WHY DO WE SPEAK ENGLISH?

　　About three thousand years ago, groups of people who lived in southern and eastern Europe began to move into the northern regions that today we call Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are known as the Germanic peoples, and the dialects and languages they spoke are all called Germanic too。大约3000年前，原本居住在欧洲南部、东部的一群人开始向北迁移，来到我们现在所谓的德国、荷兰、丹麦、瑞典和挪威等国家。他们被称为“日耳曼人”，他们说的语言就叫“日耳曼语”。

　　A monk called Bede wrote a book telling us how groups of Germanic people arrived in Britain in the fifth century from different parts of northern Europe. He says some of them were called Angles, some were called Saxons and some were called Jutes. They settled in different parts of Britain. And it didn't take long before they developed new ways of speaking。有个叫Bede的修道士写了一本书，讲述了5世纪时很多日耳曼人从北欧的不同地方迁移到了英国，其中有些被称为盎格鲁人，有些被称为撒克逊人，还有一些被称为朱特人，他们留在了英国各地。没多久，他们就形成了自己新的语言。

　　After a while, people began to give these new settlers a name. They called them Anglo-Saxons – in other words, the 'English' Saxons, not the other Saxons who still lived in mainland Europe. They called this country 'English land', and eventually this became the name we now know, England. And the language spoken by these new Saxons, they called 'English'。不久，大家给这群新移民[微博]起了个名字叫盎格鲁-撒克逊人，是指English的撒克逊人，而不是欧洲大陆的撒克逊人。他们的国家叫“English land”，后来就演变成了现在地球人都知道的England(英格兰)，而这些撒克逊人所说的语言就叫“English”(英语)。

　　If you look at the English that the Anglo-Saxons spoke, you'll find it's very different from what we use today. There have been so many changes that it's almost like a foreign language. We call it Old English。如果你听过盎格鲁-撒克逊人说的英语，你就知道他们说的英语和咱们说的英语差别好大，他们的英语听着像一门外语。我们现在称他们的英语为“Old English”(古英语)。

　　If you travelled back in time a thousand years, you'd have some difficulty understanding what the Anglo-Saxons were saying. But you'd recognize quite a few words that are still used in Modern English, such as house, bed, child and friend. And if you said to an Anglo-Saxon warrior, 'I live in that street,' he'd know what you were talking about, for all the words in that sentence have been in English for over a thousand years。如果你穿越回到1000年前，你可能很难听懂盎格鲁-撒克逊人在说啥，但你也可能会听得懂零星单词，比如house、bed、child和friend这些咱们仍在用的词。如果你对一个盎格鲁-撒克逊武士说：“I live in that street”(我住在那条街)，他会明白你在说啥，因为I、live、in、that和street这几个单词从古用到今。