speak: [OE] The usual Old English word for ‘speak’ was sprecan, which has close living relatives in German sprechen and Dutch spreken. Specan, the ancestor of modern English speak, did not appear until around the year 1000, but already by the 12th century it had virtually replaced sprecan. It is not known how the r-less form (which has no surviving relatives in other Germanic languages) arose, but it is clearly a secondary development of the r-form.
This seems to be connected with Danish spage ‘crackle’, Lithuanian sprageti ‘crackle’, and Sanskrit sphūrj- ‘crackle, rustle’, suggesting that the English word’s use for ‘utter, say’ arose via an earlier ‘crackle, prattle, babble, chatter’ (English ‘crack on about something’, ‘not what it’s cracked up to be’, and ‘crack a joke’ are remnants of an earlier widespread use of English crack for ‘speak’). => speech
speak (v.)
Old English specan, variant of sprecan "to speak, utter words; make a speech; hold discourse (with others)" (class V strong verb; past tense spr?c, past participle sprecen), from Proto-Germanic *sprek-, *spek- (cognates: Old Saxon sprecan, Old Frisian spreka, Middle Dutch spreken, Old High German sprehhan, German sprechen "to speak," Old Norse spraki "rumor, report"), from PIE root *spreg- (1) "to speak," perhaps identical with PIE root *spreg- (2) "to strew," on notion of speech as a "scattering" of words.
The -r- began to drop out in Late West Saxon and was gone by mid-12c., perhaps from influence of Danish spage "crackle," also used in a slang sense of "speak" (compare crack (v.) in slang senses having to do with speech, such as wisecrack, cracker, all it's cracked up to be). Elsewhere, rare variant forms without -r- are found in Middle Dutch (speken), Old High German (spehhan), dialectal German (sp?chten "speak").
Not the primary word for "to speak" in Old English (the "Beowulf" author prefers matelian, from m?tel "assembly, council," from root of metan "to meet;" compare Greek agoreuo "to speak, explain," originally "speak in the assembly," from agora "assembly").
speak (n.)
c. 1300, "talk, speech," from speak (v.). Survived in Scottish English and dialect, but modern use in compounds probably is entirely traceable to Orwell (see Newspeak).
例文
1. The Ukrainians speak a Slavonic language similar to Russian.
ウクライナ人が話すスラブ語系の言語はロシア語に似ている。
2.Sonia might not speak the English language well，but then who did？
ソニアの英語は下手かもしれないが、誰が上手なのだろうか。
3.Pressure appears to be mounting for conformity in how people speak English.
英語の規範化を求める圧力が高まっているようだ。
4.A substantial proportion of the population speak a French-based patois.