The etymology of english words

Words of native origin

For its most part WNO consist of very ancient elements – Indo-European, Germanic and West Germanic cognates.
Almost all words of Anglo-Saxon origin belong to very important semantic groups. They include most of the auxiliary and modal verbs (as shall, will, must, can, may, etc.), pronouns (I, you, he, my, his, who, etc.), prepositions (in, out, on, under, etc.), numerals (one, two, three, four, etc.) and conjunctions (and, but, till, as, etc.). Notional words of Anglo-Saxon origin include such word denoting parts of a human body (head, hand, foot, eyes, etc.), members of a family (mother, farther, brother, sister, son, etc.), natural phenomena and space objects (snow, rain, wind, sun, etc.), animals (horse, cow, sheep, cat, etc.), qualities and properties (old, young, cold, hot, light, dark, etc.).
Here we can mention that some of these words that have common Germanic features as the words of the modern German Language – eins, drei, fier, sechs, sieben, Ich, mein, konnen, unter, Mutter, Bruder, Swister, etc.
Most words of native origin have their great derivational potential and make up large clusters (groups) of derived and compound words in the present-day language. E.g. the word “wood” is the basis of the following words as wooden, woody, wooded, woodcraft, woodcutter, and many others. Thus, the most of Anglo-Saxon words are root-words in the process of new words formation.
During its 15 century long history the written English language has so many borrowed words from different languages which were in close contact for that period.
The most numerous and important groups of borrowings in English are formed by Latin borrowings, Scandinavian borrowings and French borrowings. Celtic borrowings are of primary historical importance for the English language. There are also borrowings from Greek, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and other languages.
Translation loans are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in the language but according to the patterns taken from another language by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme or word-for-word translation, e.g. wall-newspaper.
Semantic borrowing is the expansion of the semantic structure of a word under the influence of a correlated foreign one.
Assimilation is a process of partial or total conformation of a borrowed word to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the receiving language and its lexico-semantic system. Types of assimilation: phonetical, grammatical, lexical, graphic. According to the degree of assimilation borrowings may be subdivided into completely assimilated, partially assimilated and unassimilated loan words (barbarisms).
The change or the corruption of a borrowed word on the basis of fancied analogy with some well-known word or phrase is called folk or false etymology: Fr cotelette > cutlet.
International words are words borrowed from one language into several others simultaneously or at short intervals one after another, e.g. student, balalaika.
Etymological doublets are two or more words of the same language derived originally from the same root but having entered the vocabulary at different periods of time or from different sources, e.g. price – prize – praise.
You can consider the following English words originated from some other languages:
Latin: tabula (table), strata (street), port, wall, alibi, memorandum, vaccine
French: giant, vase, restaurant, zero, empire, state, bureau
Italian: volcano, violoncello, solo, duet, trio, quartet
German: waltz, zinc, iceberg, lobby, rucksack, Kindergarten
Greek: schole (school), kaio (ink), neurosis (nerve), architect,
Hindi: jungle, samosa,
Chinese: Catsup (Ketchup), Feng shui, Kung fu, Nunchaku, soy
Russian: taiga, tundra, steppe, Duma, Komsomol, perestroika
Arabic: algebra, azimuth, caliber, candy, carat, cipher, mohair, safari
The degree of borrowed words assimilation depends on the time of borrowings, the extent to which the word is used in the language and the way of borrowing.

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