Americans have taken over from the Indians many things besides their continent! Where did corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and maple sugar come from? The Indians. Who invented moccasins, snowshoes and hammocks? The Indians!
A list of the tools, plants, materials and designs we owe to the Indians would include hundreds of items. But there is something far more familiar, something that is always at hand. It is used daily by every American: a large vocabulary of Indian words.
Potato, tomato, chocolate, moccasin and hammock came into English from Indian languages. So did cocoa, tobacco, maize (an Indian word for corn) and succotash. Some words have changed on the way. Potato, for example, comes from a word that sounds like “batata”. Cocoa began as “cacahuatl”.
Some meanings have also changed. The long Indian word from which succotash comes means “something broken off in bits”. Indian women often varied their dishes by mixing bits of one food with another. White men who ate an Indian di
sh of mixed lima beans (青豆) and corn began using the Indian word to mean this particular mixt
ure.
Put on your moccasins and take a walk in the country. If it is a cold day and you wear a mackinaw, your jacket will be as Indian as your shoes. But mackinaw came from “michilimackinac”, the Indian name of a place where a fort (集市) served as a trading post. Bright-colored blankets or jackets bought at the post soon became known as “mackinaws”.
Early white visitors to the continent found Indian words useful for the things new to them. But some Indian sounds, such as the “tl” at the end of many words, were hard to say. That is why “coyotl” became coyote and “tomatle” became tomato.
Some words simply seemed too long. So, “musickwautash” became succotash and “rockahominy” became hominy.
小题1:The first two paragraphs may serve as a(n) .
A．explanation
B．introduction
C．comment
D．background小题2: Which of the following has been changed for easier pronunciation?
A．Batata
B．Chocolate
C．Tomatle
D．Rockahominy小题3: Some words have changed because .
A．they are too long
B．nobody can use them
C．the things they refer to have disappeared
D．they are too difficult for people to write小题4: What is the pass
age mainly about?
A．How Indian traditions affect us.
B．Why Indian words were changed.
C．Things we owe to the Indians.
D．Indian words all around us.
