2015-08-21
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· Latin butter, plum and beet – no words in Saxon vocabulary;
· potato and tomato from Spanish when these vegetables were first brought to England.
b) No gap in the vocabulary.
· one more word is borrowed because it represents the same concept in some new aspect, enlarging groups of synonyms and greatly enriching the expressive resources of the vocabulary.
E.g. Latin cordial was added to friendly; French desire to wish; Latin admire and French adore to like and love.
c) "Accidental" borrowings
· Words were borrowed " blindly“, for no obvious reason, they were not wanted. Quite a number of such "accidental" borrowings are very soon rejected by the vocabulary and forgotten.
e.g. The adjective large was borrowed from French in the meaning of wide. It was not actually wanted, because it fully coincided with the English adjective wide without adding any new shades or aspects to its meaning. Large managed to establish itself very firmly in the English vocabulary by semantic adjustment. It entered another synonymic group with the general meaning of " big in size".
