- Some of the people working the presses may have mainly spoken Flemish, not English, and they were given manuscripts that varied widely in their spelling.2:17
- Without standardization, different writers went with various spellings based in part on what they happened to encounter while reading.2:27
- Many words had a multitude of spellings.2:35
- The word dough, for instance, used to be spelled in all these ways, and was originally pronounced dach.2:39
- The guttural Germanic sound it ended with was one the Latin alphabet didn't cover.2:46
- It eventually came to be represented with gh, but for some gh words, English speakers eventually dropped the guttural sound altogether.2:52
- For others, they ended up pronouncing it as f instead, as exemplified in dough versus tough.3:02
- Printing presses memorialized the spelling even though the pronunciation eventually changed, and this wasn't just the case with gh.3:10
- Some letters, in other words, also fell silent.3:18
- Words like knife, nat, and wrong all contain the vestiges of past pronunciations.3:21
- But while the printing press was solidifying spellings, the English language was also undergoing what scholars call the great vowel shift.3:29
- Between the 14th and 18th centuries, the way English speakers pronounced many vowels changed significantly.3:39
- For instance, bot became boat.3:46
- This displaced the word for boot, which had up until then been pronounced bought, and pushed it into the high u vowel position it maintains today.3:50
- Words that already had this high u often became diphthongs, with two vowels in a single syllable.4:00
- So, hoos became house.4:07
- As with so many linguistic matters, there's no clear reason why this happened, but it did.4:10
- And how the vowel shift affected a word depended on various things, including the other sounds in the word.4:16
- The word tough was once toch, among other variations.4:25
- Through was once truch, and dough, dach.4:30
- These words all started with different vowel sounds that were then affected differently by the vowel shift.4:34
- The o -u spelling they all adopted was a haphazardly applied French influence.4:42
- So eventually, they wound up with still distinct vowel sounds, but similar spellings that don't really make much sense.4:48
- All this means English can be a difficult language for non -native speakers to learn, and it reveals the many ways history in all its messiness acted upon English, making4:57
- it especially tough.5:09
- So, where did the thousands of languages spoken today actually come from?5:13
- Dig into how languages evolved, and the mysterious higher level relationships between them with this video.5:19
- Or learn the surprising truth separating languages from dialects with this one.5:26
Что измерено в этом ролике
- Темп
- 141 слов в минуту — быстрее, чем 13% каталога
- Уровень CEFR
- C1
- Слова, которые стоит знать
- reformers, chock, pronouncing, dialects, guttural, linguistic
