Etymological Structure of

English Vocabulary

Lecture 12
 THE ORIGIN OF
ENGLISH WORDS
The Word-Stock Composition

English
Word-Stock

Native Borrowed
Elements Elements
 A Native Word

 a word, which belongs

to the original English
stock, as known from
the earliest available
manuscripts of the Old
English period.
A Loan Word
 borrowed word or
borrowing is a word
taken over from another
language and modified
in phonemic shape,
spelling, paradigm or
meaning according to
the standards of the
English language.
Native Stock

Native Stock

Indo-European Common Germanic

Origin Origin
Words of Indo-European Origin

The words having cognates in the vocabularies

of different Indo-European languages form
the oldest layer.

English words of this group denote elementary

notions without which no human
communication would be possible.
Words of Indo-European Origin
The following groups can be identified.
I. Family relations: father, mother, brother, son, daughter.
II. Parts of the human body: foot, nose, lip, heart.
III. Animals: cow, swine, goose.
IV. Plants: tree, birch, corn.
V. Times of day: day, night.
VI. Celestial bodies: sun, moon, star.
VII. Numerous adjectives: red, new, glad, sad.
VIII. The numerals from one to a hundred.
IX. Pronouns — personal (except they which is a Scandinavian
borrowing); demonstrative.
X. Numerous verbs: be, stand, sit, eat, know.
Words of Common Germanic Stock

A much bigger part of the native vocabulary

layer, words having parallels in German,
Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc., but none in
Ukrainian or French.
Words of Common Germanic Stock
Main groups of Germanic words

I. Parts of the human body: head, hand, arm, finger, bone.

II. Animals: bear, fox, calf.
III. Plants: oak, fir, grass.
IV. Natural phenomena: rain, frost.
V. Seasons of the year: winter, spring, summer.
VI. Landscape features: sea, land.
VII. Human dwellings and furniture: house, room, bench.
VIII. Sea-going vessels: boat, ship.
IX. Adjectives: green, blue, grey, white, small, thick, high, old, good.
X. Verbs: see, hear, speak, tell, say, answer, make, give, drink.
Native Words in English Vocabulary

Together with the words of the common Indo-

European stock these Common Germanic
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 of English.
Native Words in English Vocabulary

Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-

stock are for the most part characterized by
 a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency

 high frequency value

 a developed polysemy.

They often
 are monosyllabic

 show great word-building power

 make a number of set expressions.

Native Words in English Vocabulary

watch<OE wasccan is one of the 500 most 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 valency is thus of the highest:
Are you going to play or only watch the others play?
He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me
carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the
house. The man is being watched by the police.
 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 wakefulness', 'close
observation', 'a time-piece', etc.
 Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family:
watchdog, 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
impatience or are unduly worrying.
Extra-Linguistic Factors Influencing the
Composition of English Vocabulary
 Up to 70% of the English vocabulary consists of
loan words, and only 30% of the words are native
is due to specific conditions of the English language
development.
They are
 the Roman invasion

 the introduction of Christianity

 the Danish and Norman conquests

 British colonialism and imperialism

 informational revolution
Chronology of Borrowings in the
Vocabulary Stock
I. Celtic (5th - 6th c. A. D.): bald, down, bard, druid, cradle, the Avon,
London
II. Latin
1st group (1th c. B. C.): butter, cheese, pear, plum, cup, kitchen,
port, wine
2nd group (7th c. A. D.): priest, monk, bishop, candle, school,
magister, nun
3rd group (14- 16 c.): the Renaissance period: major, minor,
intelligent, moderate, permanent, elect, create
III. Scandinavian (8th-11th c. A. D.): call, take, cast, die, law,
husband, window, ski, skirt, ill, skill, bread, dream
IV. French
1. Norman borrowings (11th — 13th c. A. D.): state, crime,
prison, army, war, soldier, battle, officer, enemy, pupil, lesson,
library, pen, pencil, table, plate, dinner, supper, river, autumn, uncle
Chronology of Borrowings in the
Vocabulary Stock (cont.)
2. Parisian borrowings (Renaissance): regime, routine, police,
machine, ballet, scene, technique, bourgeois

