Etymological characteristics of english vocabulary
The most characteristic etymological feature of English vocabulary is its mixed character. Only 25-30% of English words are of native origin. They are words of Indo-European and Common Germanic stock which were brought on to the territory of the British Isles by the Germanic tribes in the 5th century and which were later on, in the 7th century, registered in the oldest known manuscripts. Their derivatives belong there, too.
Borrowings (loan words, loans) are words adopted from other languages in the course of various kinds of linguistic contacts. They make 70-75% of the general word-stock.
1. Native words
Though their proportion is relatively small, they occupy an important position in English vocabulary forming, in fact, its core. It is because:
· They denote the most important things (winter, sun; father, mother; wide, long; go, sleep, etc.). Most of the structural elements of English are native, such as auxiliary and modal verbs (be, become, can, may, shall, will, etc.), pronouns (I, he, she, we), conjunctions (and, but, though), prepositions (on, in, after), articles (a, the). Many frequent derivational affixes are of native origin, too (-hood, -dom, -ship, -ful, -less, -ly, etc.)
· Most of them are highly polysemantic (e.g., head has 15 meanings, good – 17-30 meanings).
· They occur in proverbs, in set expressions (e.g., to fall head over heels in love, to put two heads together, Two heads are better than one, etc.).
· Native words are among the most frequent.
· Native elements form the basic of extensive word-building families (head – to head, to behead, headmaster, headlong, heading, headline, etc).
· Many native root words have turned into affixes, e.g., -less, -ful, -ly, -hood, -dom: freedom, childhood, manly, etc.
· Native words make the most stable layer of English vocabulary because of their semantic importance, high frequency of usage. Together with grammar, which is more conservative than vocabulary, they ensure relative stability of language, which, nevertheless, never remains absolutely stable.
2. Borrowings
Borrowings are adopted in the course of contacts between peoples speaking different languages. Usually borrowings express notions unknown to the people speaking the adopting language, e.g., buffalo, bungalow, wigwam, etc. In the same way were borrowed such words as school, mill, army, etc. Sometimes a borrowing denotes a familiar thing or notion, but it mostly happens in those cases when the contacting people speak closely related languages, e.g., sky, take, die, leg. Borrowings may be adopted either in the course of immediate contacts of people speaking different languages (oral way of borrowing) or through written sources (written way of borrowing).
3. Sources of Borrowings
According to some data words have been borrowed into English from about 150 languages. Some of the most important borrowings are the following:
Celtic borrowings (the 5th century): bald, cradle, down, numerous place names (Avon, London).
Scandinavian borrowings (9-11th century): wing, husband, sister, egg, same, till, etc.
Dutch borrowings: hold (n), yacht, skipper.
Italian borrowings: sonnet, sonata, cello, bass.
Spanish borrowings: tomato, sombrero, dispatch, comrade, negro.
Russian borrowings: sable, sterlet, verst, steppe, nihilist, intelligentsia.
German borrowings: nazi, fascist, Blitzkrieg, spitz.
Various exotic languages: Hindi – jungle, khaki; Australian – boomerang, kangaroo; American Indian – canoe, igloo, mocassin, wigwam.
Greek borrowings: atom, ethics, cycle, etc.
But it is Latin and French borrowings which played the greatest part in the formation of English vocabulary.
There are three layers of Latin borrowings.
The first layer occurred in the first century BC during the reign of the Roman Empire. Romans had a much higher cultural level than the Germanic tribes and enriched the vocabulary of the latter with the names of new objects of material culture, such as wall, wine, mile, cheese, etc.
The second layer began in 596 AD when Christianity was introduced. It was mostly church terms that were borrowed at that time: altar, church, bishop, candle, creed, etc. But many words denoting objects of material culture were adopted at that time, too: spade, mill, school, paper, marble, etc.
The third layer took place in the XIV-XVI cent., when Modern English was being formed. It was the period of the Renaissance, which brought the revival of the interest in ancient classical civilizations, in culture, art, and science. It was the time when English began to be used instead of Latin at the Universities. Learned words with abstract meanings were borrowed mostly at that time: admit, educate, university, cultivate, idea, crisis. Many of these words have native synonyms and are marked by a bookish flavour.
French borrowings. At different times borrowings were adopted from two different dialects of French: the Norman dialect (the 11th – 13th cent.) and the Parisian dialect (the 17th cent. and later). The Normans invading the British Isles in the mid 11th century used their dialect as the state official language. Notions of political, cultural, social life were expressed by Norman-French words. Later, when English became the state national language (the 14th cent.), these words remained in it; now they are rather numerous and frequent. Here belong such terms as court, law, royal, crown, power, army, police, navy, money, property, butcher, tailor, painter, etc. These terms reflect the social and political structure of the society of those days.
