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The Modern English Period (1800-present)

 

Modern English is characterized by another influx of the vocabulary, which was provoked by three main factors: the unprecedented growth of scientific vocabulary, the emergence of American English, which turned to be a dominant variety of the language and other varieties known as ‘New Englishes’.

English scientific vocabulary has been growing steadily since the Renaissance, but the nineteenth century as a consequence of the industrial revolution and the period of extensive scientific exploration and discovery was the boom of innovations in the sphere of lexis. As H. Jackson mentions, “by the end of the nineteenth century, one could actually speak of ‘scientific English as a variety of the language” [H.Jackson, p.35]. A number of terminological systems, covering the whole scope of science have been formed.

A remarkable factor of the historical development of English was its establishment on the New World and the emergence of the USA as the leading economic state of the twentieth century. Although there are still marked differences between British and American English in the sphere of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, the extensive growth of communication and the development of mass media are making these varieties more and more alike.

In sociolinguistics the global spread of English has been viewed as two diasporas, the former of which involved migration of English speakers from the present British Isles to Australia, New Zealand and North America and the latter transported the language to Asia and Africa. “Those English users who left the old country for new ones brought with them their resource of language and its potentials for change, which are always with us, though we are not often called upon to contemplate them explicitly. Thus, the language was brought into new socio-linguistic contexts, and these contact situations have had striking and lasting effects on English in these regions, so that although these contemporary Englishes have much in common, they are also unique in their grammatical innovations and tolerances, lexis, pronunciation, idioms, and discourse” [Sandra Lee McKay Nancy H. Hornberger. Sociolinguistics and Language Learning]

Though Indian English, Philippine English, Singapore English, and African Englishes have the distinctive features of their own, vocabulary is the area in which these new Englishes best assert themselves (See Jackson, p.36).

As Baugh and Cable (1993:1) put it: “The diversity of cultures that find expression in it as a reminder that the history of the English language is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1500”. Following such reasoning, it seams inadequate to deal with loanwords simply linguistically, and ignore the political, economic, social and technological events that brought words like robot, Cossack, intifada, perestroika, glasnost, and the like into the scope of English vocabulary.

Nowadays borrowing takes place on an unprecedented scale, partly because of the enormous number of new inventions in the 20th century made by people of various nationalities and partly because international communications are much more rapid and important than a century ago (WWW, international TV networks like CNN, mobile telephones, Skype, etc.). As a result, foreign words enter a language like English easily, often without any change in their spelling and pronunciation, e.g.: blitzkrieg (from German – a swift intensive military attack, designed to defeat the opponent quickly), lunnic (the name of the Soviet spacecraft), chernozem (from Ukrainian – dark soil), polka (a Polish folk dance), kibbutz (from Hebrew - a collective agricultural settlement in modern Israel). To render such words into English does not only require time, but would lose a lot in translation. English with its “cosmopolitan vocabulary” (Baugh and Cable 1993:9) does not seem to mind the overwhelming influx of foreign words into its ranks. Quite the opposite, it has always shown a “marked tendency to go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages” (Baugh and Cable (1993:10).



 

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 2383


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The Middle English Period (1066-1500) | Native English vocabulary
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