The English language is peculiarly rich in synonyms, as, with such a history, it could not
fail to be. From the time of Julius Cæsar, Britons, Romans, Northmen, Saxons, Danes,
and Normans fighting, fortifying, and settling upon the soil of England, with Scotch and
Irish contending for mastery or existence across the mountain border and the Channel,
and all fenced in together by the sea, could not but influence each other's speech. English
merchants, sailors, soldiers, and travelers, trading, warring, and exploring in every clime,
of necessity brought back new terms of sea and shore, of shop and camp and battlefield.
English scholars have studied Greek and Latin for a thousand years, and the languages of
the Continent and of the Orient in more recent times. English churchmen have introduced
words from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, through Bible and prayer-book, sermon and tract.
From all this it results that there is scarcely a language ever spoken among men that has
not some representative in English speech. The spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race, masterful
in language as in war and commerce, has subjugated all these various elements to one
idiom, making not a patchwork, but a composite language. Anglo-Saxon thrift, finding
often several words that originally expressed the same idea, has detailed them to different
parts of the common territory or to different service, so that we have an almost
unexampled variety of words, kindred in meaning but distinct in usage, for expressing
almost every shade of human thought.
一种语言的解释就是它本身的自我理解。其他语言解释起来要用更多的解释去解释，白云变成了乌云。英语学习同此感者何其多也。
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