Etymological Survey of the English Vocabulary CONTENTS

Etymological Survey of the English Vocabulary

CONTENTS 1. Origin of English Words 2. Words of Native Origin 3. Borrowed Words - causes and ways of borrowings - criteria of borrowings - assimilation of borrowings - etymological doublets - etymological hybrids - international words - influence of borrowings

Origin of English Words 1. 5 th century AD – the British Isles populated by the Celts. 2. 1 st century BC – the Roman invasion. The Germanic tribes and the Romans come into contact. The Germanic tribes gain knowledge about land cultivation, fruits and vegetables, new foodstuffs and kitchen objects (butter, cheese, cherry, pear, plum, beet, pepper, cup, kitchen, wine, mill). 3. 449 AD – the British Isles invaded by the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The conquerors assimilate Celtic (glen bard, cradle) and Latin ( street, wall) words. 4. 7 th century AD – Christianization of England. Latin borrowings that indicate objects, ideas associated with church (priest, bishop, monk, candle) and education (school, magister). 5. Between 750 and 1050 AD – the Vikings colonize the north of England. Scandinavian borrowings (take, anger, root, wrong, happy). 6. 1066 AD – the Norman invasion. Norman French borrowings: administrative terms (government, parliament), legal terms (judge, crime), military terms (army, soldier), terms of everyday life (table, plate). 7. The Renaissance period. Greek (ethics, esthete) borrowings. Latin (datum, philosophy, method) borrowings. Parisian borrowings (routine, ballet, scene).

Native Words which belong to the original English stock known from the earliest manuscripts of the Old English period. Mostly words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles in the 5 th century by Germanic tribes. Most native words: • • • polysemantic belong to important semantic groups stylistically neutral possess wide lexical and grammatical valency enter a number of phraseological units possess great word-building power Diachronically native words are : 1. Words of the Indo-European origin 2. Words of Common Germanic origin 3. English words proper

Words of the Indo-European origin have cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo. European languages and form the oldest layer • terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; • words denoting the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; • names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; • parts of human body: arm, eye, foot, heart; • the verbs: bear, come, sit, stand, etc; • the adjectives: hard, quick, slow, red, white. • numerals from one to hundred.

Words of Common Germanic origin words of roots common to all or most Germanic languages: • nouns denoting parts of the body, family, relations, natural phenomena and planets, animals, qualities and properties: summer, winter, storm, ice, rain, group, bridge, house, shop, room, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; • notional verbs: bake, burn, buy, drive hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, send, shoot, etc; • adjectives denoting colour, size and other properties: broad, deaf, deep.

English words proper do not have cognates in other languages Appeared in the English vocabulary in the 5 th century or later, after the Germanic tribes migrated to the British Isles. • Bird, boy, girl, lord, lady

Borrowings (Loan Words) A borrowed (loan) word is a word adopted from another language and modified in sound form, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of English. The number and character of borrowings depend on many factors: • the historical conditions • the nature and length of the contacts • the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned • sometimes words were borrowed to fill in gaps in the vocabulary Borrowings enter the language in two ways: • through oral speech (e. g. mill, inch) usually short and undergo more changes in the act of adoption • through written speech (e. g. French belles-letres, naivete) - preserve their spelling, often rather long and their assimilation is a long process

Borrowings (Loan Words) Words may be borrowed: • directly from another language as the result of contacts with the people of another country or with literature • indirectly – not from the source language but through another language. The terms «source of borrowing» denotes the language from which the loan was taken into English. The term «origin of borrowing» denotes the language to which the word may be traced (e. g. the French borrowing table is Latin by origin (lat. Tabula), the Latin borrowing school came into Latin from the Greek language (Gr. schole)

Assimilation of Borrowings Assimilation of borrowings is a partial or total conformation to the phonetic, graphical or morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic structure • Phonetic assimilation comprises changes in sound form and stress. Sounds that were alien to the English language were fitted into its scheme of sounds. e. g. the consonant combinations pn, ps in the words pneumonia, psychology of Greek origin were simplified into [n] and [s] since pn and ps never occur in the initial position in native English words. • Grammatical assimilation. Borrowed words lost their former grammatical categories and influence and acquired new grammatical categories and paradigms by analogy with other English words. e. g. 'sputnik' acquired the paradigm sputnik, sputnik's, sputniks` having lost the inflections it has in the Russian language. • Lexical assimilation. When a word is taken 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. In the recipient language a borrowing sometimes acquires new meanings. Some meanings become more general, others more specialized. e. g. the word 'cargo' which is highly polysemantic in Spanish, was bor¬rowed only in one meaning - «the goods carried in a ship»

Degrees of Assimilation According to the degree of assimilation : • completely assimilated borrowings • partially assimilated borrowings • unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms The degree of assimilation depends on: • the time of borrowing • frequency of use • the way in which the borrowing was taken over into the language (orally, through writing)

COMPLETELY ASSIMILATED BORROWED WORDS follow all morphological, phonetic and orthographic standards of the English language E. g. cheese (the word of the first layer of Latin borrowings) husband (Scand. ) face (Fr. ) animal (the Latin word borrowed during the revival of learning).

PARTIALLY ASSIMILATED BORROWED WORDS Borrowed words not completely assimilated phonetically: e. g. machine, cartoon, police (borrowed from French) keep the accent on the final syllable • Borrowed words not completely assimilated graphically. Words borrowed from French in which the final consonants are not pronounced: e. g. ballet, buffet, corps • Borrowed words not assimilated grammatically. E. g. nouns borrowed from Latin and Greek which keep their original forms: crisiscrises, formula-formulae, phenomenon-phenomena • Borrowed words not assimilated semantically because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come: sombrero, shah, sheik, rickchaw, sherbet •

UNASSIMILATED BORROWINGS OR BARBARISMS 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. E. g. the Italian addio, ciao (‘good bye’), the French coiffure (‘hairstyle’), ennui (‘boredom’).

TRANSLATION LOANS Translation loans are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in the English language, but according to patterns, taken from other languages, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme translation. E. g. 'mother tongue* from Latin 'lingua materna' (родной язык), 'it goes without saying' from French 'cela va sans dire' (само собой разумеется).

ETYMOLOGICAL DOUBLETS. Etymological doublets are two or more words originating from the same etymological source, but differing in phonetic shape and meaning. Sources of etymological doublets: • Both words are borrowed from different languages which are historically descended from the same route: captain (Lat. ) – chieftain (French) (вожак, главарь), senior (Lat. ) – sir (French), canal (Lat. ) – channel (French). • Both words are borrowed from the same language but in different historical periods: hospital (Lat. ) – hostel (Norman French) – hotel (Parisian French) – etymological triplets. • Both words are native, but one of them originates from the other: history – story, phantasy – fancy, defence – fence, shadow – shade.

ETYMOLOGICAL HYBRIDS Words consisting of etymologically different elements are called hybrids e. g. goddess (a Germanic stem and a Romance suffix), e. g. relationship (a Romance stem and native suffix)

INTERNATIONAL WORDS Borrowings or loans are 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» . (I. V. Arnold). e. g. physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, etc. e. g. allegro, concert, opera, etc. e. g. genetic code, site, database, etc.

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