Native and borrowed words

Native Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary. The native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

Borrowings-the term is used to denote the process of adopting words from other languages and also the result of this process. Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language. In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a thorough etymological analysis.

Source of borrowings. - is appliede to the lang from which particular words were taken into Engl. Original borrowings. - the term is applied to the language the word may be traced to. Assimilation - the process of the changing of the adopted words. A. of thr borrowings includes changes in: sound form; morphological strct; grammar charact-s; usage.

Completely assimilated borrowings - are the words which have undergone all types of Assimilation. They are active in word formation. Partially assim-d b. - the words which lack one of the types of A. They are subdivided into: borrow. not ass-d grammatically (nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek); borrow. not ass-d phonetically (contain peculiarities in stress, not standard for English); barbarisms - words from other lang. , used by English people in conversations or writing, but not assimilated in any way.

Why are words borrowed? Wars, conquests; trade, international and cultural relations; to fill the gap in vocabulary; words, which express some particular notion; enrichment of word groups (syn., ant…).

Native and Borrowed word

Native are words of anglo-saxon origin brought to the English islands from the continent in the 5-th cent by the Germ. tribes (angles, saxons).

Borrowings-the term is used to denote the process of adopting words from other languages and also the result of this process- the lang. material itself.

It has been studied that not only words, but word-building affixes were borrowed into English (able, ment)

Some word-groups were borrowed of their foreign form (tet-a-tet)

Translation loans - are words and expressions, formed from the material, available in the language after the patterns characteristics of the given language , but under the influence of some foreign words and expressions.

Semantic borrowing is the appearance of new meaning due to the influence related words in other lan/

Source of b. - is appliede to the lang from which particular words were taken into Engl.

Original b. - the term is applied to the language the word may be traced to.

Latin b. are classified into 4 subgroups: Early Latin loans, Later b. (7th cent AD), The 3d period (Norman-French b.) Latest stratum of Latin words - international words.

Norman-French subdiv: Early loans 12-15 cent, later loans 16 cent.

Russian b: before the October revolution,after.

Assimilation - the process of the changing of the adopted words. A. of thr borrowings includes changes in: sound form, morphological strct, grammar charact-s, usage.

Completely assimilated b. - are the words which have undergone all types of A. Such words are frequent and stylistically neutral. They may occur as dominant words in synonymic groups. They are active in word formation.

Partially assim-d b. - the words which lack one of the types of A. They are subdivided into:

b. not ass-d grammatically (nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek)

b. not ass-d phonetically (contain peculiarities in stress, not standard for English)

barbarisms - words from other lang. , used by English people in conversations or writing, but not assimilated in any way, for which there are corresponding English equivalents.

Why are words borrowed?

Wars, conquests

trade, international and cultural relations

to fill the gap in vocabulary

words, which express some particular notion

enrichment of word groups (syn., ant…)

Semantic adaptation is adjustment to the system of meaning of vocabulary. Sometimes a word may be borrowed blindly without the aim.E.G. large (Fr. “wide”) managed to establish itself very firmly in Engl. voc. and got the meaning “big”.

International words - As the process of borrowing is mostly connected with the appearance of new notions which the loan words serve to express, it is natural that the borrowing is seldom limited to one language. Words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowings from one ultimate source are called international words.

Most of them are of Latin and Greek origin. Most names of sciences, terms of art, political terms are international.

Etymological doublets (or, by ellipsis, simply doublets) are two or more words of the same language which were derived by different routes from the same basic word.

Examples are whole (in the old sense of ‘healthy’ or ‘free from disease’) and hale. The latter has survived in its original meaning and is preserved in the phrase hale and hearty. Both come from OE hah the one by the normal development of OE a into 6, the other from a northern dialect in which this modification did not take place. Similarly there are the doublets raid and road, their relationship remains clear in the term inroad which means ‘a hostile incursion’, ‘a raid’.The verbs drag and draw both come from OE dragan.

Etymological triplets- 3 words have common route.

A dublet can consist of a shortened words. (history-story)

To sum up this brief treatment of loan words it is necessary to stress t in studying loan words a linguist cannot be content with establish-the source, the date of penetration, the semantic sphere to which word belonged and the circumstances of the process of borrowing, these are very important, but one should also be concerned with the iges the new language system into which the loan word penetrates :es in the word itself, and, on the other hand, look for the changes sioned by the newcomer in the English vocabulary, when in finding vay into the new language it pushed some of its lexical neighbours e. In the discussion above we have tried to show the importance of problem of conformity with the patterns typical of the receiving ;uage and its semantic needs.

Major Periods of Borrowing

Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language (the source language). A loanword can also be called a borrowing. The abstract noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language. "Loan" and "borrowing" are of course metaphors, because there is no literal lending process. There is no transfer from one language to another, and no "returning" words to the source language. The words simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one these words originated in.

Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities. Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the two languages in contact, but often there is an asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other. In this case the source language community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing language community. For example, the Germanic tribes in the first few centuries A.D. adopted numerous loanwords from Latin as they adopted new products via trade with the Romans. Few Germanic words, on the other hand, passed into Latin.

