PERIODS OF BOROWINGS FROM FRENCH

It is customary to divide the time in which English was in contact with French into two periods, 1) Anglo-Norman and 2) Central French. The first period lasted from the invasion of 1066 to the loss of Normandy to England under King John in 1204.

After this there is little or no direct influence of French on English but the language remained fashionable and the practice of borrowing words from the continental language continued well into the 15th century. The Central French period (during which influence from the region around Paris dominated) can be taken to cease gradually with the introduction of printing at the end of the 15th century and the general resurgence in interest and status of English.

The difference between Anglo-Norman and Central French loans in English is to be seen in famous pairs of words like catch and chase, both of which go back originally to Latin captiare, which itself furnished English with the later loan ‘capture’. The main differences between Anglo-Norman and Central French are outline in the tables below.

9. Definition of morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest component of a word, or other linguistic unit, that has semantic meaning. The term is used as part of the branch of linguistics known as morphology (linguistics). A morpheme is composed by phoneme(s) (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound) in spoken language, and by grapheme(s) (the smallest units of written language) in written language.

English example:

The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a bound morpheme; "break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", /s/, in cats (/kæts/), but "-es", /ɨz/, in dishes (/dɪʃɨz/), and even the voiced "-s", /z/, in dogs (/dɒɡz/). "-s". These are allomorphs.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1212