sábado, 6 de agosto de 2011

History of English -Whatever happened to the Jutes?

The History of English in 10 minutes is a collection of ten one-minute videos from The Open University, which provides a funny light-hearted approach to the history of the English language.

The videos are fast-paced and dense, because they try to convey a lot of information in a very short period of time, but the cartoons greatly help with comprehension.

To kill two birds with one stone, we'll be providing the transcripts of all the chapters with some blanks in it, so that you can practise your listening skills while making sure that you get a full understanding of everything that is narrated on the video.

The first chapter in the series is Whatever happened to the Jutes?



Self-study activity:

The English language begins with the phrase Up your Caesar, as the Romans (1) ... Britain, and a lot of Germanic tribes start (2) ... in, tribes such as the Saxons and the Anglos, who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jukes, who didn’t.

The Romans left some very (3) ...   ... behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Anglo-Saxon vocab was much more useful, as it was mainly words for simple everyday things like ‘house’, ‘woman’, ‘(4) ...’ and ‘werewolf’.

Four of our days of the week were named in honour of Anglo-Saxon gods. They didn’t (5) ... with Saturday, Sunday or Monday as they’d all gone off for a long weekend.

While they were away, Christian missionaries stole in bringing with them with (6) ... about jumble sales and more Latin. Christianity was a (7) ... with the locals and made them much happy to take on funky new words from Latin like ‘martyr’, ‘bishop’ and ‘font’.

Along came the Vikings with their action man words like ‘drag’, ‘ransack’, ‘thrust’ and ‘die’. They made have (8) ... and pillaged but they were also into (9) ... and (10) ...    . Two of around two thousand words they gave English, as well as the phrase ‘Watch out for that man with the enormous axe’.

Key:
1 leave 2 flooding 3 straight roads 4 loaf 5 bother 6 leaflets 7 hit 8 raped 9 give 10 take

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