LIN200H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Blackboard, Gumbo, Chutzpah
Document Summary
Unabridged dictionaries contain 500 000 600 000 lexical entries, each with a number of subentries. Most people know 15-20% of these words. English is a european language from the indo-european language family. English belongs to western branch of germanic subfamily under indo-european. Dutch, german, frisian, and yiddish closest to english language. English originated as dialect of proto-germanic from angles, saxons and jutes tribes. English comes from names angles (language spoken called angl-isc ) Language of shakespeare and king james bible note old english, they are early modern english. Grammar similar to that of modern german with elaborate system of suffixes to indicate tense, person, number, gender, and case: called inflectional suffixes . E. g. man, child, house, strong, eat, drink, and fight all germanic in origin: vocab. Also contained small # of words borrowed from latin b/c contact w/ romans. E. g. cheese, urine, wine, butter, angel, school, street: borrowed also from old norse.
