2. 外语
  3. A number of foreign words still look like foreign words; these are often expressions which were originally used by people who wa

A number of foreign words still look like foreign words; these are often expressions which were originally used by people who wa

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问题      A number of foreign words still look like foreign words; these are often expressions which were originally used by people who wanted to sound particularly well educated. (61) It was the desire to be scholarly that brought about a wave of Latin terms which appeared in the 16th century when the Humanist movement brought new impetus to learning throughout Europe. Abbreviations such as e.g. (from the Latin meaning a voluntary example); PS (meaning "added after the letter has been written); a.m. and p.m. (meaning "before noon" and "after noon") came into the language at this time. 62) Nowadays they are so common that most people don’t even know what the letters actually stand for, and there’s certainly nothing learned about using them today!
     In addition to the words brought to English by foreigners, there are plenty of words which the British have collected from the countries they have settled in all over the world. 63) There are even a few Chinese words, which I’m sure a Chinese speaker would never recognize from the way we pronounce them: "typhoon" is a great wind; "to kow tow" is to bow down low; a "sampan" is a small wooden boat. Over 5,000 of the words in common use in English today are words of foreign origin. Some of them are clearly recognizable as foreign like "au pair" or "rendezvous"; others now look so English that only a language historian knows where they came from.
     So English is in a state of permanent development. Both in Britain and abroad it is gaining new words and expressions, and dropping and changing old ones. Words change their meaning, and they go in and out of fashion like hairstyles. 64) Nobody knows all the four million words that are said to exist; a well educated person probably uses under 200,000. 65) So don’t be surprised if you never encounter some of the expressions that still appear in school textbooks; and next time you hear somebody using a strange word you haven’t heard before, you can comfort yourself that there may well be a native speaker somewhere who doesn’t know it either.
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答案今天，这些字词用得太普遍了，大多数人甚至不大了解这些缩略字母实际代表什么，所以今天使用这些字当然也就不能表示知识渊博了。
解析 此句是一个并列复合句，两个分句由and连接。第一个分句中 that引导结果状语从句，说明common；what引导名词从句，作know的宾语。句中主语they表示前面提到的缩略字母；stand for是“代表”的意思。
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