Borrowings in the 17th century

17^th century English was characterized by further growth of the vocabulary due to borrowing words.

Various colonial languages gave words denoting products and other objects brought from the New World:

1) North American words: canoe, maize, potato, tobacco, mahogany, cannibal, colibri;

2) South American: caoutchouc [‘kauCuk], jaguar, buccaneer, condor, puma, pampas.

French loan words of this period were far more important. Many of these refer to the semantic field of feudal culture: ball, ballet, beau [bou], caprice, chagrin, coquette, intrigue.

Some other borrowings had a wider meaning: grotesque, gazette, naïve, ridicule, serenade, etc.

These are late borrowings and have some peculiarities in pronunciation:

1) the stress is on the last syllable (intrigue, coquette, caress);

2) vowels keep their French pronunciation ([i:] – police, naïve, [ou] – beau, chateau);

3) the digraph ch is read as [S], as in modern French (chemise, chagrin).

4) final t or s is silent (ballet, bouquet, pas, a propos).

Borrowings of the 18^th – 20^th centuries

New words from other languages continue to come into English. Many of them denote ideas, institutions, and customs peculiar to some country.

Kindergarten and waltz were borrowed from German, from dialects in Indian – bungalow, from Chinese coolie and ketchup, from Persian caravan, from Turkish giaour. A number of artificial words came from Greek roots to form terms for new inventions and discoveries: telegraph, telephone, microscope, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. Some Russian words were also borrowed: borzoi (a wolf hound), borsch, tsar, sputnik.

WORD-BUILDING

Changes in the grammatical structure in MnE had their effect on word-building. The loss of endings in infinitives of verbs and nouns from which they had been derived made their forms identical: answer (noun and verb), work, walk, look, point, smell, love, hate, accord, rest. According to this pattern new verbs were derived from nouns by means of conversion (formation of one part of speech from another without suffixes): act, advantage, effect, air, mention, note, finger, figure, bandage. Thus, some suffixes which had been reliable features of nouns (-tion, -er, -age, etc.) now were no longer reliable as verbs could also have the same suffixes. In Shakespeare’s time derivation of one part of speech from another without a suffix was used even more freely than it is used nowadays:

….Will you pleasure me?... …. They lessoned us to weep…..

So verbs derived from other parts of speech by conversion occupy a prominent place in the system of the language.

In OE verbs were sometimes derived from nouns by adding a prefix and verbal endings (-an, -on, -e, -est, etc.) Thus, from the noun heafod (head) the verb beheafdian was formed. In ME these words would appear as heed – beheeden. In MnE they became head – behead, the only feature of the verb being the prefix be-. The prefix acquired a grammatical function becoming a means of deriving a verb from a noun or some other part of speech: encircle, enchant, encourage, discourage, befool, belittle, ensure, enlarge.

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