a História do Inglês - como Tudo Começou inglês

HOW IT ALL BEGAN\nThe history of English (part one)\n\n1. About 5000 B.C., a tribe called the Indo-Europeans lived in Central Europe. They were farmers and they had their own language. They discovered the wheel around 3000 B.C. After this they were able to travel. Some went east and others went west.\n\n2. The Indo-Europeans who travelled to Britain were the Celts. Today the people of Wales, Western Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and Brittany in Northern France still call themselves 'Celts'.\n\n3. The Celts were the only people in Britain for over 2,000 years. Then the Romans arrived. Julius Caesar and his army brought a new language - Latin. But the Romans lived in England and the Celts (they’re sometimes called 'Ancient' Britons) lived in Scotland and Wales. Only a few Latin words entered the Celtic language.\n\n4. The Romans left Britain in 410 A.D. Forty years later, a new group of invaders arrived. These were the Angles and Saxons. Today British and American people are still often called Anglo-Saxons. They came from Holland, Denmark and Germany. The language of the Angles and Saxons was 'Englisc' or 'Old English'. They were farmers and many of their words are still in the dictionary today. Here are some examples: story, earth, day, and field. Words like 'is' and 'you' are Anglo-Saxon too. 6. The next important step in the history of English came between the years 750 and 1050. That’s when the Vikings began to attack Britain. They came from Scandinavia and their language, 'Norse', sounded a lot like modern Swedish. Norse words in English today include get, wrong, leg, want, skin, same and few.\n\n7. One of the most important dates in British history is 1066. That’s when the French duke, William, beat the English king, Harold, at the Battle of Hastings. After that, French words became an important part of English.\n\n8. In the next 200 years, Old English (with all its new Norse, Latin and French vocabulary) changed and became 'Middle English'. Then in 1340 the first great English writer was born - Geoffrey Chaucer. His most famous book is called the Canterbury Tales.\n\n9. In the next century (around 1480) a man called William Caxton printed the Canterbury Tales on a new machine. It was called a printing press. Printing was very important for English because it fixed the grammar and spelling. Thanks to Caxton, English became a clearer, stronger language. Now it was ready for its next great writer - William Shakespeare. FROM SHAKESPEARE TO NOW\nThe history of English (part two)\n\nElizabeth I was Queen of England from 1558 to 1603. These forty-five years are sometimes called 'The Elizabethan Age'. Two famous Elizabethans were Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. Drake and Raleigh were both sailors and explorers. Their journeys to the New World (America) and the West Indies were very important for two reasons. First, they brought England a lot of money and power. Second, they began something that is still happening today - the export of the English language.\n\nBut perhaps the most famous Elizabethan of all was William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616). He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and wrote many of his thirty-seven plays there. Today, they’re still popular in Stratford. That’s because it’s now the home of Britain’s most famous theatre group 'The Royal Shakespeare Company'.\n\nShakespeare's Plays Include\nHamlet / Macbeth / King Lear / Othello / The Tempest / Romeo and Juliet / Richard III / All’s Well That Ends Well\n\nDid you know?\n1. Shakespeare had a vocabulary of about 30,000 words. Even today, few people have a vocabulary of more than 15,000.\n\n2. In Shakespeare’s time, only six or seven million people spoke English. In 1620 (four years after Shakespeare's death), a ship called the Mayflower sailed to America. The people on it weren't explorers like Drake and Raleigh - they were settlers. They stayed in America, built towns and started a new life there. In the next thirty years, more than 250,000 people from all over Britain followed them.\n\nBut the English language didn't just travel west to America. It went to Australia, too. A famous explorer called Captain Cook sailed there in 1770. Eighteen years later the first settlers began to arrive. Many of them were criminals. Why did the English send thousands of criminals to Australia? Because there was a lot of crime in the eighteenth century and the prisons were full.\n\nThe first English dictionary appeared in 1775. It contained more than 40,000 words (today, the Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million). The man who wrote it was called Dr Samuel Johnson. It took him thirty years.