ENGLISH TEXT
English has had a long tradition of borrowing words from other languages. This tradition began with the conquest of Britain by the Norman-French in 1066. Beacause these conquerors established themselves as rulers, their dialect of French became the language of aristocracy, of government, and of education. During this oeriod, many French words came in the English language. Another strong influx of vocabulary came from Latin, which was the language of the church. Today, those words derived from French and Latin, though still identiable, as such, are an inseparable part of English vocabulary and are not thought of as foreign by English speakers. In fact, the first two sentences of this paragraph contain three words that come to us from this tradition : tradition, languages, and conquest.
The British colonial era, which began with outposts in Nirth America in the early seventeeth century, brought English speakers into contact with many other languages. In North America, words from the Native American peoples quickly found rheir way into the language. Examples include moccasin (a kind of soft shoe), squash (a vegetable), and succotash (a dish made with corn and quash).
The presence of Spanish colonies in North America led to the adoption of numerous Spanish words, such as siesta (a nap) and tortilla (a flat thin pancake made of wheat or corn flour). Asian languages also made contributions. For example, the word pajamas come from a Hindi worrd, khaki come from Urdu, and ketchup was borrowed from Chinese.
Words from African languages, too, made their way into English during the time that slavery was an institution in the United States. Okra (a vegetable) and goober (peanut) are examples.
The result of all of this absorption of new words is a very rich vocabulary that allows users of English to express subtlety of meaning and also formality and informality through their choice of words.
QUESTIONS BASED ON THE TEXT
The following ideas concerning the English language are contained in the second paragraph:
