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Lecture 8. Early New English Vocabulary

The English vocabulary of the New English period reflects as no other aspect of the
language the many changes in the history of the people and various contacts which the
English speakers had with many nations and countries. The long and controversial history
of the people is reflected in its vocabulary and especially in the number of loan words in it,
different in origin and time of their entering the language and the circumstances under
which the acquisition of the foreign element took place.
Borrowings as means of enriching vocabulary in New English
Very many new words appear in New English due to borrowing. Chronologically
speaking, New English borrowings may be subdivided into borrowings of the Early New
English period — XV—XVII centuries, the period preceeding the establishment of the
literary norm, and loan words which entered the language after the establishment of the
literary norm — in the XVIII—XX centuries, the period which is generally alluded to as
late New English.
— Early New English borrowings (XV—XVII centuries)
Borrowings into the English language in the XV—XVII centuries are primarily due
to political events and also to the cultural and trade relations between the English people
and peoples in other countries.
Latin borrowings
th th
In the 16 and 17 c. Latin was the main language of philosophy and science, its
use in the sphere of religion became more restricted after the Reformation and the
publication of the English versions of the Bible.
Latin borrowings were especially numerous. They belonged to the bookish varieties
of the language, to scientific prose and special terminology.
Taken mainly from written sources they have easily assimilated in the language:
they do not contain any foreign sounds and receive primary and secondary stresses like
other English words.
Latin loan words can be identified by means of some suffixes and endings, for
instance:
— verbs, with the characteristic endings -ate, -ute:
aggravate, abbreviate, exaggerate, frustrate, separate, irritate, contribute,
constitute, persecute, prosecute, execute, etc.,
— adjectives ending in -ant, -ent, -ior, -al:
arrogant, reluctant, evident, obedient, superior, inferior, senior, junior, dental,
cordial, filial.
As a result of numerous Latin borrowings at the time there appeared many
ethymological doublets:
Latin
strictum
(direct) strict strait (through French)
seniorem
senior sir

French borrowings
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French borrowings are connected with diplomatic relations (e.g. attache,
communiqué), social life, leisure and pastime (e.g. ball, café, hotel, picnic, cricket,
billiard), art (e.g. ballet, ensemble) fashion and food (e.g. blouse, corsage, champagne
soup, omelette).
The peculiarity of the French borrowings of the period is that they in many cases
preserve French phonetic shape – they have the stress on the final syllable, often have
mute consonants at the end and have French sounds (e.g. genre, bourgeois).

Italian borrowings
Borrowing Italian words at this period is explained by great influence of Italy in
certain spheres of life. Italian architecture, painting and music excelled in those times.
As it is known, Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance movement and the revival of
interest in art.
Examples of musical terms adopted in English are: concerto, opera, solo, soprano,
tenor, violin.
Words relating to architecture and painting are: parapet, balcony, gallery, fresco.

Spanish borrowings
Borrowings from Spanish came as the result of contacts with Spain in the military,
commercial and political fields, due to the rivalry of England and Spain in foreign trade
and colonial expansion.
Spanish borrowings of this period are rather numerous and can be subdivided into
two groups:
– borrowings of the native Spanish words such as: guitar, cigar, armada, cargo,
sombrero
– and those that were taken into Spanish from various American Indian
languages. These loan words indicated new objects and concepts encountered in
the colonies: tobacco, potato, tomato, banana, chocolate, canoe.

Dutch borrowings
The Dutch element comes into the English language in a considerable number of
words, reflecting the commercial ties between England and the Netherlands. The
Netherlands of the period was well-known for its school of painting, its crafts and a well-
developed fleet. Hence the Dutch borrowings of the Early New English period are: easel,
landscape, sketch, cruise, deck, dock, reef, yacht.

—Late New English borrowings (XVIII—XX centuries)

— German: kindergarten, waltz, wagon, boy, girl
— French: magazine, machine, garage, police, engine, nacelle, aileron
— Indian: bungalow, jungle, indigo
— Chinese: coolie, tea
— Arabic: caravan, divan, alcohol, algebra, coffee, bazaar, orange, cotton, candy

Early New English Grammar

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The Noun in Early New English

