The origin of English words

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An important distinctive feature which has not been discussed so far is that of origin. According to this feature the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A loan word, borrowed word or borrowing is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language^ A native word, on the other hand, is a word which belongs to the original English stock, as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period.

The native words are further subdivided by diachronistic linguistics into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin. The words having cognates in the vocabularies of" different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; parts of the human body: arm, ear, eye, foot, heart, etc. Some of the most frequent verbs are also of Indo-European common stock: bear, come, sit, stand and others. The adjectives of this group denote concrete physical properties: hard, quick, slow, red, white. Most numerals also belong here.

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i. e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc., but none in Russian or French. It contains a greater number of semantic groups. The following list may serve as an illustration of their general character. The nouns are summer, winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope,. life, need, rest; the verbs are bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot and many more; the adjectives are broad, dead, deaf, deep. Many adverbs and pronouns also belong to this layer. Together with the words of the common Indo-European stock 'these Common Germanic words form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words listed by Thorndike and Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy; they are often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch OE wceccan is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sentence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and combined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean 'the act of watching', 'the guard' (on ships), 'a period of duty for part of the ship's crew', 'a period of wakefulness', 'close observation', 'a time-piece', etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are to be on the watch, to watch one's step, to keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb the watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying.

The part played by borrowings in the vocabulary of a language depends upon the history of each given language, being conditioned by direct linguistic/contacts and political, economic and cultural relationships between nations. English history contains innumerable occasions for all types of such contacts. It is the vocabulary system of each language that is particularly responsive to every change in the life of the speaking community. Nowhere, perhaps,, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The source, the scope and the semantic sphere of the loan words are all dependent upon historical factors.

NATIVE WORDS VERSUS LOAN WORDS

The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consist of loan words and only 30% of the words are native is due not to an inherent tolerance of foreign elements but to specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific features marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

The term "source of "borrowing" should be distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing". The first should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus, the word paper Fr papier Lat papyrus Gr papyros has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin.

Alongside loan words proper, we distinguish translation loans and semantic loans. Translation loans are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in the British language but according to patterns taken from another language, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme translation. Examples are: chain-smoker :: Germ Kettenraucher; wall newspaper :: Russ cmeHuasi zamma; (it) goes without saying :: Fr (cela) va sans dire.

The term "semantic loan" is used to denote the development in an English word of a new meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language. The English word pioneer meant 'explorer' and 'one who is among the first in new fields of activity'; now under the influence of the Russian word nuouep it has come to mean 'a member of the Young Pioneers' Organization'.

'The number of loan words in the English language is indeed so high that many foreign scholars (L. P. Smith, H. Bradley and others) were inclined to reduce the study of the English vocabulary to the discussion of its etymology, taking it for granted that the development of English was mainly due to borrowing. They seemed to be more interested in tracing the original source, form and meaning of every lexical element than in studying its present functioning and peculiarities. This view has been by, now convincingly disproved.

LOAN WORDS

Although the mixed character of the English vocabulary cannot ' be denied and the part of borrowing in its development is indeed one of great importance, the leading role in the history of this vocabulary belongs to word-formation and semantic changes patterned according to the specific features of the English language^system. This system absorbed and remodelled the vast majority of loan words according to its own standards, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell an old borrowing from a native word. Examples are: cheese, street, wall, wine and other ovords belonging to the earliest layer of Latin borrowings. Many'Irar fords oa'the other hand, in spite of the changes they have undergone after penetrating into English, retain some peculiarities in pronunciation, spelling, orthoepy, and morphology. word native borrowed english

