3)Etymological survey of the Eng lexicon

3 Etymological survey of the Eng lexicon

Etymology – the study of lexical history, of the origin and development of the word.

The origin of the Eng vocabulary:

• On the basis of the Germ tribal lgs

• Its core was formed by the 7^th century

• A mixed character: 70% of borrowings and 30% native words

• 120 lgs – sources of its present day vocabulary.

Wordstock

30 % native	70 % borrowings/loans
Indo-European stock	Celtic 5-6th c: bog, glen, whiskey, bug, kick, creak; the Avon, the Esk, the Usk, the Thames, the Severn, Ben Nevis, Winchester, Salisbury…
Germanic stock	Latin: 1. early/continental (brought by the Germ tribes: cup, cheese, butter, mill, line…) 2. the Germ tribes tried to annihilate all the remnants of the Roman culture but nevertheless they borrowed via Celtic some words that were still in wide use in England: port, street, mile, mountain, -chester, -caster 3. Christianity 4. The Renaissance
English proper	Scandinavian 8-11th c AD
	French
	Greek, Italian, Spanish…

Native words possess:

1. stability

2. semantic value: parts of body, family members, closest relatives, animals, common actions

3. wide collocability/combinability → idioms, phrasal verbs, stonewall constructions

4. polysemy

5. derivational potential: can produce new words

6. wide sphere of application and high frequency value.

Conditions stimulating borrowings

1. close contact; especially in multinational communities

2. the domination of 1 lg over another for some reason

3. a sense of need: when there’s a need to fill the gap in the vocabulary

4. prestige

Source of borrowings – the lg from which the loan word was taken.

Origin of borrowings – the lg to which the loan word can be traced. The lg where the word 1^st appeared.

Ways of borrowings: through oral or written speech.

Types of borrowings:

1. borrowings proper: table, chair, people… resemble the native words; lost their peculiarities

2. translation loans/calques – words/expressions formed from the material existing in the lg according to the patterns taken from another lg by means of literal morpheme-for-morpheme translation or literal word-for-word translation. (the mg and the pattern are borrowed). Superman, lightning-war, masterpiece, homesickness… см. Лещеву стр. 30

3. semantic loans – words that acquired a new mg due to the influence of a related word in another lg. (only the mg is borrowed). Pioneer, to dwell, dream, gift, bureau, bread, comrade…

4. international words – words of identical origin that appear in several lgs as a result of simultaneous/successive borrowings from 1 ultimate source. Film, club, cocktail, jazz… reflect the cultural history

5. combining forms/neoclassical compositions – words made of borrowed roots of Gr and Lat origin. The words themselves didn’t exist in Gr or Lat. Telephone, photograph, microphone…

6. hybrid words – words made up of element derived from 2 or more lgs. Gr/Lat/Fr+native

major patterns:Eng stem+Lat suffix: readable, eatable

Fr root+native sfx: senseless, cheerless…

Gr+native: schoolboy

7. etymological doublets – 2 words of the same lg which are derived from the same basic word but by different routes.

8. folk etymology – mistaken forms. The true explanation is more prosaic. The Middle English form was bridgome, which goes back to Old English brydguma, from 'bride' + guma 'man.' However, gome died out during the Middle English period. By the 16th century its meaning was no longer apparent, and it came to be popularly replaced by a similar-sounding word, grome, 'serving lad.' This later developed the sense of 'servant having the care of horses,' which is the dominant sense today. But bridegroom never meant anything more than 'bride's man.'" Spanish cucaracha became by folk etymology cockroach.

Assimilation of borrowings – adaptation of a loan word to the norms of the given lg.

Types of assimilation:

1. phonetic (shift of stress): capital, service

2. grammatical: protégés

3. lexical/semantic (changes in the semantic structure): stool, surround, large

4. graphic (phantom/fantom). Very rare. Usually in Am Eng. Inconsistent and incomplete.

Degrees of assimilation:

1. complete: sky, get, skin, skirt, table, sport

2. partial: semantic (sombrero, shah, sheikh, tzar, zloty; specific cultural phenomenon), grammatical (criteria, formulas vs. formulae, mediums vs. media), phonetic (garage, vanilla, volcano, genre, gesture, giant, jewel, jungle, police, cartoon, Reich) and graphic: protégé, cortege, cliché, morpheme

3. barbarisms: dolce vita, beau monde…. Have equivalents in the native lg

Linguistic effects of borrowings

1. increase in stylistic synonyms. Usually the borrowed words refer to the literary style and native are more colloquial

2. changes in the semantic structure of words:

• specialization of the mg of the native words

• new mgs

3. derivational ability (re-, -able, -ism)

4. changes in the morphological structure (sk-, v-, oi)

Borrowings in modern Eng culture:

• cuisine: croissant

• sports: aikido

• geisha, Sudoku, karaoke, feng shui, graffiti, macho

• politics: ethnic cleansing, al-Qaeda, jihad, mujahid, perestroika, siloviki….

Etymology

The origin of the Eng vocabulary

Word-stock

Native words possess

Conditions stimulating borrowings

Source of borrowings

Origin of borrowings

Types of borrowings:

Assimilation of borrowings

Types of assimilation

Degrees of assimilation

Linguistic effects of borrowings

Borrowings in modern Eng culture