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3. Vocabulary The vocabulary used by American speakers of English has many distinctive peculiarities. There are whole groups of words which belong exclusively to the American vocabulary and make it different from other variants of English. Such words are called Americanisms. The first group of Americanisms is known as historical Americanisms . The first English-speaking migrants began arriving in America at the beginning of the 17 th c. They came there in search of new opportunities and better living conditions. It was then that the English language was first brought to the American soil, and it is obvious that it was spoken then in its 17 th c. form. For example, the noun fall was still used at that time in its old meaning „autumn‟, the verb to guess meant „to think‟ and the adjective sick meant „ill, unwell‟. Later these words changed their meanings in British, whereas in American usage they have retained the meanings that the migrants knew in the 17 th c. The second group of Americanisms includes words which are not likely to be discovered in the British English vocabulary. They are exclusively American and are called proper Americanisms . The oldest of these words were created by the first migrants to the American continent. To a great extent, these words reflect the attempts of the first English settlers to cope linguistically with their new environment. Coming to a new and faraway place, the migrants felt a serious lack of words in their 144 own vocabulary with which to describe all the unfamiliar and strange things around them. Gradually they started to invent their own words to describe the unfamiliar things and notions. Thus there appeared such words as eggplant (a plant with edible fruit; aubergine in British English), sweet potato (a plant with sweet edible roots), catfish (a kind of fish called so because of the spines resembling cat‟s claws), bull- frog (a huge frog producing sounds resembling a bull‟s roar). Among later proper Americanisms we find names of objects and notions called differently in England and in the United States. E.g. the British chemist’s is called drugstore or pharmacy in the United States, the American word for sweets (Br.) is candy, lift (Br.) = elevator (Amer.), biscuit (Br.) = cookie (Amer.), cash dispenser (Br.) = ATM machine (Amer.), company (Br. ) = corporation (Amer.), dinner jacket (Br.) = tuxedo (Amer.), pavement (Br.) = sidewalk (Amer.), petrol (Br.) = gas (Amer.). American vocabulary is rich in specifically жүктеу/скачать 1,38 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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