Borrowing

Borrowing is the second most important way of increasing the vocabulary stock. Native words are the most frequently used words. Native words are subdivided into two groups: Indo-European and Common Germanic.

The oldest layer of words in English are words met in Indo-European languages. A much larger group of native vocabulary are Common Germanic words (their equivalents are met in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic).

Native words have a great word-building capacity, they form a lot of phraseological units, they are mostly polysemantic.

More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms. It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

Cases when both form and meaning are borrowed into the language are called borrowings or loans proper. A language may borrow the form and the meaning of a word, as it happened with names of material objects of culture (butter, street etc borrowed from Latin).

We speak about semantic borrowings when a new meaning of the unit existing in the language is borrowed: there are semantic borrowngs between Scandinavian and English, such as the meaning “to live” for the word to dwell which in Old English had the meaning “to wander”.

There are also cases when the structure of the word or set expression is borrowed, but the actual words and expressions are coined from the material existing in the language. These are called loan translations – wonder child (Wunderkind).

Morphemic borrowings are borrowings of affixes which occur in the language when many words with identical affixes are borrowed from one language into another. As the result, the morphemic structure of borrowed words becomes familiar to the people speaking the borrowing language: goddess (native root + Romanic suffix -ess), uneatable (English prefix un- + English root + Romanic suffix -able).

From the formal, or structural point of view, some of the borrowed words are clearly perceived as foreign. It may show in the graphic or sound form: café, soprano etc. In other cases borrowed words undergo phonetic and morphological changes and get assimilated to the system of the recipient language. This happened, for example, to the French word alouer (сдавать в наем) that turned into allow – позволять.

From the semantic point of view we can differentiate

- non-assimilated words (sometimes called barbarisms) – words denoting realia of another country

- partially assimilated words – words the meanings of which are assimilated by the recipient language, but the usage of which is restricted by a specific sphere – terms and bookish words

- fully assimilated words – those which were at some moment borrowed from another language but have lost all signs of foreign origin and are perceived as native.

Most borrowings come into English from these sources:

a) Scandinavian borrowings. bull, cake, egg, knife; such adjectives as flat, ill, happy; such verbs as call, die, guess; pronouns and connective words same, both, though; pronominal forms they, them, their;

b) Romanic borrowings (Latin and Greek). They appeared in English during the Middle English period due to the Great Revival of Learning: memorandum, maximum, veto;

c) French borrowings: words relating to government – administer, empire; words relating to military affairs: soldier, battle; words relating to jurisprudence: advocate, barrister; words relating to fashion: luxary, coat; words relating to jewelry: emerald, pearl; words relating to food and cooking: dinner, appetite

Also many borrowings came into English from Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch; Russian.

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. International words play an especially important part in different terminological systems including the vocabulary of science, industry and art. The origin of this vocabulary reflects the history of world culture.

Though there are many exceptions we can say that in terminology and learned words the foreign element (i.e. borrowed words) dominate the native. And the informal strata of the language, especially slang and dialect, abound in native words. Compare the expressive and stylistic value of the French and the English words in such synonymic pairs as to begin — to commence, to wish — to desire, happiness — felicity,

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