Thus, the initial position of the sounds [v], [d^], [3] is a sign that the word is not of native stock. Examples are: vacuum (Latin), valley (French), voivode (Russian), vanadium (named by a Swedish chemist Selfstroih from ON Vanadis, the goddess Freya), vanilla (Spanish), etc. The sound [&%] may be rendered by the letters g and : gem Lat gemma and jewel OFv foel. The initial [3] occurs in comparatively late borrowings: genre, gendarme (French). The letters /, x, z in initial position and such combinations as ph, kh, eau in the root indicate the foreign origin of the word: philology (Greek), khaki (Indian), beau (French). Some letters and combinations of letters depend in their orthoepy upon the etymology of the word. Thus, x is pronounced [ks] and [gz] in words of native and Latin origin respectively, and [z] in words coming from Greek: six [siks] (native), exist [ig'zist] (Latin), but xylophone (Greek) is pronounced ['zadefoun]. The combination ch is pronounced [tj] in native words and early borrowings: child, chair; [J] in late French borrowings: machine [mo'Ji:n],parachute ['paereju:t], and [k] in words of Greek origin: epoch ['i:pok], chemist ['kemist], echo ['ekou].

The phono-morphological structure of borrowings is characterized by a high percentage of polysyllabic words: company, condition, continue, government, important and the like are among the most frequent. Bound stems prevail.

L. Bloomfield points out that English possesses a great mass of words (he calls them "foreign-learned" words) with a separate pattern of derivation. Their chief characteristic is the use of certain accented suffixes and combinations of suffixes: ability, education. Another feature, according to L. Bloomfield, is the presence of certain phonemic alterations, such as receive :: reception :: receipt, or provide :: provident, visible :: provision. There are also prefixes which mark certain words as foreign-learned, as for instance: ab-, ad-, con-, de-, dis-, ex-, in-, per-, pre-, pro-, re-, trans-. These prefixes themselves show peculiar phonetic alternations: con-centrate, but col-lect,,

NATIVE WORDS VERSUS LOAN WORDS

cor-rect. Such words contain bound forms for which it seems sometimes quite impossible to set up any definite semantic value. Examples are: conceive, deceive, perceive, receive or attend, contend, distend, pretend; adduce, conduce, deduce, induce, produce, reduce.

ASSIMILATION OF LOAN WORDS

role of^foan word& iKi the formation and development of English vocabularyts-^eait with in the history of the language. It is there that the historical circumstances are discussed under which words borrowed from Latin, from Scandinavian dialects, from Norman and Parisian French and many other languages, including Russian, were introduced into English! L"5CtCotT5fy7-o"h the other hand, has in this connection tasks of-to own, being chiefly concerned with the material and the results of assimilation.

In the present paragraph attention must be concentrated on the assimilation of loan words as a way of their interaction with the system of the language as a whole. The term assimilation of a loan word is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic system. The degree of assimilation depends upon the length of period during which the word has been used in the receiving language, upon its importance for communication purpose and its frequency. Oral borrowings due to personal contacts are assimilated more completely and more rapidly than literary borrowings, i. e. borrowings through written speech.

A classification of loan words according to the.degree of assimilation can be only very general as no rigorous procedure for measuring it has so far been developed. The-following three groups may be suggested: completely assimilated loan words, partially assimilated loan words and unassimilated loan words or barbarisms. The group of partially assimilated words may be subdivided depending on the aspect that remains unaltered, i. e. according to whether the word retains features of spelling, pronunciation, morphology or denotation 1 that are not English. The third group is not universally accepted, as it may be argued that words not changed at all cannot form part of the English vocabulary because they occur in speech only, but do not enter the language.

I. Completely assimilated words are found in all the layers of Ofder borrowings. They may belong to the first layer of La tin borrowings, e. g. cheese, street, wall or wine. Among Scandinavian loan

