THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH WORDS

An important distinctive feature which has not been discussed so far in this book is that of origin. According to this feature the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A native word is a word which belongs to the original English stock, as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. A loan word, borrowed word or borrowing is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

The native words are further subdivided by diachronic linguistics into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin. The words having cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; parts of the human body: arm, ear, eye, foot, heart, etc. Some of the most frequent verbs are also of Indo-European common stock: bear, come, sit, stand and others. The adjectives of this group denote concrete physical properties: hard, quick, slow, red, white. Most numerals also belong here.

, A much bigger part of this 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 none in Russian or French. It contains a greater number of semantic groups. The following list may serve as an illustration of their general character. The nouns are: summer, winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; the verbs are bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot and many more; the adjectives are: broad, dead, deaf, deep. Many adverbs and pronouns also belong to this layer.

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 listed by E.L. Thorndike and I.Lorge.

Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy; they are often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch<OE waeccan is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sentence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and combined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean ‘the act of watching’, ‘the guard’ (on ships), ‘a period of duty for part of the ship’s crew’, ‘a period of wake-fulness’, ‘close observation’, ‘a time-piece’, etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are: be on the watch, watch one’s step, keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb The watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying. The part played by borrowings in the vocabulary of a language depends upon the history of each given language, being conditioned by direct linguistic contacts and political, economic and cultural relationships between nations. English history contains innumerable occasions for all types of such contacts. It is the vocabulary system of each language that is particularly responsive to every change in the life of the speaking community. Nowhere, perhaps, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The source, the scope and the semantic sphere of the loan words are all dependent upon historical factors. The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consist of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due not to an inherent tolerance of foreign elements but to specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific features marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

The term "source of borrowing" should be distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing". The first should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus, the word paper<Fr papier<Lat papyrus<Gr papyros has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin. It may be observed that several of the terms for items used in writing show their origin in words denoting the raw material. Papyros is the name of a plant; cf. book<OE boc ‘the beech tree’ (boards of which were used for writing). Alongside loan words proper, we distinguish loan translation and semantic loans. Translation loans are words

and expressions formed from the material already existing in the British language but according to patterns taken from another language, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme or word-for-word translation. Examples are: chain-smoker : : Germ Kettenraucher; wall newspaper : : Russ cmeнная газета; (it) goes without saying : : Fr (cela) va sans dire; summit conference is an international diplomatic term, cf. Germ Gipfet Konferenz and Fr conference au sommet.

Loan translation is facilitated by the existence of formally related words, even though in other contexts and with a different meaning. e.g. Supreme Council as a synonym for Supreme Soviet.

The term "semantic loan" is used to denote the development in an English word of a new meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language. The English word pioneer meant ‘explorer’ and ‘one who is among the first in new fields of activity’; now under the influence of the Russian word пионер it has come to mean ‘a member of the Young Pioneers’ Organization’.

The number of loan words in the English language is indeed so high that many foreign scholars (L.P. Smith, H. Bradley and others) were inclined to reduce the study of the English vocabulary to the discussion of its etymology, taking it for granted that the development of English was mainly due to borrowing. They seemed to be more interested in tracing the original source, form and meaning of every lexical element than in studying its present functioning and peculiarities. This view has been by now convincingly disproved by N.N. Amosova.

Although the mixed character of the English vocabulary cannot be denied and the part of borrowing in its development is indeed one of great importance, the leading role in the history of this vocabulary belongs to word-formation and semantic changes patterned according to the specific features of the English language system. This system absorbed and remodelled the vast majority of loan words according to its own standards, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell an old borrowing from a native word. Examples are: cheese, street, wall, wine and other words belonging to the earliest layer of Latin borrowings. Many loan words, on the other hand, in spite of the changes they have undergone after penetrating into English, retain some peculiarities in pronunciation, spelling, orthoepy, and morphology.’

Thus, the initial position of the sounds [v], [dz], [z] is a sign that the word is not of native stock. Examples are: vacuum (Lat), valley (Fr), voivode (Russ), vanadium (named by a Swedish chemist Selfstrom from ON Vanadis, the goddess Freya), vanilla (Sp), etc. The sound [dз ] may be rendered by the letters g and j: gem<Lai gemma and jewel<OFr jouel. The initial [з] occurs in comparatively late borrowings: genre, gendarme (Fr). The letters j, x, z in initial position and such combinations as ph, kh, eau in the root indicate the foreign origin of the word: philology (Gr), khaki (Indian), beau (Fr). Some letters and combinations of letters depend in their orthoepy upon the etymology of the word. Thus, x is pronounced [ks] and [gz] in words of native and Latin origin respectively, and [z ] in words coming from Greek: six [siks] (native), exist [ig’zist] (Lat), but xylophone (Gr) is pronounced [’zailafoun].

The combination ch is pronounced [tS ] in native words and early borrowings: child, chair; [S] in late French borrowings: machine [me’Si:n], parachute I’paeraSu:t], and [k] in words of Greek origin: epoch [’i:pok], chemist t’kemist], echo [’ekou].

The phono-morphological structure of borrowings is characterized by a high percentage of polysyllabic words: company, condition, continue, government, important and the like are among the most frequent. Bound stems prevail.

L. Bloomfield points out that English possesses a great mass of words (he calls them "foreign-learned" words) with a separate pattern of derivation. Their chief characteristic is the use of certain accented suffixes and combinations of suffixes: ability, education. Another feature, according to L. Bloomfield, is the presence of certain phonemic alterations, such as [v]—[p]—[t]: receive : : reception : : receipt; or [ai]—[i]: provide : : provident; and [z]—[з]: visible : : provision. There are also "prefixes which mark certain words as foreign-learned, as for instance: ab-, ad-, con-, de-, dis-, ex-, in-, per-, pre-, pro-, re-, trans-. These prefixes themselves show peculiar phonetic alternations: con-centrate, but col-lect, cor-rect. Such words contain bound forms for which it seems sometimes quite impossible to set up any definite semantic value. Examples are: conceive, deceive, perceive, receive or attend, contend, distend, pretend; adduce, conduce, deduce, induce, produce, reduce.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 4960