The actual process of borrowing is complex and involves many usage events (i.e. instances of use of the new word). Generally, some speakers of the borrowing language know the source language too, or at least enough of it to utilize the relevant word. They (often consciously) adopt the new word when speaking the borrowing language, because it most exactly fits the idea they are trying to express. If they are bilingual in the source language, which is often the case, they might pronounce the words the same or similar to the way they are pronounced in the source language. For example, English speakers adopted the word garage from French, at first with a pronunciation nearer to the French pronunciation than is now usually found. Presumably the very first speakers who used the word in English knew at least some French and heard the word used by French speakers, in a French-speaking context.

Those who first use the new word might use it at first only with speakers of the source language who know the word, but at some point they come to use the word with those to whom the word was not previously known. To these speakers the word may sound 'foreign'. At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Fahrvergnuegen (German).

However, in time more speakers can become familiar with a new foreign word or expression. The community of users of this word can grow to the point where even people who know little or nothing of the source language understand, and even use, the novel word themselves. The new word becomes conventionalized: part of the conventional ways of speaking in the borrowing language. At this point we call it a borrowing or loanword.

(It should be noted that not all foreign words do become loanwords; if they fall out of use before they become widespread, they do not reach the loanword stage.)

Conventionalization is a gradual process in which a word progressively permeates a larger and larger speech community, becoming part of ever more people's linguistic repetoire. As part of its becoming more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic systems. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the word as a loanword at all. Generally, the longer a borrowed word has been in the language, and the more frequently it is used, the more it resembles the native words of the language.

English has gone through many periods in which large numbers of words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the 8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman Conquest brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.

It is part of the cultural history of English speakers that they have always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they have come in contact with. There have been few periods when borrowing became unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in Britain, the U.S., or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.

The following list is a small sampling of the loanwords that came into English in different periods and from different languages.

I. Germanic period

Latin

The forms given in this section are the Old English ones. The original Latin source word is given in parentheses where significantly different. Some Latin words were themselves originally borrowed from Greek. It can be deduced that these borrowings date from the time before the Angles and Saxons left the continent for England, because of very similar forms found in the other old Germanic languages (Old High German, Old Saxon, etc.). The source words are generally attested in Latin texts, in the large body of Latin writings that were preserved through the ages.ancor 'anchor'

butere 'butter' (L < Gr. butyros)

cealc 'chalk'

ceas 'cheese' (caseum)

cetel 'kettle'

cycene 'kitchen'

cirice 'church' (ecclesia < Gr. ecclesia)

disc 'dish' (discus)

mil 'mile' (milia [passuum] 'a thousand paces')

piper 'pepper'

pund 'pound' (pondo 'a weight')

sacc 'sack' (saccus)

sicol 'sickle'

straet 'street' ([via] strata 'straight way' or stone-paved road)

weall 'wall' (vallum)

win 'wine' (vinum < Gr. oinos)

II. Old English Period (600-1100)

Latinapostol 'apostle' (apostolus < Gr. apostolos)

casere 'caesar, emperor'

ceaster 'city' (castra 'camp')

cest 'chest' (cista 'box')

circul 'circle'

cometa 'comet' (cometa < Greek)

maegester 'master' (magister)

martir 'martyr'

paper 'paper' (papyrus, from Gr.)

tigle 'tile' (tegula)

Celticbrocc 'badger'

cumb 'combe, valley'

(few ordinary words, but thousands of place and river names: London, Carlisle,

Devon, Dover, Cornwall, Thames, Avon...)

III. Middle English Period (1100-1500)

Scandinavian

Most of these first appeared in the written language in Middle English; but many were no doubt borrowed earlier, during the period of the Danelaw (9th-10th centuries).

anger, blight, by-law, cake, call, clumsy, doze, egg, fellow, gear, get, give, hale, hit, husband, kick, kill, kilt, kindle, law, low, lump, rag, raise, root, scathe, scorch, score, scowl, scrape, scrub, seat, skill, skin, skirt, sky, sly, take, they, them, their, thrall, thrust, ugly, want, window, wing

Place name suffixes: -by, -thorpe, -gate

French

Law and government—attorney, bailiff, chancellor, chattel, country, court, crime, defendent, evidence, government, jail, judge, jury, larceny, noble, parliament, plaintiff, plea, prison, revenue, state, tax, verdict

Church—abbot, chaplain, chapter, clergy, friar, prayer, preach, priest, religion, sacrament, saint, sermon

Nobility—baron, baroness; count, countess; duke, duchess; marquis, marquess; prince, princess; viscount, viscountess; noble, royal (contrast native words: king, queen, earl, lord, lady, knight, kingly, queenly)

Military—army, artillery, battle, captain, company, corporal, defense,enemy,marine, navy, sergeant, soldier, volunteer

Cooking—beef, boil, broil, butcher, dine, fry, mutton, pork, poultry, roast, salmon, stew, veal

Culture and luxury goods—art, bracelet, claret, clarinet, dance, diamond, fashion, fur, jewel, oboe, painting, pendant, satin, ruby, sculpture

Other—adventure, change, charge, chart, courage, devout, dignity, enamor, feign, fruit, letter, literature, magic, male, female, mirror, pilgrimage, proud, question, regard, special

Also Middle English French loans: a huge number of words in age, -ance/-ence, -ant/-ent, -ity, -ment, -tion, con-, de-, and pre- .

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a given word came from French or whether it was taken straight from Latin. Words for which this difficulty occurs are those in which there were no special sound and/or spelling changes of the sort that distinguished French from Latin