Презентация на тему Etymological Characteristics of the Modern English Lexicon

and its peculiarities
2 Reasons and ways of borrowings
3 Types

of borrowings
4 Assimilation of borrowings
5 Types of assimilated words

and its Peculiarities
What is vocabulary?
The vocabulary of any language

doesn’t remain the same but changes constantly.
The vocabulary is an open system and the number of words cannot be stated with certainty.
The term Etymology (from Greek) means the study of the earliest forms of the word.

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its vocabulary “ [Joseph M. Williams “Origins of the

English Language”]

minutes

has some peculiarities:
1 the simple morphemic structure of words

and highly developed semantic structure

ex. hand has more
than 20 meanings
[www.visualthesaurus.com]

"hand; side; power, control, possession," from P.Gmc. *khanduz (cf.

O.S., O.Fris., Du., Ger. hand, O.N. hönd, Goth. handus).

falls into 3 layers

a) words of the general Indo-European

origin
b) words of the common Germanic origin
c) words of unknown origin

nature;
names of animals and birds (cat – Katz –

кот);
parts of human body (nose – нос – nasus – Nase);
names of the most frequent actions (stand – stande – стоять);
adjectives naming concrete properties (red – rod – rufus – рудый);
most of the numerals (two – duo – два);
some pronouns (I – ich – ego)

English vocabulary. They have cognates in vocabularies of different

groups of Indo-European languages.

Ex. dēor: "animal, beast." (OE),
Cf. Tier (G), dier (Dutch), djur (Swedish),
dyr (Norwegian and Danish)

most frequent elements used in any style of speech.

Their most characteristic features are: a wide range of lexical and gram­matical valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy; they are often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.
parts of the human body (head, hand, arm, finger, bone);
animals (bear, fox, calf);
plants (oak, fir, grass);
natural phenomena (rain, frost);
seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer);
landscape features (sea, land).

found outside Germanic lgs;
girl - gyrle "child" (of

either sex);
lady - from O.E. hlæfdige "mistress of a household, wife of a lord," lit. "one who kneads bread," from hlaf "bread" (see loaf) + -dige "maid";
horse - O.E. hors

the word-stock of other languages for words to express

new concepts, to further differentiate the existing concepts and to name new objects, etc. (process);
a loan word, borrowed word – a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language (result) .

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and extralinguistic
Auto-machine gun Maxim was named after its

creator sir Hiram Stevens Maxim
(1840—1916)

Extralinguistic (historic) reasons include wars and conquest and peaceful contacts as well.

- fillet (En)

sciampagna (It) - champagne (Fr) - champaign

(En)

frangia (It) - frange (Fr) - fringe (origin. on tents, now a type of haircut) (En)

words were borrowed together with the notions which they

denoted.
EG: potato, tomato were borrowed from Spanish, when these vegetables were brought to the British island.
Balaclava - "woolen head covering," especially worn by soldiers
Evidently named for village near Sebastopol, Russia, site of a battle Oct. 25, 1854, in the Crimean War. But the term (originally Balaclava helmet) does not appear before 1881 and seems to have come into widespread use in the Boer War. The British troops seem to have suffered from the cold in the Crimean War, and the usage might be a remembrance of that conflict.

same object. This type of borrowing enlarges groups of

synonyms.
Ex: to adore
to love
to like
The French word “to adore” was added to native words “to like” and “to love” to denote the strongest degree of the process.

ways:




through oral speech
(by immediate contact between the

peoples)

through written speech
(by indirect contact through books, etc.)

periods of history
Words borrowed orally are usually short,

are assimilated more readily, they undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption.
e.g. L. inch, mill, street

preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of their sound-form,

their assimilation is a long and laborious process.

e.g. Fr. communiqué, belles-lettres, naïveté (naivety (En)

to the development of a language or do they

undermine its purity? Borrowings are, of course, necessary. Probably an English language wouldn't exist without the almost 70,000 borrowed terms from French.

can be distinguished:
Loan words proper
Translation loans (calques)
Etymological Doublets
International words
Translator’s

false friends
Etymological hybrids

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assimilated to this or that extent.

Ex. Table, skirt, mill

material already existing in the English language but according

to patterns taken from another language by way of literal word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme translation
EG: from the Russian language: пятилетка – five-year plan,
from German: Wunderkind – wonder child,
from Italian: prima ballerina – first dancer.

but they are different in phonetic shape and in

meaning.

of the pair may be a native word and

the other is a borrowed one. EG: the word shirt is native. skirt was borrowed from Scandinavian (clothes)
2) Both words are borrowed, but from different languages. EG: senior (from Latin) sir (from French)
3) Both words are borrowed from one of the same language, but at different periods of time. EG: cavalry (Normandy French) – кавалерия. Chivalry (Parisian Language) – рыцарство (ch-показывает о более позднем происхождение). humour and humid.
4) Shortening may bring to life etymological doublets. EG: history and story, defense and fence.