ASSIMILATION OF LOAN WORDS

Words we find such frequent nouns as husband, fellow, gate, root, wing; such verbs as call, die, take, want and adjectives like happy, ill, low, odd and wrong. Completely assimilated French words are extremely numerous and frequent. Suffice it to mention such everyday words as table and chair, face and figure, finish and matter. A considerable number of Latin words borrowed during the revival of learning are at present almost indistinguishable from the rest of the vocabulary. Neither animal nor article differ noticeably from native words. The number of completely assimilated loan words is many times greater than the number of partly assimilated ones. They follow all morphological, phonetical and orthographic standards. Being very frequent and stylistically neutral, they may occur as dominant words in synonymic groups. They take an active part in word-formation. Moreover, their morphological structure and motivation remain trans-parent, so that they are morphologically ana-lysable and therefore supply the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in series of loan words that contain them. Such are, for instance, the French suffixes -age, -ance, -ess, -fy and -ment, which provide speech material to produce hybrids like shortage, goddess, hindrance, speechify and endearment. The free forms, on the other hand, are readily combined with native affixes: e. g. pained, painful, painfully, painless, painlessness, all formed from pain Ft peine Lat poena Gv poine 'penalty'. The subject of hybrids has already been dealt with in the chapter on derivation (see pp. 83--84).

Completely assimilated loan words are also indistinguishable phonetically. It is impossible to say judging by the sound of the words sport and start whether they are borrowed or native. In fact start is native, derived from ME sterten, whereas sport is a shortening of disport v t OFr (se) desporter 'to amuse oneself, 'to carry oneself away from one's work' (ultimately derived from Lat portare 'to carry'). This last example brings us to the problem of semantic assimilation. This problem deserves far more attention than has hitherto been given to it. Its treatment has been limited so far to passing remarks in works dealing with other subjects. The first thing that needs stressing is that a loanword never brings into the receiving language the whole of its semantic structure if it is polysemantic in the original language. And even the borrowed variants are for the most part changed and specialized in the new system.

The word sport can serve as an illustration. It had a much wider scope in Old French denoting pleasures, making merry and entertainments in general. It was borrowed into Middle English in this character but gradually acquired the additional meaning of outdoor games and exercise, and in this new meaning was borrowed into many

European languages and became international. This process of semantic specialization in borrowing is even more evident in such loan words from Russian as Soviet and sputnik, whose Russian prototypes are polysemantic. In the light of current ideas, it is convenient to classify and study loanwords as oppositions of the words as they exist in the receiving language (1) with their prototypes in the source language, on the one hand, and (2) with words of the same lexico-grammatical class or (depending on the level chosen) of the same morphological or phonetical pattern in the receiving language.

Specialization is primarily due to the fact that the receiving system has at its disposal words for the older notions, and it is only the new notion that needs a new name. Even so, the borrowing of a new word leads as a rule to semantic changes in words already existing in the language. The interaction of linguistic and extra-linguistic, i. e. political, economical and cultural factors in this process has been investigated by several authors (I. P. Ivanova, N. I. Eremeyeva, A. A. Ufimtseva). The following example may serve to illustrate these relationships.

OE burh/burg from beorgan 'to protect' meant 'a fortress, a castle, a walled town'. In the 11th century when the Normans brought the word castel, a diminutive from Lat castra, this loan word came to denote the type of fortified mansion in which the Norman feudal aristocracy lived. So the natWe word burh/burg lost its first meanings keeping only the last: 'a fortified, walled town'. In the 15th century the change of the economical and political status of towns causes the word burg to lose its meaning of a fortified place. The modern word borough denotes a town with a corporation and special privileges granted by a royal charter, also a town that sends its representatives to parliament.

The conformity of the completely assimilated loan words to morphological patterns of the English paradigms may be illustrated by Scandinavian loans taking the plural ending -s: eggs, gates, laws; or Latin loan verbs with the dental suffix of the Past Indefinite and Participle II: acted, corrected, disturbed.

To illustrate the frequency of completely assimilated words it is sufficient jpo mention that many of them are included by Thorndike and Lorge in the list of 500 most frequent words. Some of these are: act Lat, age Fr, air Fr, army Fr, bill Lat', case Fr, cast ON, cause Fr, die Scand.

II. The second group containing the partly assimilated loan words can be subdivided into several groups. The oppositions are equipollent.

(a) Loan words not assimilated semantically because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come.

