16. Etymological classification of the English vocabulary. Borrowings.

As to the origin English words may be classified into two large sets: native and borrowed words. A native word is a word which belongs to the original English word stock, as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. A borrowed word or a borrowing is a word taken over from another language and assimilated in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning, or at least in some of these aspects, according to the standards of the English language.

The term borrowing belongs to diachronic description of the word stock thus the words ‘wine, cheap, pound’ were introduced by the Romans into all Germanic dialects long before the Angles and the Saxons migrated to the British Isles and nowadays they are not distinguishable from words of native origin.

According to the origin the wordstock may be subdivided into native and borrowed. A much bigger part of the native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc, but not in Russian or French. It contains a great number of semantic groups, e.g. summer, winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; the verb bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot and many more, the adjectives broad, dead, deaf, deep, many adverbs and pronouns.

Together with the words of the common Indo-European stock these Common Germanic words form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words.

The part played by borrowings in the vocabulary of a language depends upon the history of each given language. the Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests and the development of British colonialism in modern times caused important changes in the vocabulary. 70% of the English vocabulary consist of loan words and only 30% of the words are native.

Assimilation of Loan Words

The term assimilation of loan words is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic system. According to the degree of assimilation all loan words are subdivided into three groups: completely assimilated loan words, partially assimilated loan words and unassimilated loan words or barbarisms. The group of partially assimilated words may be subdivided according to the aspect that remains unaltered, i.e. spelling, pronunciation or morphology.

1. Completely assimilated words are found in all layers of older borrowings: e.g. cheese, street, wall, wine (Latin), husband, fellow, gate, root, wing (Scandinavian), table, chair, face, figure, finish, matter (French).

2. The second group containing the partly assimilated loan words can be subdivided into subgroups.

a) loan words not assimilated semantically, because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come. They may denote foreign clothing: sari, sombrero; foreign titles and professions: shah, rajah, sheik, bei, toreador; foreign vehicles: caique (Turkish), rickshaw (Chinцщкв-ese); food and drinks: sherbet (Arabian), pilav (Persian).

b) Loan words not completely assimilated grammatically, for example nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek which keep their original plural forms: phenomenon-phenomena, formula-formulae, index-indices.

c) Loan words not completely assimilated phonetically. Some French words borrowed after 1650 keep the stress on the final syllable: machine, cartoon, police. Others contain sounds that are standard for the English language: [ ] bourgeiois, prestige, regime; [wa:] - memoir. In many cases it is not the sounds but the whole pattern is different from the rest of the vocabulary: confetti, macaroni, opera, sonata, tomato, potato, tobacco.

d) Loan words not completely assimilated graphically. These are, for instance, words borrowed from French in which the final consonant is not pronounced: ballet, buffet, corps. Some may keep a diacritic mark: café, cliché. Speciffically French diagraphs (ch, qu, ou,etc) may be treated in spelling: bouquet, brioche.

3. The third group of borrowings comprises the so-called barbarisms, i.e. 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. The examples are the Italian addio, ciao “good bye”, the French affiche for “placard”, the Latin ad libitum “at pleasure” and the like.