\n\nAnother important date in the history of English is 1807. That’s when the 'slave trade' stopped. For 150 years before 1807 British ships took West African people to America and the West Indies. There, they sold them to rich farmers. These West African 'slaves' were the first black Americans. Between 1800 and 1900 Britain became the richest country in the world. It was powerful, too. Queen Victoria (she was queen from 1837 to 1901) controlled an 'empire' of foreign countries. These included India, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria and South Africa. Because of the British Empire, English was now an important language on every continent. But many people in Australia, Africa, Asia and North America didn’t speak the official 'Queen’s English'. Their accents and vocabulary were very different from hers! English was already growing and changing internationally.\n\nBritain kept its empire until the middle of the 20th century. Then, one by one, countries like India, Kenya, Canada and New Zealand became independent. (They left the empire, but stayed good friends with Britain. Today, many of these countries are in the Commonwealth - an international club of English-speaking countries.)\n\nAt the same time, the U.S.A. was quickly growing richer and more powerful. Finally, by the 1950s, America and not Britain was the English-speaking super power. After that, a new chapter began in the history of English. It was already an important language. Now, in the age of TV and satellites it was ready to become something even bigger. The United States and its language both grew very quickly in the nineteenth century. These were the days of cowboys, Indians, gold and railways. Every year, thousands of pioneers travelled west. Soon, many of them reached the Pacific Ocean and in 1850 California became the thirty-first state. Only twenty years later it was possible to travel there by train from New York. The American population also grew quickly. Between 1800 and 1900, sixteen million Europeans began new lives in the U.S.A. Many of them came from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia and Central Europe. All of them brought new words and expressions to American English.\n\nToday there are thousands of nineteenth-century words in American English. They’re the vocabulary of cowboys, avers, settlers and railway-builders. There are thousands of twentieth-century words, too, of course.\n\nIn fact, American English is growing faster now than ever before. Where are the new words coming from?\nThe same people - pioneers and settlers, but these days the settlers come from south-east Asia and Central America and the pioneers are scientists and teenagers.\n\nDid you know? The second most important language in America is Spanish. More than twenty million Hispanic people live in the U.S.A. In fact, by the year 2000 more people in Los Angeles will speak Spanish than English. AMERICAN ENGLISH\nWhat's the difference?\n\nVOCABULARY\n\nAmerican English British English\napartment flat\nautomobile car\ncab taxi\ncan tin\ncandy sweets\ncloset cupboard\ncookie biscuit\ncrazy mad\ndrug-store chemist(s)\nelevator lift\nfail autumn\nfaucet tap\nfirst floor ground floor\nfreeway motorway\ngarbage rubbish\ngarbage can dustbin\ngas petrol\nhighway main road\nmad angry\nmail post\nmovies the cinema\npants trousers\npocketbook wallet\npotato chips crisps\nrailroad railway\nrest room public toilet\nround trip return (ticket)\nschedule timetable\nschool school, college, university\nshades sunglasses\nsick ill\nsidewalk pavement\nstore shop\nstove cooker\nsubway tube, underground (train)\ntruck van, lorry\nvacation holiday\n\nSPELLING\n\nAmerican English British English\ncheck cheque\ndefense defence\ndialog dialogue\njewelry jewellery\ntheater theatre\ntire tyre\ntraveler traveller\nrealize realise\nfavorite favourite\n\nGRAMMAR\n\n1 American English often uses the past where British English uses the present perfect.\nU.S. - Did you eat yet? G.B. - Have you eaten yet?\n\n2 American English sometimes uses the verb 'to have' differently from British English.\nU.S. - Do you have a problem? G.B. - Have you got a problem?\n\n3 The past participle of 'get' in American English is 'gotten'. In British English it is 'got'.\nU.S. - We've never really gotten to know each other.\nG.B. - We've never really got to know each other.\n\n4 There are lots of small differences in the use of prepositions.\nFor example ...\nU.S. G.B.\ncheck something out check something\ndo something over do something again\nfill out a form fill in a form\nmeet with somebody meet somebody\nprotest' something protest about something\nstay home stay at home\nvisit with somebody visit somebody\nMonday thru Friday Monday to Friday\nten of eleven ten to eleven\n\n5 On the telephone.\nU.S. - Hello, is this Susan?\nG.B. - Hello, is that Susan?