Филология ф акультеті «Ағылшын филологиясы» кафедрасы

Lecture 2. Тhе Еtіmо1оgу of English words.

English history is very rich in different types of contacts with other countries, that is why it is very rich in borrowings. Borrowing words from other languages is characteristic of English throughout its history More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms. It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

The Roman invasion, the adoption of Cristianity, Scandinavian and Norman conquests of the British Isles, the development of British colonialism and trade and cultural relations served to increase immensely the English vocabulary. The majority of these borrowings are fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar, spelling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.

English continues to take in foreign words, but now the quantity of borrowings is not so abundant as it was before. All the more so, English now has become a «giving» language, it has become Lingva franca of the twentieth century.
Borrowings can be classified according to different criteria:
a) according to the aspect which is borrowed,
b) according to the degree of assimilation,
c) according to the language from which the word was borrowed.

It is known that the word-stock of the English language is one of the most extendible among other world languages. Each time there appeared a majority new words and word combination enriching the English vocabulary. The process of neologisms depends on various factors, as we had mentioned before – of an inner linguistic rules, and extralinguistic factors.

However, the English word-stock contains an immense number of words of foreign origin. Due to results of some investigators, there is only 30% of the English word-stock has its native English origin and its 70% is borrowed words and word combinations. The term “borrowing” is used in linguistics to denote the process of adopting words from other languages and also the result of this process, the language material itself.
The English word-stock was being compiled for a long time since the very early periods of its beginning up to nowadays. We should consider the native English word as of the Anglo-Saxon origin and loan ones from the 1^st, 5^th and 7^th centuries.
As the first borrowings come to the English language from written manuscripts were the Latin scholastic notions; other ones as French origin - during the Norman invasion; and others are Old Norse (as Scandinavian ones). There is a postulate: when two or more nations are close to each other their languages come to so-called interrelation. There one can see the process of adoption of words by one people from their neighbors. As long these nations coexist side by side for so many words and phrases of their languages will insert each other on a mutual base.