2.4. Dependence on the English Loan Words in the Advertising Field

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century can be characterized by cardinal changes in the political, social and economic life of Ukrainian society [16; p. 103]. New approaches with regard to the strengthening and development of relations between countries have taken on special significance. Сhanges in the life of the modern society are reflected in its languages, as it is known that a language is a dynamic system and it rapidly reacts to the development of science and technology.

The lexical system of the present-day Ukrainian language reflects every new object or phenomenon that appeared in our life at the turn of the new millennium. After opening the Ukrainian market to overseas goods a lot of trade dealers appeared on the territory of Ukraine. As a result, a net of advertising agencies has been opened for attracting Ukrainian consumers. Advertising texts became an integral part of almost all newspapers and magazines. Advertisement plays a great role in the distributing goods from manufacturers to consumers. In the vocabulary of present-day Ukrainian advertisements, commonly used words predominate, though socio-political vocabulary, emotionally-coloured words, terms, borrowings from foreign languages are used as well”.

The English borrowings in the Ukrainian language are conveyed with the help of transcription or transliteration. Transcription means the adequate word reproduction with the help of language-borrower’s graphemes. The dominant factor in this case is the word’s sounding in the source-language. When graphics is considered more important, we are speaking about transliteration Transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another. The main aim of transliteration is to be exact, so that a reader can reproduce the original spelling of transliterated words. Transcription maps the sounds of one language to the script of another language and mostly implies looking for a better way to convey foreign words into a particular language [14; с. 47].

English spelling is non-phonetical, that is word graphics often do not coincide with its pronunciation. For example, in the English language the word “tank” is pronounced with an open sound [æ], but both in Ukrainian and Russian the sound [а] is used. In the word “park” the vowel [а:] is pronounced, but the consonant [r], following it, is omitted. In the Ukrainian language the sound [r] is distinct and instead of [а:], [а] is used. Sometimes an incomplete acoustic correspondence between foreign and Ukrainian sounds causes several variants during the process of assimilating the foreign sounds in the Ukrainian language.

The stems of borrowed words are susceptible to derivation paradigms that are also used in the advertising media. Many of the new lexical units, borrowed from English and present in the Ukrainian advertisements, indicate the names of the computer’s hardware, the names of modern everyday devices, while some of them name modern newly-appeared kinds of sport, or elements of modern music culture. Most of the borrowed words of English origin have been assimilated grammatically and they function according to the norms of the Ukrainian language. They have acquired the category of gender; they are also used in all cases and in the forms of singular and plural numbers. In approximately 90% of the English borrowed words, the Latin way of writing has been transformed into the Cyrillic alphabet (p.104).

There are however some words that are written with Latin letters: CD-плеєр (СD-player), CD-ченджер (CD-changer), DVD-диск (DVD-disc), PR-кампанія (PR-campaign), VIP-перепустка (VIP-holiday).

The lack of language competence of the employees of the advertising agencies sometimes causes borrowed words to be used in some advertising texts with a deviation from the norms of the Ukrainian spelling [2; p. 11].

As for the specific features of any advertising text, it should be concrete and purposeful. The main idea may be expressed as a slogan which should be easy to remember. A peculiar motive, something which might be interesting for a consumer, has to form the basis of advertisement. The main aim of any advertisement is to attract the attention of consumers, spectators, etc. Recently the Ukrainian market has been overloaded with goods, the price of which is not oriented to the average customer, but to the well-off strata of society; thus, advertisers try to use a greater number of English borrowings, considering this group.

One of the main features of today’s Ukrainian advertising is the parallel usage of borrowings and their Ukrainian equivalents. Looking through advertisements it is easy to find the synonyms which are used for naming the same concept. The word CD-плейер (CD-player, consisting of two parts, the first one is written in Latin, the second one in Cyrillic) gives evidence that language tries to find the best variant for naming the concept. There are three main categories of English borrowings in Ukrainian advertisements.

1. Computer and IT terminology;

2. Domestic appliances;

3. Sport.

The following concepts belong to the first category: адаптер - adapter, вінчестер – winchester (hard disc), дигітайзер - digitizer , диск-disc, дисплей-display, джойстик - joystick, драйвер - driver, інтерфейс - interface, картридж-cartridge, контролер - controller, модем - modem, монітор -monitor, ноутбук - notebook, плотер-plotter, принтер-printer, провайдер-provider, сервер-server, сканер-scanner, тюнер-tuner, чип – chip, etc. There are many borrowings which have been used in the Ukrainian language for a long time (computer, display, and disc) and other ones which appeared only at the end of the previous century (site, hosting, toner).

Usually those concepts are borrowed which do not have equivalents in the Ukrainian language. Sometimes during the process of borrowing, the semantic structure of a word is expanded. The word “server” first was used when tennis became popular in our country, thus its meaning was “player who serves in racket games”. With the spreading of computer equipment its meaning became wider and now means “a computer or program that supplies data or resources to other machines on a network”. In the process of its development the word сервер has turned into a polysemic word turned from a monosemic one [16; p. 105].

One of the ways of developing a word semantic structure is to make it more complicated. It means that a mono- or polysemic word obtains new, additional variants in the process of its development [2; с. 93].

In the process of technological development, the homonym for the word “winchester” has appeared, meaning “a magnetic medium for information recording”. During its borrowing, the process of metaphorization has taken place – transfer of the proper name to the name of the commodity: Sometimes it is difficult to classify the appearance of a word’s new meaning. The unification of a homonym meanings into a polysemantic word is a long process. That is why there are always several words in the language, which are difficult to categorize either as homonyms or meanings of a polysemic word” [ФЕДОРЕЦЬ; с. 89]. Rapid scientific and technological progress has enriched the lexical system of today’s Ukrainian literary language with the words which denote domestic appliances. A wide spread of the modern appliances of the world’s leading companies in the Ukrainian sales network gave a chance to our citizens to enlarge their vocabulary due to the frequent usage of English borrowings.