The French Influence on English Vocabulary.

2.1.Borrowings and Loanwords .

Borrowing words from other languages is characteristic of English throughout its history.More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings.Mostly they are words of Romanic origin(Latin,French,Italian,Spanish).Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure,by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms.It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.English history is very rich in different types of contracts with other countries,that is why it is very rich in borrowings.The Roman invasion,the adoption of Christianity,Scandinavian and Norman conquests of the British Isles,the development of British colonialism and trade and cultural relations served to increase immensely the English vocabulary.The majority of these borrowing are fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar ,spel-

ling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.

English continues to take in foreign words,but now the quantity of borrowings is not so abundant as it was before.All the more so,English now become a ?giving?language,it has become Lingva franca of the twentieth century.

Borrowings can be classified according to different criteriation a:a)according to the aspect which is borrowed,b)according to the degree of assimilation,c)according to the language from which the word was borrowed.(In this classification only the main languages from which words were borrowed into English are described,such as Latin,French,Italian,Spanish,German and Russian).

Classification of Borrowings according to the borrowed aspect.There are the following group : phonetic borrowings,translation loans,semantic borrowings,mor-

phemic borrowing.Phonetic borrowing are most characteristic in all languages,they are called loan words proper.Words are borrowed with their spelling,pronunciation and meaning.Then they undergo assimilation,each sound in the borrowed word is substituted by the corresponding sound of the borrwing language.In some cases the spelling is changed.The structure of the word can also be changed.The position of the stress is very often influenced by the phonetic system of the borrowing language.The paradigm of the word,and sometimes the meaning of the borrowed word can also changed.Such words as:labour,travel,table,

chair,people are phonetic borrowings from French.

Translation loans are word-for-word(or morpheme-for-morpheme)translation of some foreign words or expressions.In such cases:the notion is borrowed from a foreign language but it is expressed by native lexical units,?to take the bull by the horns?(Latin),?fair sex?(French),?living space?(German),etc.

Semantic borrowings are such units when a new meaning of the unit existing in the language is borrowed.It can happen when we have two relative languageswhich have common words with different meaning,e.g.,there are semantic borrowings between Scandinavian and English,such as meaning ?to live?for the word ?to dwell?in which in Old English had the meaning?to wander?.

Morphemic borrowings are borrowings of affixes which occur in the language when many words with identical affixes are borrowed from one language into another,so that the morphemic structure of borrowed words becomes familiar to the people speaking the borrowing language,e.g.,we can find a lot of Romanic affixes in the English word-building system , that is why there are a lot

of words_hybrids in English where different morphemes have different origin,e.g.,?goddess?,?beautiful?.

Classification of borrowings according to the degree of assimilation. The degree of assimilation of borrowings depends on the following factors:a)from what group group of languages the word was borrowed,if the word belongs to the same group of languages to which the borrowing language belongs it is assimilated easier,b)in what way the word is borrowed:orally or in the written form,words borrowed orally are assimilated quicker,c)how often the borrowing is used in the language,the greater the frequency of its usage,the quicker it is assimilated,d)how long the word lives in the language,the longer it lives,the more assimilated it is.

Accordingly borrowings are subdivided into:completely assimilated,partly assimilated and non-assimilated(barbarisms).

Completely assimilated borrowings are not felt as foreign words in the language,cf.the French word?sport? and the native word?start?.

Partly assimilated borrowings are subdivided into the following group:a)borrowings non-assimilated semantically,because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from the language of which they were borrowed.e.g.,sari,sombrero,taiga,kvass,etc.

b)borrowings non-assimilated grammatically,e.g.nouns borrowed from Latin and Greek retain their plural forms(bacillus-bacilli,phenomenon-phenomena,datum-data,genius-genii etc.

c)borrowings non-assimilated phonetically.Here belong words with the initial sounds/v/ and/z/,e.g.,voice,zero.

Non-assimilated borrowings(barbarisms) are borrowings which are used by Englishmen rather seldom and are non-assimilated,e.g.addio(Italian),tete-a-tete(French),dolce vita(Italian),an home a femme(French),etc.

Classification of Borrowings according to the language from which they were borrowed. Although the mixed character of the English vocabulary can not be denied and the part of borrowing in its development is indded 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,ortheopy and morphology.

Charpter 3

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 136