The process of the simplification of the system of noun declension that was manifest
in Middle English continued at the beginning of the New English period.
Morphological classification of nouns
In Old English we could speak of many types of consonant and vowel declensions,
the a-, n- and root-stem being principal among them. In Middle English we observe only
these three declensions: a-stem, n-stem, root-stem. In New English we do not find
different declensions, as the overwhelming majority of nouns is declined in accordance
with the original a-stem declension masculine, the endings of the plural form -es and. the
Possessive -s being traced to the endings of the original a-stem declension masculine, i.e.:
Old English Middle English
Nominative & Accusative Common Plural
Plural ending -as ending -es
Genitive Singular Genitive Singular
ending -es ending -s
Of the original n-stem and root-stem declensions we have in New English but isolated
forms, generally referred to in modern grammar books as exceptions, or irregular noun
forms.
Origin of modern irregular noun forms
All modern irregular noun forms can be subdivided into several groups according to
their origin:
a) nouns going back to the original a-stem declension, neuter gender, which had no
ending in the nominative and accusative plural even in Old English, such as:
sheep — sheep (OE scēap — scēap)
deer — deer (OE dēor — dēor)
b) some nouns of the n-stem declension preserving their plural form, such as:
ox — oxen (OE oxa — oxan)
c) the original s-stem declension word
child — children (Old English cild — cildra)
In Middle English the final vowel was neutralised and the ending -n added on
analogy with the nouns of the original n-stem declension. This shows that the power of the
n-stem declension was at the time still relatively strong.
d) remnants of the original root-stem declension, such as:
foot — feet (OE fōt — fēt)
tooth — teeth (OE tōð — tēð)
e) "foreign plurals" — words borrowed in Early New English from Latin. These
words were borrowed by learned people from scientific books who alone used them, trying
to preserve their original form and not attempting to adapt them to their native language.
Among such words are:
datum — data, automaton — automata, axis — axes, etc.
It should be noted that when in the course of further history these words entered the
language of the whole people, they tended to a regular plural endings, which gave rise to
such doublets as:
molecula—moleculae and moleculas,
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formula —formulae and formulas,
antenna—antennae and antennas,
the irregular form being reserved for the scientific style.
Grammatical categories
The category of gender is formal, traditional already in Old English; in Middle
English and New English nouns have no category оf gender.
The category of number is preserved, manifesting the difference between singular
and plural forms.
The category of case, which underwent reduction from four to two forms in ME, in
New English contains the same number of case-forms as in Middle English, but the
difference is the number of the nouns used in the Genitive (or Possessive) case — mainly
living beings, and the meaning — mainly the quality or the person who possesses
something, e.g.
the boy's book; a women's magazine; a two miles' walk
Inanimate nouns are not so common: the river's bank; the razor's edge
In Modern English, however, we observe a gradual spreading of the ending -s of the
Possessive case to nouns denoting inanimate things, especially certain geographical
notions, such cases as England's prime minister being the norm, especially in political
style.

The adjective

In New English what remained of the declension in Middle English disappeared

completely and now we have the uninflected form for the adjective used for all purposes
for which in Old English there existed a complicated adjectival paradigm with two
number-forms, five case-forms, three gender-forms and two declensions.
All grammatical categories and declensions in New English disappeared. The
adjective acquired its present-day qualities.
The degrees of comparison of the adjective were formed by means of the suffixes –
er and –est, vowel mutation which was characteristic of some of them was almost lost.
The forms elder/older, eldest/oldest and further/farther, furthest/farthest are
distinguished in use. So older forms elder, eldest are used to denote relations within a
family and further, furthest are used in relation to time whereas farther, farthest to
distance.
The tendency to unification of the general norm sometimes brings to the general rule
even those adjectives the comperatives and superlatives of which were traditionally in
suppletive way, e.g. the littlest doubts, worser.
The new way of forming the degrees of comparison that appeared in Middle English
– that is, analytically, by placing the adverb more and most before the adjective comes
into practice. The rule that this new form is to be used only with polysyllabic and a limited
number of bisyllabic adjectives was not yet established, e.g. more deep, most sharp.
Double comparatives and superlatives – the instances when the adjective with a
suffix is preceded by more/most are also found, e.g. more wider, the most unkindest.
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Pronouns
Changes in the system of pronouns are not very numerous, yet worth special
attention.
Three changes in pronouns were involved: (1) the disuse of thou, thy, thee; (2) the
substitution of you for ye as a nominative case; (3) and the introduction of its as the
possessive of it.
(1) In the earliest period of English the distinction between thou and ye was simply
one of number; thou was the singular and ye the plural form for the second person
pronoun. In time, however, a quite different distinction grew up. In the thirteenth century
the singular forms (thou, thy, thee) were used among familiars and in addressing children
or persons of inferior rank, while the plural forms (ye, your, you) began to be used as a
mark of respect in addressing a superior.
By the sixteenth century the singular forms had disappeared and the plural forms of
nd
the 2 person – ye, you, your – were applied more and more generally to individuals
irrespective of rank or intimacy. (Nowadays thou is found only in poetry, in religious
discourse and in some dialects.)
In Shakespeare’s time the plural forms of the 2 nd person were widely used as
equivalents of thou, thee, thine, e.g. there was the free interchange of you and thou in
Shakespeare’s sonnets (thine image, your epitaph).
(2) In Early New English the syncretism of cases entered a new phase: the
Nominative case began to merge with the Objective case. Originally a clear distinction
was made between the nominative ye and the objective you. But because both forms are so
frequently unstressed, they were often pronounced alike [jə] A tendency to confuse the
nominative and the accusative forms can be observed fairly early, and in the fourteenth
century you began to be used as a nominative. By a similar substitution ye appears in the
following century for the objective case, and from this time on the two forms seem to have
been used pretty indiscriminately until ye finally disappeared.
(3) In some ways the most interesting development in the pronoun at this time was
the formation of a new possessive neuter, its. As we have seen above, the neuter pronoun
in Old English was declined hit, his, him, hit, which by the merging of the dative and
accusative under hit in Middle English became hit, his, hit. In unstressed positions hit
weakened to it, and at the beginning of the modern period it was the usual form for the
subject and object. His, however, remained the proper form of the possessive. Although it
was thus identical with the possessive case of he, its occurrence where we should now use
its is very common in written English down to the middle of the seventeenth century.
With loss of grammatical gender the personal pronouns of the third person singular,
he, she, it, had a distinctive form for each gender in the nominative and objective cases,
and a need seems to have been felt for some distinctive form in the possessive case as
well. So its was built on the analogy of the Gen. case of nouns. Though it was still rare in
the age of Shakespeare.

