云英语

Let's start with a bit of the history of England and of Europe in general. Before English even existed as such (English was brought to the British islands by Germanic tribes coming from northern continental Europe at the end of the 5th century) Britain was a colony of the Roman empire, whose official language was, as you may know, Latin. Well, at the peak of the extension of the empire, Latin was spoken from Scotland to Egypt and from Morocco to Romania. After the fall of the empire, a myriad of smaller political units arose, and people at each of them developed different languages, but Latin was still the only one recognized as universal. Becoming a literary language, Latin was, for more than one millennium, the unchallenged medium of expression for all higher intellectual and scientific discourse: its impact in western culture can hardly be overstated. This is why, even today, most scholarly vocabulary in most western languages, including English, is drawn from Latin. This means that when studying advanced English vocabulary, we are getting in touch with a plethora of Latin words, for whose roots we start developing a certain sensibility. Take a look at the following words: induce, deduce, introduction, abduction, education, product, aqueduct. Can you "feel" the Latin root duc "to lead" hovering over these words? When one has got a solid grasp of these roots present virtually in every department of English vocabulary, when one tackles a Latin text, there are hardly any words for which there are not related English words stemming from it.