Chapter 2 The Development of the English Vocabulary Introduction 1. A synchronic overview of the Indo-European Language Family will explain the relation between English and other languages. Modern English is derived from a collection of Germanic dialects/ Teutonic dialects, that were first brought to the British Islands in the fourth and fifth centuries. English is classified as a Teutonic language, that is, a Germanic language. To be more exact, English belongs to the Low West Germanic branch of Indo-European family. That is to say, English belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian also belong. The Indo-European Language Family It is newly estimated that there are totally 5651 languages in the world, among which 1,400 languages have not yet been generally recognized as independent languages or the dying languages. ~ is made up of most languages of Europe The Near East India The prehistoric Indo-European parent language was a highly inflected language. The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another. The similarity bears a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into 10 principal groups, which can be grouped into an Eastern set and and Western set(东部组和西部组). The Eastern set: Balto-Slavic波罗的-斯拉夫语族(the biggest one) Prussian普鲁士语 Lithuanian立陶宛语 Polish波兰语 Czech捷克语 Bulgarian保加利亚语 Slovenian斯洛文尼亚语 Russian俄罗斯语 Indo-Iranian印伊语族 Persian波斯语 Bengali 孟加拉语 Hindi 北印度语 Romany吉普赛语 Armenian亚美尼亚语族 Armenian Albanian阿尔巴尼语族 Albanian The Western Set Hellenic希腊语族 Greek Celtic凯尔特语族 Scotish苏格兰语 Irish爱尔兰语 Welsh威尔士 Breton布列塔尼语 Pictish皮克特语 Hittite希泰语族 Tocharian吐火罗语族 Italic意大利语族(5 romance languages) Portuguese葡萄牙语 Spanish西班牙语 French法语 Italian意大利语 Rumanian罗马尼亚语 Germanic日耳曼族 English英语 German德语 Dutch荷兰语 Flemish弗来芒语 Scandinavian languages Norwegian挪威语 Icelandic冰岛语 Danish丹麦语 Swedish瑞典语 3 Phases of the Historical Development Three periods of English: Old Engl
