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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答案据说英文有400万词汇，没有人能认识所有的词。一个受过良好教育的人的词汇量超不过20万。
解析 此句是一个并列复合句，两个分句由分号连接。句子结构为：“Nobody knows…words that…；a…person…uses under200,000”。在第一个分句中，关系代词that引导定语从句修饰words。
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