Four stages in the United States and Britain

The four stages of the United States and Britain are: colonial period, expansion period, independence period and prevailing period.

The first stage belongs to colonial American English. /kloc-in the 0 th and 7 th centuries, the British began to immigrate to North America and settled on the Atlantic coast. The English that these immigrants introduced into the New World was British English in Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan's time.

The second stage is the expansion of American English from the original thirteen state colonies to the mainland, from 1790 to 1860, just before the outbreak of the American Civil War. During this period, the conservatism brought by British immigrants merged with the spirit of ignoring the traditional frontier development.

In terms of language, American English has been influenced by foreign words such as German, French and Spanish, and has expanded its vocabulary. For example, hamburgers, noodles and semesters are all borrowed from German. Bureau, depot, cache, borrowing French; Tomatoes, barbecues, chocolates, in Spanish.

In the third stage, American English began to move towards independence. From about 1860 to 1890, Latin-and Slavic-speaking countries began to immigrate to the United States.

During this period, national literature appeared in the United States, and some writers, such as Webster, Bartley, Whitman and Mark Twain, all opposed the English expression and usage following the provisions of standard British English.

The fourth stage is the period of American nationalism. From about 1890 to 1920, transportation, mass communication and science and technology all progressed with nationalism, and American English also developed its unique nature.

And this unique Americanism began to intervene in British English, such as common words such as talent, reliability, influence, bravado, and political terms such as Caucus, Buncombe, Graft, Platform and Carpotba.

Creativity of American English

1. Create new words that don't exist at all. For example, a person with exciting attraction began to be called pizzazz(/p? z？ Z/, a fashionable person). The early colonists also created many words, such as bellhop (club attendant), decouple (revealing the truth), blurb (explanation), cosloops(* * * plot) and skyscrapers (skyscrapers).

With the development of science and technology, a series of scientific theory words have been born, such as black hole, movie, copy, spacewalk and so on. The recent appearance of Chinese astronauts has also added a new word "taikonaut" to American English to distinguish it from "astronaut".

2. On the basis of old words, use affixes freely, or create new words by using affixes and anti-word formation.

For example: debug (find and eliminate the cause of the error), defog (defog), defrost (defrost). Smoke comes from smoke and fog, medical insurance is a mixture of medical care and nursing, and brunch is a mixture of breakfast and lunch.

American English frequently uses transformations, especially the transformation from nouns to verbs, such as: to engineer (design), to style (naming), to revive (model) and so on. Adjectives are often transformed into nouns, such as depressed people, gentle people and friendly people.

Baidu Encyclopedia-American English