Chapter: lexicology and its object subject matter of Lexicology

2. The penetration of borrowed words in English
« ... in 1066 came the Norman conquest, an event which had more influeric on the English language than any other from outside. There is an importam difference between the influence now to be examined and the earlier foreig n influences. The native language was not completely driven out, leaving lity e impression on the language of the conquerors, as had happened when the Angles and Saxons conquered the Britons, nor modified by a related language, as in the case of the Scandinavian invasion, but instead a second language was established in the country in use side by side with the native language.
The comparison may be carried further; Scandinavian first came into and influenced chiefly the north and north-east, whereas French was most influential in the south and south-east, a fact which became of increasing importance as a standard English language gradually developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scandinavian modified the existing language through related words and construction, but French introduced entirely new words. Scandinavian made its way into the everyday speech of the people, whereas, although many French words eventually became part of our everyday speech and can hardly be recognized today as foreign loan-words, the French element was in the main composed of words reflecting a high state ,of culture and influenced at first chiefly the language of the upper classes. (J. A. Sheard.)
«... The influence which French exerted on the language is seen in all aspects of life, social, political, and religions, and hardly any walk of live was unaffected by it. Had the Conquest not taken place it may be that English would have developed along entirely different lines, keeping in the main its Germanic characteristics particularly as regards vocabulary, much as the German and Scandinavian languages have' done, and therefore lacking the tremendous number of Roman words which are now an accepted part of our language. It may be interesting to consider the general implication of such a large adoption of French loan words into English.
The first point to be emphasized is that here we are not dealing with completely new ideas introduced from a different type of civilization and culture, jbut rather the imposing by a dominant race of their own terms for ideas which were already familiar to the subject race. Such a state of affairs obviously means that there will arise pairs of words, the native and the foreign term, for the same id ea and a struggle for survival between the two, so that one of the words was eventually lost from the language, or survived only with some differentiation ot meaning.
Let us first take examples of native wor.ds replaced by French words;it is possible to compile a very long list, so here we must confine ourselves to a few, merely by way of illustration «cynecic» was replaced by «royal», «cynestol» by “throne», «cynehelm» by «crown», «dema» was replaced by «judge», «firen» by (Cr j me » «rihtoew» by «justice», «sach» by «such», Much of the loss of Old English vocabulary can be accounted for by the influx of French words for the same or a similar idea in the Middle English period. (/. Sheard).
Thus, due to the great influence of the Roman civilization Latin was for a long time used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse of the Scandinavian tribes was the language of the conquerors (9 — 10—11 centuries). French ( Norman dialect) was the language of the other conquerors who brought with them a lot of new notions of a higher social system, developed fueda-lizm. It was the language of upper classes, of official documents and school(11-14 cent).
These factors are extra-linguistic ones.
The absence of equivalent words in the language to express new subjects or a phenomena makes people to borrow words. For examplethe words football, volleyball, michman in Russian; to economize the linguistic means, i. e. to use a foreign word instead of a long native expressions and others are called linguistic causes.
The closer the two interacting languages are in structure the easier it is for words of one language to penetrate into the other. The fact that Scandinavian borrowings have penetrated into such grammatical classes as prepositions and pro­nouns (they, them, their, both, same, till) can only be attributed to a similarity in the structure of the two languages.
Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech(by immediate contact between the people) and through written speech (by indirect contact through books). Words borrowed orally (inch, mill, street, map) are usually short and they undergo more changes in the act of adopter. Written borrowings (communque, bellas — lettres, naivete, psychology, pagoda etc) are often rather long and they are unknown to many people, speaking English.