They may denote foreign clothing: sari, sombrero; foreign titles and professions: shah, rajah, sheik, bei, toreador; foreign vehicles: caique (Turkish), rickshaw (Chinese); food and drinks: pilav (Persian), sherbet (Arabian), etc.

Loan words not assimilated grammatically, for example, nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek which keep their original plural forms: bacillus :: bacilli, crisis :: crises, formula :: formulae, index :: indices, phenomenon :: phenomena. Some of these are also used in English plural forms, e. g. formulas, but in that case there may be a difference in lexical meaning, as in indices :: indexes. Loan words not completely assimilated phonetically. The French words borrowed after 1650 afford good examples. Some of them keep the accent on the final syllable: machine, cartoon, police.

Others, alongside with peculiarities in stress, contain sounds or com binations of sounds that are not standard for the English language and do not occur in native words. The examples are [3] -- bourgeois, camouflage, regime, [wa] -- as in memoir or the nasalized [a], [o]: melange. In many cases it is not the sounds but the whole pattern of the word's phonetic make-up that is different from the rest of the vocabulary, as in some of the Italian and Spanish borrowings: confetti, incognito, macaroni, opera, sonata, soprano and tomato, potato, tobacco. The pronunciation of words where the process of assimilation is phonetically incomplete will often vary, as in ['foiei] or ['fwaje] for foyer and ['bu:lva], ['bu:liva:J, ['builava], [bu:lvad] for boulevard.1(d)Loan words not completely assimilated graphically.2 Thisgroup is fairly large and variegated. There are, for instance, words borrowed from French in which the final consonant is not pronounced: e. g. ballet, buffet. Some may keep a diacritic mark: cafe, cliche. Specifically French digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.) may be retained in spelling: bouquet, brioche. It goes without saying that these sets are intersecting, i. e. one and the same loan word often shows incomplete assimilation in several respects simultaneously. III. The third group of borrowings comprises the so-called barbarisms, i. e. words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents. The examples are the Italian addio 'good-bye', the French affiche for 'placard', the Latin ad libitum 'at pleasure' and the like.

The incompleteness of assimilation results in some specific features which permit us to judge of the origin of words. They may serve as formal indications of loan words of Greek, Latin, French or other origin.

ETYMOLOGICAL DOUBLETS

The changes a loan word has had to undergo depending on the date of its penetration are the main cause for the existence of the so-called etymological doublets. 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. They differ to a certain degree in form, meaning and current usage. Two words at present slightly differentiated in meaning may have originally been dialectal variants of the same word. Thus we find in doublets traces of Old English dialects. Fxamples 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 Kal: the one by the normal development of OE a into 0, 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.

The words shirt, shriek, share, shabby come down from Old English, whereas their respective doublets skirt, screech, scar and scabby are etymologically cognate Scandinavian borrowings.

As the process of borrowing is mostly connected with the appearance of new notions which the loan words serve to express, it is but 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.^x They play an especially prominent part in various terminological systems and among words denoting abstract notions. They should not be mixed with w^Tords of the common Indo-European stock that also comprise a sort of common fund of the European languages. A few examples of comparatively new words due to the progress of science will suffice to illustrate the type: antenna, antibiotic, atomic, automation, autostrada, betatron, bionics, cybernetics and many others show sufficient likeness in English, French, Russian and several other languages.

This layer is of great importance for the foreign language teacher as he must know the most efficient ways of showing the points of similarity and difference between such words as control :: Konmpojib, general :: zenepaji, industry wuHdycmpua, or magazine :: Maeasun, etc.

The treatment of international words at English lessons would be one-sided if the teacher did not draw his pupils' attention to the spread of the English vocabulary into other languages. We find numerous English words in the field of sport: football, out, match, time. A large number of English words are to be found in the vocabulary pertaining to clothes: jersey, pullover, sweater, nylon, tweed, etc. Cinema and different forms of entertainment are also a source of many international words of English origin: film, club, cocktail, jazz.

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

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