way2go! 6. Practice Pack, Arbeitsheft

38 Unit 06 | Of angst and Oscars Read the text about Shakespeare. The text’s three original paragraphs have been halved and then mixed up. Match the paragraph halves and decide which order the paragraphs go in. READING 9 a Shakespeare’s English A He gave us many different sayings which we use on a daily basis, such as ‘the world is my oyster’, meaning you have a lot of opportunities. If you’ve ever eaten too much pizza and felt sick, someone might have told you that you can have ‘too much of a good thing’, or if you can picture something and see it ‘in your mind’s eye’, then you’re using Shakespeare’s words. So why is some of Shakespeare’s language hard to follow? B In fact, he invented or first wrote down over 1,700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and sometimes just making up words. Some of these may have been in use already, but Shakespeare was the first to write them down and put them into general use. Now you are probably wondering which words these are. C Shakespeare’s complex sentence structures and use of archaic words lead many students to think they are reading Old English. In fact, Shakespeare’s works are written in Early Modern English. Once you see a text in Old English, you’ll really appreciate how easy Shakespeare is to understand (well, relatively speaking). Take, for example, a line from the most famous of all Old English works, Beowulf . D If you’ve ever used the words ‘alligator’, ‘bloody’, ‘gloomy’ and ‘eyeball’, then you got them from Shakespeare. If you’ve ever told someone you have ‘caught a cold’ when you start sneezing, said that something old and worn has ‘seen better days’ or warned someone that ‘all that glitters is not gold’ when something seems wonderful but actually isn’t, then you have been using Shakespeare’s words. Even everyday words such as ‘excitement’ and ‘useful’ seem to have first been recorded by him. E It reads: “Hwät! we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum” (which means: “Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements”). Now you’ll surely agree that this is much trickier than Shakespeare’s language. Old English was spoken and written in Britain from the 5th century to the middle of the 11th century and is really closer to the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. So, next time you have visitors who eat all your food and ‘eat you out of house and home’, and you sadly look into the empty fridge and think it is ‘a sorry sight’, you can thank William Shakespeare for the words! F Do you speak like Shakespeare? Believe it or not, the answer to this is yes! Sure, it can be difficult to read Shakespeare’s plays and poems as they were written around 1600, and the language can be tricky. Also, it is hard to understand words which we no longer commonly use, such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. However, Shakespeare created many words and phrases which we still use today. After reading the text, do the following: 1 Explain how we all use Shakespeare’s English. 2 Write two reasons why some people think Shakespeare’s language is Old English. 3 Write down three ways in which Shakespeare created new words. b Body paragraph 1 Body paragraph 2 Body paragraph 3 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv