Phonetic assimilation

Phonetic assimilation comprising changes in sound-form and stress is perhaps the most conspicuous.

Sounds that were alien to the English language were fitted into its scheme of sounds. For instance, the long [e] and [έ] in recent French borrowings, alien to English speech, are rendered with the help of [ei] (as in the words communique, chaussee, cafe).

German spitz [ pits] was furred into Eng. [spits].

as the nativefather, mother.

Grammatical Assimilation

Usually as soon as words from other languages were introduced into English they lost their former grammatical categories and paradigms and acquired new grammatical categories and paradigms by analogy with other Eng.words.

However, there are some words in Modern Eng. that have for centuries retained their foreign inflexions. Thus a considerable group of borrowed nouns have preserved their original plural inflexion to this day, e.g. phenomenon (L.) – phenomena; addendum (L.) – addenda; parenthesis(Gr.) – parentheses. Sometimes in borrowed words foreign affixes are replaced by those available in the English language, e.g. the inflexion –us in Latin adjectives was replaced in Eng. with the suffixes –ous or –al: L. barbarus > E. Barbarous; L. botanicus > E. botanical; L. balneus > E. balneal.

Lexical Assimilation

When a word is taken over into another language, its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great changes. Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one or two of their meanings. Thus the wordtimbre that had a number of meanings in French was borrowed into English as a musical term only. In the process of its historical development a borrowing sometimes acquired new meanings that were not to be found in its former semantic structure. For instance, the verb move in Modern English has developed the meanings of “propose”, “change one s flat”, “mix with people” and others that the French mouvoir does not possess.

Lecture 12

Theme: 1. Lexicography.

Types of Dictionaries.

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