3

by means of derivational morphemes of different origin.
Thus

almost immediately after the borrowing of the word sputnik the words pre-sputnik, sputnikist, sputnikked, to out-sputnik.
London – (L.) Londinium (c.115), often explained as "place belonging to a man named Londinos," a supposed Celtic personal name meaning "the wild one“
Beautiful

languages denoting the same notion. Among international words are

names of sciences, political terms, sports, name of fruits, foods.

Ex. phonetics, physics, dynamite, kangaroo, sauna, fauna
http://www.answers.com/library/International+Word+Origins

languages which are similar in their form but different

in their meaning or the meanings of the two do not completely coincide

friends of a translator” by Aculenco V.V.
2) German-Russian and

Russian-German dictionary of “the false friends of a translator” by Gotlib K.G.

the original phrases / words on the right.

попутчик
fellow-traveller
wonder

child

Wunderkind

first dancer

словосочетание

word-combination

prima-ballerina

or adaptation of borrowed words.
The phenomenon by which two

languages are put in contact and borrow words one from the other is known as interference.
A lexical borrowing occurs when a group of speakers is put in contact with a foreign word and adopts it in their language. Usually, there are substantial changes in its morphology, in the pronunciation and even in the meaning.

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phonetic, grammatical and semantic.
Phonetic assimilation comprises changes in

sound-form and stress. It is most obvious.
Sounds that were unfamiliar to the English language were fitted into its scheme of sounds.
Ex. 1) the long [e] and [ε] are rendered with the help of [ei] (as in café).
2) In words from French or Latin the accent was gradually transferred to the first syllable (honour, reason)

the words pneumatics, psychology, Ptolemy were simplified into [n],

[s], [t], since the consonant combinations [ps], [pt], [pn], were never used in the initial position.
4) For the same reason the initial [ks] was changed into [z] (as in Gr. xylophone).

the paradigm of the borrowed word.
EG: delicious –

more delicious – the most delicious, cup-cups.
Some of the borrowed words are still in the process of grammatical assimilation.
EG: formula (-as – colloq),(-ae – scient.) plural

the system of meanings of the English vocabulary.

EG:

the word “large” was borrowed from French in the meaning “broad”. But in the Eng. vocabulary there already was an adjective with the same meaning (“wide”). The word “large” entered a group of words meaning “big” in size. At first the word “large” was used when speaking about objects which were horizontally “large”. But then it changed its meaning and now it can be used when speaking about any object and it is close in meaning to the adjective “big”.

adopted only in one or two of their meanings.

The words cargo and cask, highly polysemantic in Spanish, were adopted only in one of their meanings — ‘the goods carried in a ship’, ‘a barrel for holding liquids’ respectively.

2) The semantic structure of borrowings changes in other ways as well. Some meanings become more general, others more specialised, etc.
Ex. the verb move in Modern English has developed the meanings of ‘propose’, ‘change one’s flat’, ‘mix with people’ and others that the French mouvoir does not possess.

minister, cup)
Partially assimilated (phenomenon – phenomena, garage)
3. Non-assimilated (barbarisms)

– belles-lettres, touché

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given words. Circle them according to the colour of

the column:

completely assimilated borrowings

partially assimilated borrowings

Soyuz

gate

want

tzatziki

sabotage

ad libitum

torchere

corps

stimulus

criterion

parquet

every language (unless it is a dead language, like

Latin) can't avoid interference with other countries and other cultures. Language is an open system and every language is a member of a global linguistic community.
2) Anyway, the prime mover in linguistic borrowings is the individual speaker who, after being put in contact with a written or a spoken foreign word, forms an acoustic image in his mind, which , after a so called processing period, becomes a borrowed term.
3) During the processing period, the speaker adapts the foreign word to the morphology and the phonetics of its own language, trying to transform all the morphological or /and phonetic features which don't exist in the language he speaks.

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means the study of the earliest forms of the

word. Now it studies both: the form and the meaning of borrowed and native words.
2 Vocabulary – comes from Greek and it means the study of the earliest forms of the word.
3 Native elements – words which were not borrowed from other languages
4 Basic stock or word stock – a certain stable layer in the vocabulary. It changes very slowly and throughout the centuries has been fundamentally the same without great change. At the same time this layer makes the basis for the future growth of the vocabulary.
5 Words of unknown origin – not found outside Germanic languages
6 Borrowing – 1) (process) resorting to the word-stock of other languages for words to express new concepts, to further differentiate the existing concepts and to name new objects, etc.; 2) (result) a loan word, borrowed word – a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.
7 Etymological Doublets are words which have the same origin but they are different in phonetic shape and in meaning.