The Etymology of English words (words of native origin, borrowings).
Etymology is a brunch of linguistics that studies the origin and history of words tracing them to the earliest determinable source. The etymological structure of the Eng. vocab-ry consists of the native and borrowed elements.
English vocabulary contains immense number of foreign and origin words. Appearance of borrowed words depends on historical factors.
Words of the native element may be divided into 3 groups: Indo-European, Germanic, English-proper element. I. words appear in English vocabulary in 5th century or later. Ex: father, mother, son, daughter, foot, nose, lip, heart, day, night, numbers from 1 to 100. G. groups are head, arm, hand, finger, bear, fox, grass, rain, frost, house, room, and green, blue, grey. English-proper – words of the same etymological root of common origin. Ex: the word ‘finger’ doesn’t only denote a part of hand as in old English, but also the part of glove covering one of the fingers; a hand of a clock; an index. Also phraseological units enter in this group: upon the heels – попятам.
Borrowings enter the L. through 2 ways: oral and written speech.
1. Completely assimilated borrowed words. They follow all morphological, phonetical and orphological standarts. Comp.assim.words are found in all the layers of older borrowings.
-cheese (the first layer of Latin borrowings)
-husband (Scan)
-face (Fr)
2. Partially assimilated borrowed words. They are subdivided into four groups:
a)Non-assimilated semantically (sari, sombrero,shah,kvass)Because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country.
b)Non-assimilated grammatically. E.g. nouns borrowed from Latin and Greek have kept the original plural forms: crisis-crises, phenomenon-phenomena.
c)Non-assimilated phonetically: some of French borrowings keep the accent on the final syllable: machine, cartoon, police.
d)Not completely assimilated graphically: phoneme, morpheme(ph-f); ballet,buffet(Fr);Psycology(ps-s)
3.Barbarisms or unassimilated borrowings.This group includes words from other L.used in conversation or in writing but non-assimilated in any way.E.g.: addio,ciao(It)-‘good-bye’
Derivational word formation.
Word formation.Affixation.
Word-formation is the system of derivative types of words and the process of creating new words from material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns. The basic ways of forming words in word derivation are affixation and conversion. Affixation is the formation of a new word with the help of affixes (f.e. heartless; overdo). Conversion is the formation of a new word by bringing a stem of this word into a different formal paradigm (f.e. a private, to paper).
Three types of affixes: 1. An affix that is attached to the front of its base is called a prefix, whereas 2. an affix attached to the end of the base is called a suffix. 3. infixes - a type of affix that occurs within a base of a word to express such notions as tense, number, or gender. English has no system of infixes.
The logical classification of suffixes is according to:
1.their origin: from etymological point of view suffixes are subdivided into 2 main classes:native (-er, -ness, -dom) and borrowed (latin: -ant,-ent,-ible,-able; romanic: -age,-ment,-tion; greek: -ist,-ism,-ism).
2. Meaning: -er – doer of the action: worker;
- ess – denote gender: lion-lioness;
- -ence/-ance – abstract meaning: importance;
- -dom + -age – collectivity: kingdom.etc.
3. Suffixes part of speech they form: noun-forming suffixes: -er, -ness, -ment, -th, -hood, -ing. Adjective-forming suffixes: -ful, -less, -y, -ish, -en, -ly. Verb-forming suffixes: -en (redden, darken)
4. Productivity. By productive suffixes we mean the ability of being used to form new occasional or potential words which take part in deriving new words in this particular period of languge development.
The best way to identify productive affixes is to look for them among neologisms. Well most productive suffixes are: noun forming - -er, -ness, -ing, -ism, -ist, -ance, -ancy; adjective forming - -ish, -able, -ion, -edd, -less; adverb forming - -ly; verb forming - -ize, -ise, -ate. By non-productive affixes we mean affixes which are not able to form new words in the period in question. Non-productive affixes are recognized as separate morphemes and posess clear-cut semantic characteristics. (Non-productive suffixes are: noun forming - -hood, -ship, adjective forming - -ful, -some, verb forming - -en
Word formation.Conversion is one of the principal ways of forming words in Modern English.. Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech; the morphemic shape of the original word remains unchanged (f.e. paper – to paper).
Among the main varieties of conversion are: 1 – verbalization (f.e. the verb to ape from the noun ape); 2 – substantivation (f.e. the noun a private from the adj. private); 3 – adjectivation (f.e. the adj. down from the adverb down); 4 - adverbalization (f.e. the adverb home from the noun home);
The 2 categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous among the words produced by conversion. (f.e. to eye, to monkey). Nouns are frequently made from verbs. Verbs can also be made from adjectives. (f.e. to yellow). Other parts of speech are not entirely unsusceptible to conversion (f.e. to down, to out). In case of polysemantic words one and the same member of a conversion pair may belong to several groups.