Latin has been the most long-lasting donor of borrowings to English because its influence started before the 5th A.D. (when Anglo-Saxons still lived on the Continent) and continues up to present day.
Usually Latin borrowings in OEare classified into the following layers:
1)Continental borrowings – words that the West Germanic tribes borrowed from Latin while they still lived on the Continent. Later, when they conquered the British Isles, they brought these words with them. These words are present in all the Germanic languages.
Plus there appeared a lot of so-called translation loans – words that were translated part-for-part from Latin (e.g. Monday (“moon day”, from Latin Lunae dies), goldsmith (from Latin aurifex (auri = gold, fex = worker)), etc.).
All Latin borrowings in OE underwent assimilation, i.e.:
-changed their spelling according to the English rules;
-underwent some phonetic changes according to the English rules;
-were used in derivation and compounding;
-acquired grammatical categories of the English parts of speech.
ME
After the Norman Conquest the main spheres of the Latin Language remained: church, law; academic activities.
-the number of stressed syllables in a line is fixes;
-the line is usually divided into 2 halves, each half starts with one and the same sound; this sound may be repeated also in the middle of each half
The style of OE poetry is marked by the wide use of metaphorical phrases compounds, describing the qualities of the thing. This kind of metaphor led to the composition of riddles (contained description of nature, all kinds of everyday objects = a sort of encyclopedia)
The two best known Old English poets are Cædmon and Cynewulf (Northumbrian authors).
The topics of Old English poetry:
-heroic epic(“Beowulf”)
-lyrical poems(“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, etc. Most of the poems are ascribed to Cynewulf);
-religious poems(“Fate of the Apostles” (probably Cædmon), “Dream of the Rood”, etc.).
“Beowulf”- the oldest in the Germanic literature, 7th c., was written in Mercian or Northumbrian but has come down to us only in a 10th c. West Saxon copy. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons and features the adventures and fights of the legendary heroes.
-vocabulary ( is not used in everyday life since it is epic: hero, warrior, battle, kind of weapons, sea, ship /are not Br. but Scand.)
- alliteration repetition of consonants (as good as gold), the word with alliteration should be given more prominence. The poem was intended to be read & heard.
- kenning – a double metaphor (2 parts) wudu bundenne
-synonym: ship (flota, bat, naca, wudu bundenne)
Warrior (beornas, weras, çuman)
Borrowings in NE.
17c. is characterized by further growth of vocabulary due to borrowing of words from colonial lang-s & also from France. It is connected with growth of intern. commercial ties; words denoted
-products brought into England from the New World
- names of animals
e.g. North Am. canoe, hammock, potato, tobacco
South Am. puma, guano, condor,tapir
French loan words of this period were far more important:
-notions typical for feudal culture (bizarre)
-words of wider meaning (grotesque, naïve, ridicule,suite)
-A number of artificial words derived from Greek roots (telegraph, telephone, oxygen)
-Russian borrowings (samovar, tzar)
-after 1917 words reflecting an idea of building socialism ( udarnik, sputnik, soviet)
1)The OE languages, their classification & principal features
All of these lan-s have common linguistic features
1)Phonetical level
- the system of word accentuation: only dynamic stress& fixed on the 1st syllable/root or prefix/. Is not movable-the other syllables are weakened-loss of ending== transformation of E. from synthetical l-ge to analytic one (OE sunu-ME sune-NE son)