Indo-European language family （Europe， the Near East， India）

　　Balto –Slavic Indo-Iranian Italic Germanic

　　Prussian Persian Portuguese Norwegian

　　Lithuanian Hindi Spanish Icelandie

　　Polish Italian Danish

　　Bulgarian Roumanian Swedish

　　Slovenian French English

　　Russian German

　　Albanian Armenian Celtic Hellenic

　　Irish Greek

　　Breton

　　Scottish

　　2. History （时间，历史事件，特征）

　　1） Old English （450-1150） totally 50，000-60，000 words

　　The 1st people known to inhabit England were Celts， the language was Celtic.

　　The second language was the Latin of the Roman Legions.

　　The Germanic tribes called angles， Saxons and Jutes and their language， Anglo-Saxon dominated and blotted out the Celtic. Now people refer to Anglo-Saxon as old English.

　　At the end of 6th century， the introduction of Christianity has a great impact on the English vocabulary.

　　The common practice was to create new words by combining two native words.

　　In the 9th century， many Scandinavian words came into English. At least 900 words of Scandinavian are in modern English， our daily life and speech.

　　特点： highly inflected language

　　complex endings or vowel changes （full ending）

　　2） Middle English （1150-1500） English， Latin， French

　　Until 1066， although there were borrowings from Latin， the influence on English was mainly Germanic. But the Norman Conquest started a continual flow of French words into English.

　　By the end of the 13th century， English gradually come back into public areas.

　　Between 1250 and 150 about 9000 words of French origin come into English. 75% of them are till in use today.

　　As many as 2500 words of Dutch origin come into English.

　　特点： fewer inflections

　　leveled ending

　　3） Modern English （1500-up to now） early modern English （1500-1700）

　　late modern English（1700-up to now）

　　The Renaissance， Latin and Greek were recognized as the languages of the Western world’s great literary heritage.

　　The Industrial Revolution was in the mid-17 century. With the growth of colonization， British tentacles began a stretching out of to every corner of the globe， thus enabling English to absorb words from all major languages of the world.

　　After World War II， many new words have been created to express new ideas， inventions and scientific achievements.

　　More words are created by means of word-formation.

　　thousands and thousands of new words have been entered to express new ideas inventions， and scientific achievements.

　　more words are created by means of word-formation.

　　in modern English， word endings were mostly lost with just a few exceptions English has evolved from a synthetic language to the present analytic language.

　　science and technology terms make up about 45% of new words. words associated