V. Greek (Renaissance): atom, cycle, ethics, music, method

VI. Italian (Renaissance and later): piano, violin, opera, alarm,
colonel
VII. Spanish (Renaissance and later); embargo, junta, siesta, macho,
mosquito, patio, guerilla
VIII. German (modern): kindergarten, hamburger, frankfurter, blitz,
waltz, poodle, seminar
IX. Portugal: marmalade, cobra
X. Russian: bistro, steppe, tundra, tsar, mammoth, sputnik, cosmonaut
Source of Borrowing vs. Origin of
Borrowing
 The term "source of borrowing" should be
distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing".
 Source of borrowing should be applied to the
language from which the loan word was taken into
English.
 Origin of borrowing refers to the language to which
the word may be traced.
The word paper<Fr papier<Lat papyrus<Gr papyros
has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as
its origin.
Semantic Loans

 is used to denote the development in an

English word of a new meaning due to the
influence of a related word in another
language.
 The English word pioneer meant 'explorer'
and 'one who is among the first in new fields
of activity'; then under the influence of the
word nuoнep it has come to mean 'a member
of the Young Pioneers' Organization'.
ASSIMILATION OF LOAN
WORDS
 Assimilation
 assimilation of a loan word is used to denote a
partial or total conformation to the phonetic,
graphical and morphological standards of the
receiving language and its semantic system.
 The degree of assimilation depends upon
 the length of period during which the word has been used
in the receiving language
 its importance for communication purpose

 its frequency.

Oral borrowings due to personal contacts are assimilated

more completely and more rapidly than literary borrowings,
i.e. borrowings through written speech.
Degrees of Assimilation

barbarisms

partially assimilated

completely assimilated
Completely Assimilated Loan Words

 found in all the layers of older borrowings:

 Latin borrowings: cheese, street, wall, wine.
 Scandinavian loan words: husband, fellow, gate,
root, wing; verbs: call, die, take, want and
adjectives: happy, ill, low, odd, wrong.
 French words are extremely numerous and
frequent: table, chair, face, figure, finish, matter.
Completely Assimilated Loan Words
 A considerable number of Latin words borrowed during the
revival of learning are at present almost indistinguishable from
the rest of the vocabulary.
 The number of completely assimilated loan words is many times
greater than the number of partially assimilated ones.
 They follow all morphological, phonetic and orthographic
standards.
 Being very frequent and stylistically neutral, they may occur as
dominant words in synonymic groups.
 They take an active part in word-formation.
 Their morphological structure and motivation remain transparent,
so that they are morphologically analysable and therefore supply
the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with
bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in
series of loan words that contain them. Such are, for instance,
the French suffixes -age, -ance and -ment, which provide speech
material to produce hybrids like shortage, goddess, hindrance,
and endearment.
 Partially Assimilated Loan Words

Not assimilated

semantically grammatically phonetically graphically

Loan Words not Assimilated
Semantically
denote objects and notions specific to the country from
which they come.
They may name
 foreign clothing: mantilla, sombrero;

 foreign titles and professions: shah, rajah, sheik,

bei, toreador;
 foreign vehicles: caique (Turkish), rickshaw
(Chinese);
 food and drinks: pilaw (Persian), sherbet (Arabian);

 foreign currency: rupee (India), hrivna (Ukraine), etc.

Loan Words not Assimilated
Grammatically
keep to the for paradigm of the language of
origin: Latin or Greek which keep their
original plural forms: bacillus : : bacilli;
crisis : : crises; formula : : formulae; index : :
indices; phenomenon : : phenomena.
Some of these are also used in English plural
forms, but in that case there may be a
difference in stylistic terms indices : : indexes.
Loan Words not Assimilated
Phonetically
 The French words borrowed after 1650 afford good examples.
Some of them keep the accent on the final syllable: machine,
cartoon, police. Others, alongside with specific stress, contain
sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the
English language and do not occur in native words. The
examples are: [Z] — bourgeois, camouflage, prestige, regime,
sabotage; [wR] — as in memoir, or the nasalized [R], [P] —
melange. In many cases it is not the sounds but the whole
pattern of the word phonetic structure that is different from the
rest of the vocabulary, as in some of the Italian and Spanish
borrowings: confetti, incognito, macaroni, opera, sonata, soprano
and tomato, potato, tobacco.
 The pronunciation of words where the process of assimilation is
phonetically incomplete will often vary, as in ['foiei] or ['fwaje] for
foyer and [‘bHl,vR], [‘bHlvR], [‘bHlavR], [‘bHlvRd] for boulevard.
Eight different pronunciations are registered by D. Jones for the
word fiance.
Loan Words not Assimilated Graphically

 This group is fairly large and variegated.

There are, for instance, words borrowed from
French in which the final consonant is not
pronounced, e. g. ballet, buffet, corps. Some
may keep a diacritic mark: café, cliché.
Specifically French digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.)
may be retained in spelling: bouquet, brioche.
Some have variant spellings.
Barbarisms

 words from other languages used by English

people in conversation or in writing but not
assimilated in any way, and for which there
are corresponding English equivalents. The
examples are the Italian addio, ciao 'good-
bye', the French affiche for 'placard' and coup
or coup d'Etat 'a sudden seizure of state
power by a small group', the Latin ad libitum
'at pleasure' and the like.