3 Etymological survey of the English lexicon.

1 – native words (30 %); 2 – borrowed words /loans (70 %). Typical features of native words: 1 – they mean trivial notions; 2 – they have monosyllabic character; 3 – high frequency (Zipth’s law – the shorter the word is the more frequently it is used); 4 – polysemantic character; 5 – great word-building power (derivatives & compounds); 6 – high combinability (make set expressions); 7 – they are stylistically neutral in different speech styles. Native words: 1) those of the Indo-European stock: terms of kinship (father, son); objects of nature (sun, moon); animals, birds (goose, wolf); parts of human body (arm, heart, foot) 2) of Common Germanic origin (have parallels in German – Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic). E.g.: nouns – summer, winter, ice, bridge, house, life, cloth; verbs – buy, hear, meet, keep; adj. – dead, deaf. English vocabulary: archaic words; historical words (describe historical events); obsolete words; modern words; neologies (new words nami9ng new concepts, fashionable words – workaholic, cod); home-words (occasional words – box = TV-set, words of writers, of youth, slang). History of borrowings: 1 – Roman invasion; 2 – introduction of Christianity; 3 – the Danish & Scandinavian invasions; 4 – Norman Conquest; 5 – Italian Renaissance; 6 – British colonialism; 7 – modern borrowings. Types of borrowing: 1) the original l-ge (where a word was born); 2) the source (donor) l-ge – from which it was taken. Sources of borrowing: 1) from other l-ges (from Latin, French, Greek, Hindi); 2) from dialects of the same l-ge (London dialect became superior for economical & political reasons). Reasons or motives for borrowing: 1) the prestige motive – to sound clever & sophisticated, to be identical with the upper class); 2) the need-feeling motive (to fill in gaps in the vocabulary – tobacco, coffee, tomato, pizza). Loans: 1) translation loans (morpheme-for- morpheme translation; wall newspaper – стенная газета); 2) semantic loans (the development of a new meaning due to the influence of another from Russian l-ge; “pioneer” meaning “explorer” but from Russian acquired “A member of the young Pioneer’s organization). Assimilation of loans conformation to the standards of the receiving l-ge: 1) completely assimilated (complete phonetical, graphical, morphological & semantic assimilation): - Latin borrowings (cheese, animal, wall); - Scand. (husband, fellow); - French (table, chair, face) 2) partially assimilated: - not assimilated semantically (they denote notions peculiar to that country – sheik, toreador); - grammatically (crisis – crises); - phonetically (machine, police, prestige); - graphically (ballet, buffet); 3) barbarisms (non – assimilated) – words from other l-ges used by English people in conversation or writing – Italian “addio”. Etymological douplets – have the same meaning but different etymology & used in different styles (bookish & colloquial) – to start & to commence. International words (appear due to the progress in science) – e.g.: antenna, antibiotic; international of English origin: film, club, cocktail, jazz. Lexical assimilation: 1)specialization (narrowing, restriction); 2) generalization (extension, widening); 3)amelioration (elevation); 4) ? (degradation); 5)transference; 6) folk etymology (associating with familiar words which resemble in sound but are not related). Linguistic Puritanism – denies loan words, their right to exist. They pollute the l-ge.