The borrowing and its function in the English language

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers –the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words.

In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valence, they are highlypolysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language.

In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a through etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language and the role played by themis determined by the historical development of the nation speaking the language. The most effective ways of borrowing is direct borrowing from another language as the result of the contacts with other nations. Though, a word be also borrowed indirectly not from the source language but through another language.

The native words are further subdivided by diachronic linguistic 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 other. 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.g. 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, led, 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 and the adjectives are: broad, dead, deaf and deep. Many adverbs and pronouns also belong to this layer.

Together with the words of the common Indo-European stock these Common Germane 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 list. Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valence, 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 Old English wiccan is one of the 500most 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 valence 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.

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-fullness’, ‘close observation’, ‘a time-piece’ etc.

Watch is the centreof 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 importance or are unduly worrying. The part played by the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language depends upon the history of each given language, being conditioned by direct linguistic contacts and political, economic and cultural relationship 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 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 loanwords are all dependent upon historical factors. The very fact that up to 70% of English vocabulary consist of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due not to inherent tolerance of foreign elements but specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests and, in the modern times, the specific features marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

The number of loan words in the English language is high that many foreign scholars 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.

Thus, the initial position of the sounds [v], [dz], [s] is a sign that the word is not of native stock. Examples are: vacuum (Lat), valley(Fr), voivode (Russ), vanadium (Swedish), vanilla(Sp), etc. The sound [d3] may be rendered by the letters g nab j: gem-Lat. Gemma and jewel-Fr. joule. The initial [3] 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 phone-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.

Resume:

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisiandialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and/or settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually became predominant.

The English language underwent extensive change in the Middle Ages. Written Old English of AD 1000 is similar in vocabulary and grammar to other old Germanic languages such as Old High German and Old Norse, and completely unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognizable in written Middle English of AD 1400. The transformation was caused by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. A large proportion of the modern English vocabulary comes directly from Anglo-Norman.

Close contact with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, these changes had not reached South West England by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a full-fledged literary language. The Norman invasion occurred in 1066, and when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on the speech of London, much closer to the centre of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old Norman, with particularly heavy influence in the church, the courts, and government. With the coming of the Renaissance, as with most other developing European languages such as German and Dutch, Latin and Ancient Greek supplanted Norman and French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.