Download BORROWINGS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Alyona Zagorodneva

BORROWINGS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Alyona Zagorodneva
Academic advisor – A. Kyzykeyeva
Kazakh-American Free University
Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan
The “guests from another language” or borrowed words penetrate
the English language. Through linguistic osmosis, these numerous words
were taken over from one language by another during the course of the
English history mainly through the constant uninvited arrival of invaders to
the island.
Otto Jespersen, in his book “Growth and Structure of the English
Language” indicates that the English language is a “chain of borrowings”
that was a result of the conquests of Britain by various invaders [1].
First came the Romans and with their occupancy of England, they
introduced Latin to some, but not all, its inhabitants. While the Celts coexisted with the Romans and “continental Germans”, only a few hundred
borrowed Latin words were found in Old English, which was substantially
a “self-sufficing” language, according to Jespersen. The Christianization of
the country in the VIth century forced more inhabitants to adopt Latin
words and phrases through the Church. Once the Angles, Saxons and Jutes
arrived in Britain, and with the Celts displaced, the language literally began
revolting as the new-arrivals began settling in. The Celtic influence began
quickly decreasing as the so-called “superior” borrowed words began to
take hold. Yet, while the Angles, Saxons and Jutes brought us the original
English language, the foundation of English as we know it today is
Germanic with a solid French impact.
The history of the English language, and its borrowings, is founded
on three incursions: Teutonic; Scandinavian (Vikings); and, most
importantly, by the Norman conquest of England by the Duke of
Normandy in 1066. The Teutonic and Scandinavian invasions apparently
affected the mother language. But it was the French-speaking Normans, led
by William the Conqueror (Guillaume le Conquérant), who introduced the
greatest, most extensive and most constant collection of borrowed or “loan”
words to the English language upon their successful 1066 invasion of the
island.
According to Jespersen, many British adopted borrowed French
words not only to communicate, but because they felt it was the “fashion”
to imitate their “betters”. Again, while some might distinguish this as a
form of snobbism, many of us do strive to improve our language skills as
our knowledge of borrowed words not only expands our vocabulary but
enables us to converse with one another [1, p.72].
This borrowing has also helped swell the size of English
dictionaries. The voluminous English dictionaries, as compared to French,
German or Dutch dictionaries for example, can credit their size to the
borrowings of foreign words the British adopted. If the English were
originally concerned that their native language was not up to snuff with the
French or Latin tongues, the Britons’ borrowings might give new meaning
to “size matters”. [2, p. 55]
The Renaissance brought a multitude of classical words,
particularly from France and Italy, increasing the Latin influence on the
language in England. But Italy, along with Spain, contributed few
borrowed words because the English language was nearly completely
formed by this age. The new words and phrases enriched the British
language, but Jespersen believes at somewhat of a cost. Because of the
various invasions, the English had, over time, begun to “shrink from
consciously coining new words out of native material”. That concept brings
us full circle back to the “physical mobility and mental laziness” aspect of
borrowing words [2].
There are the following groups of borrowings: phonetic borrowings,
translation loans, semantic borrowings, and morphemic borrowings.
Phonetic borrowings are most characteristic in all languages; they
are called loan words proper. Words are borrowed with their spelling,
pronunciation and meaning. Then they undergo assimilation, each sound of
the borrowing language. In some cases the spellings changed. The structure
of the word can also be changed. The position of the stress is very often
influenced by the phonetic system of the borrowing language. The
paradigm of the word, and sometimes the meaning of the borrowed word
are also changed. Such words as labor, travel, table, chair, people are
phonetic borrowings from French; apparatchik, nomenclature, sputnik are
borrowings from Russian; bank, soprano, duet are phonetic borrowings
from Italian, etc. [3, p.114]
Translation loans are word-for-word (or morpheme-for-morpheme)
translations of some foreign word expressions. In such cases the notion is
borrowed from a foreign language but it is expressed by native lexical
units, ‘to take the bull by the horns’(Latin), ‘living space’(German), etc.
Some translation loans appeared in English from Latin already in the Old
English period, for example Sunday (solis dies).
Semantic borrowing can appear when an English word borrowed
into some other language, developed there a new meaning and this meaning
was borrowed back into English, for example ‘brigade’ was borrowed into
Russian and formed the meaning ‘a working collective’. This meaning was
borrowed back into English as a Russian borrowing. The same is true of the
English word ‘pioneer’.
Morphemic borrowings are borrowings of affixes which occur in
the language when many words with identical affixes are borrowed from
one language into another. So that the morphemic structure of borrowed
words becomes familiar to the people speaking the borrowing language, for
example we can find a lot of Romanic affixes in English word-building
system, that is why there are a lot words-hybrids in English where different
morphemes have different origin, for example ‘goddes’, ‘beautiful’, etc. [4,
p.101].
Accordingly borrowings are subdivided into completely
assimilated, partly assimilated and non-assimilated (barbarisms).
Completely assimilated words correspond to all phonetic,
morphological and semantic loans of English and are not felt as the foreign
words. Many of them belong to the basic word-stock.
Partly assimilated borrowings are subdivided into the following
groups:
- borrowings non-assimilated semantically, because they denote
objects and notions peculiar to the country from the language of which they
were borrowed, for example sari, sombrero, taiga, kvass, etc.
- borrowings non-assimilated grammatically, for example nouns
borrowed from Latin and Greek retain their plural forms (bacillus-bacilli,
phenomenon-phenomena, datum-data, genius-genii), etc.
- borrowings non-assimilated phonetically. Here belong words
with the initial sounds /v/ and /z/, for example voice, zero. In native words
these voiced consonants are used only in the intervocalic position as
allophones of sounds /f/ and /s/ (loss-lose, life-live).
Borrowings can be partly assimilated graphically, for example in
Greek borrowings ‘y’ can be spelled in the middle of the word (symbol,
synonym), ‘ph’ denotes the sound /f/ (phoneme, morpheme), ‘ch’ denotes
the sound /k/ (chemistry, chaos) and ‘ps’ denotes the sound /s/ (psychology)
[5, p.3].
The great number of borrowings brought with them new phonomorphological types, new phonetic, morphological and semantic features.
On the other hand, under the influence of the borrowed element words
already existing in English changed to some extent their semantic structure,
frequency and derivational ability.
Through the history of the English language and the English people
borrowing from different languages such as French, German, Italian,
Russian considerably enlarged the English vocabulary and brought about
some changes in the English synonymic groups, in the distribution of the
English vocabulary through spheres of application and in the lexical
divergence between the variants of the literary language and its dialects.
References:
1.
Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English
Language. 10th ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.
2.
Greenough, James Bradstreet, and George Lyman
Kittredge. Words and Their Ways in English Speech. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1962.
3.
Liberman,
Anatoly
Dr.
(Ph.D.)
University
of
Minnesota. Word Origins and How We Know Them. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
4. Lynch, Jack. The Lexicographer’s Dilemma. New York:
Walker Publishing Co., Inc., 2009.
5. Лексикология английского языка: Учебник для ин-тов и
фак. иностр. яз./Р. 3. Гинзбург, С. С. Хидекель, Г. Ю. Князева и А. А.
Санкин. — 2-е изд., испр. и доп. — М.: Высш. школа, 1979. — 269 с.