History of English文章翻译

History of English文章翻译
这是第二段The Scandinavian Settlements
The next invaders were the Norsemen. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers of Norse invaders settled in Britain, particularly in northern and eastern areas, and in the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king, Canute. The distinct North Germanic speech of the Norsemen had great influence on English, most obviously seen in the words that English has borrowed from this source. These include some very basic words such as take and even grammatical words such as they. The common Germanic base of the two languages meant that there were still many similarities between Old English and the language of the invaders. Some words, for example give perhaps show a kind of hybridization with some spellings going back to Old English and others being Norse in origin. However, the resemblances between the two languages are so great that in many cases it is impossible to be sure of the exact ancestry of a particular word or spelling. However, much of the influence of Norse, including the vast majority of the loanwords, does not appear in written English until after the next great historical and cultural upheaval, the Norman Conquest.
1066 and after 1066 and all that
The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. Old English, like German today, showed a tendency to find native equivalents for foreign words and phrases (although both Old English and modern German show plenty of loanwords), whereas Middle English acquired the habit that modern English retains today of readily accommodating foreign words. Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. One only has to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

北欧人定居
接着的侵略者是古斯堪的纳维亚人（又称北欧人）.从九世纪中期开始,就有大量的北欧人定居在不列颠,尤其是在不列颠的北部和东部地区.到了11世纪,整个英格兰被丹麦国王卡纽特所统治.北欧人独特的北日耳曼语对英语有很大的影响,从借用北日耳曼语的英语单词中看,这种影响尤为突出.这些从北日耳曼语借用来的英语单词包括像take这样的基本单词,还包括像they这样的语法单词.两种语言都有日耳曼语的基础,这就意味着古英语和侵略者语言还是存在很多相似之处的.比方说,有些单词给人的感觉可能就是一些读音属于古英语,而另外一些读音来源于北欧语.然而,由于这两种语言有太多相似之处,很多时候人们根本无法判定某个单词或发音真正来源于哪种语言.不管怎样,北欧语系带来的影响,包括很大一部分外来词语,直到诺曼征服这一历史和文化剧变的发生才出现在书面英语中.
（这是前面一部分）