Latest French borrowings from the Parisian dialect (the 17th cent. and later) are usually technical terms, e.g., parachute, chassis, fuselage, or words characterizing the aristocratic way of life, e.g., banquet, coquette, restaurant. There are some political terms, too, e.g., police, regime, detente, etc.
4. Types of borrowings
There are three types of borrowing:
· Phonetic loans (borrowings proper): glasnost, sputnik. These are words transplanted from one language into another and modified in their phonetic shape according to the standards of the receiving language.
· Translation loans are formed by means of literal word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme translation, e.g., «Верховный Совет» – Supreme Soviet, «колхоз» – collective farm, «ударник» – shock-worker.
· Semantic loans are words, which borrowed a new meaning into an already existing word, e.g., the noun pioneer in the meaning «member of the children's organization».
5. Assimilation of borrowings
Being adopted by a language, words undergo some changes in their spelling, pronunciation, and paradigm and meaning – they become assimilated. Assimilation of borrowings is their conformation to the phonetic, graphical, morphological, semantic standards of the receiving language. There are 4 types of assimilation:
· Phonetic assimilation, comprising changes in sound form and stress. Alien sounds and clusters of sounds are rendered by those existing in the receiving language, e.g., верста – verst; spitz – [ʃpits] > [spits]. Stress can be shifted, too: e.g., rendezvous ['rɔndɪvu:] – the word has become forestressed. But sometimes foreign pronunciation is preserved for a long time, e.g., nazi ['na:tsi], garage [gə'ra:ʒ]
· Grammatical, or morphological, assimilation. Words acquire the paradigm of the receiving language, e.g.: спутник, спутника, спутнику, etc., but sputnik, sputniks, sputnik's, sputniks'. There are some words in English which are not assimilated morphologically, e.g., datum (pl. data), criterion (pl. criteria).
· Lexical (semantic) assimilation: borrowings become part of the lexico-semantic system of the receiving language, i.e. they develop a new system of meanings, enter various semantic relations with other words, and serve as word-building bases. E.g., the verb to move, borrowed from French is highly polysemantic, has synonyms (shift, wander, travel, etc.), enters a large word-building family (movement, moving, movable, etc.). This word is lexically assimilated.
· Unassimilated words (bei, shakh, sari) stand apart, they are isolated from the vocabulary system because they denote foreign realia.
According to the degree of assimilation borrowings may be assimilated completely or partially. Assimilation is complete when all its types have taken place, as, for example in the early French loans sport, spy. If at least one type of assimilation has not occurred, the assimilation is partial, e.g., regime is unassimilated phonetically, perestroika and glasnost are unassimilated semantically. Completely unassimilated words, or barbarisms, are not part of English, e.g., bambino, ciao (Ital.).
6. Etymological Doublets
Etymological doublets are two or more words of the same language having a common word as a source of their development. E.g.,
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Etymological doublets can also proceed from two dialectal forms of the same word, e.g., OEshare, OScscar. They may also be the result of successive borrowing of one and the same word at different periods, e.g., travel, travail (from French), or of different routs of development of the word in different meanings, e.g., flower and flour.
Many etymological doublets are due to shortening, e.g., espy (n) – spy; estrange (n) – strange; history – story.
7. International Words
Internetional words are words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowing from one ultimate source, e.g., atom, vitamin, cybernetics, algebra, etc. The sources of international words are very rich.
First of all, it is Latin and Greek, e.g., school (Gr-L), phenomenon (Gr-L), atom (Gr), student (L); French, e.g., communique, fuselage, police, detente; Russian, e.g., Soviet, bolshevik, sputnik, nihilism. Many international words are of English origin, especially sports terms (football, play-off), terms of clothing (pullover, jumper), modem music, dance (twist, shake, break, jazz, foxtrot, etc.). But one should remember that classical music terms are Italian, and classical dance terms are French.
International words are especially numerous in terminological systems (science, technology, music, art, sport, navigation, etc.), but there are quite a few of them in general vocabulary, too. One should always bear in mind, though, that general words are not, in most cases, quite identical in meanings in different languages; they mostly coincide in only one or two meanings.
Compare: индустрия – industry, антенна – antenna, генеральный and general. There are also cases, when words having very similar forms are quite different in meanings: cf. актуальный and actual (syn. real), фокус and focus, интеллигентный and intelligent.