The Verb
The categories of the Early New English verb remain basically the same: tense,
voice, aspect, mood. The categories of number and person are less distinct and expressed
in the personal ending of the 3rd person singular in the present tense active voice and in the
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passive voice, as the verb to be retains its 1st person singular and two number forms in the
past.
The loss of endings greatly simplified the verbal paradigm. There were no longer
endings marking the 1st person singular, plural present indicative, and the infinitival suffix
–an → en → e was also lost. Personal ending of the 3rd person singular in the present tense
–th is replaced by –s, e.g. hath – has; thinketh – thinks.
The category of aspect. The continuous aspect, the first instances of which were
used in Middle English is used in the texts of this period. However, it was not until the 18 th
c. that the Cont. forms acquired a specific meaning of there own, that of incomplete
concrete process of limited duration.
For many hundred years the Cont. forms were not used in the Passive Voice. The
Active form of the Cont. aspect was employed in the passive meaning until the 19 th c. The
new Passive form aroused the protest of many scholars. Even in the 19 th c. it was claimed
that the house is being built was a clumsy construction which should be replaced by the
house is building. But in spite of all these protests the Passive Voice of the Cont. aspect
continued to be used and eventually was recognized as correct.
All forms of the perfect tenses are abundantly used in Early New English. The
auxiliary have had lost the meaning of possession and was used with all kinds of verbs,
without restriction. Occasionally the perfect tenses of the intransitive verbs were formed
with the auxiliary to be, e.g. he is not yet arriv’d.
The category of voice. In Early New English the Passive Voice continued to grow
and to extend its application. Passive forms began to be built from intransitive verbs
associated with different kinds of objects: indirect objects and prepositional objects. The
wide use of various pass. constructions in the 18th and 19th c. testifies to the high
productivity of the Pass. Voice.
The category of mood. The moods of the Early New English period are the same as
they were in the Middle English – the Indicative, the Imperative, and the Subjunctive. The
newly arisen analytical forms of the Subjunctive have not yet the present-day
differentiation as to the rules of the structural limitation of their use – we may find any
combination of the moods in the sentences of unreal condition.
The traditional classification of strong and weak verbs gives way to division into
regular and irregular. Somewhat apart are treated modal verbs, formely preterite-present,
that are stripped of their paradigmatic forms and are later referred to as defective.
Among New English regular verbs there are:
 native words (almost all Old English weak verbs of the 2nd class and some Old
English strong verbs having lost their irregularity and forming their forms on
analogy with the weak verbs of the 2nd class, such as to help, to bake, etc.);
 borrowings (almost all loan verbs);
 the verbs that are derived from other parts of speech.
Irregular verbs include those former strong verbs that preserved the vowel interchange
in the root. Here belong both those that form their participle with the help of the suffix –n,
and those that lost the suffix altogether, e.g. write – wrote – written; swim – swam –swum.
Among irregular verbs there are verbs with a long root vowel and the root ending in -t
or d.
Old English metan — mette — mett
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Middle English meten — mette — mett
New English meet — met — met
In Middle English the root vowel of the second and third forms is shortened due to
the rhythmic tendency of the language requiring the shortening of all vowels if followed
by two consonants. The vowel interchange in Middle English is quantitative only.
In New English the long root vowel in the first form due to the great vowel shift is
changed qualitatively, so now we have both quantitative and qualitative vowel interchange
in the verb.
Modal verbs. The changes in the preterite-present are significant. Some verbs are
lost altogether (dowen, munnen etc.) The rest lost the greater part of their paradigms and
turned into a group of modal (defective) verbs. Unlike the former preterite-present verbs,
these are no longer autonomous and cannot be used without a complement. Now they are
always used as modal auxiliaries with the infinitive without the particle to.