The borrowing process as the reflection of cultural contacts
Contents
Introduction 3
1 The borrowing process as the reflection of cultural contacts 6
1.1 The impact of historical events on the development of English vocabulary 6
1.2 The reason of appearance of borrowed words in English vocabulary 9
1.3 Potential of the borrowings in English language 10
1.4 Classification of borrowings according to the degree of assimilation 11
1.5 Loan words 15
1.6 The role of borrowings in the development of English vocabulary 17
1.7 The contribution of the particular linguistic culture to the forming English vocabulary 18
1.8 Borrowimgs into English from other language 20
1.9 Forms of influence of one language on another Borrowing of vocabulary 25
2 The usage of borrowing at practice 26
2.1 The card index of Greek borrowings 26
2.2 The card-index of Latin Borrowings 30
2.3 The card-index of French borrowings 33
Conclusion 34
Bibliography 36
Introduction
Actuality it of the problem. The given theme of the diploma paper is of current importance, because it deals with the following interesting notions: why there is a language, why people speak in different languages, though the speaker can meet various words from any language in his speech. These words are called borrowings, and the present work will observe how they came into our language. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating internal differences until one parent language splits into daughter languages. This is analogous to a sexual reproduction in biology. Change due to language contact, in this analogy, is skin to the recombination that happens when separate organisms exchange genetic material.” We don’t just borrow on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary” [1;28].Borrowing words from other languages is characteristic of English throughout its history and more than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian and 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. English history is very rich in different types of contacts with other countries, that is why it is very rich in borrowings. The Roman invasion, The adoption of Christianity, 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 is fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar and spelling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.
English continues to take in foreign words, but now the quantity of borrowings is not as abundant as it had been 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:
1 The borrowing process as the reflection of cultural contacts
1.1 The impact of historical events on the development of English vocabulary
Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Contrary to popular opinion, multilingualism has been common throughout much of human history. Even in hunter-gatherer times, to judge by recent parallels, multilingualism was not uncommon, as bands would need to communicative with neighboring peoples, who often spoke different languages. And in-present day areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is much variation in language over even short distances, it is usual for anyone who dealings outside his own town or village to know two or more languages were spoken in a small territory. Thus, language contact is a very common phenomenon in human history, and the world’s present vast linguistic diversity has developed in the presence of this constant contact. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating internal differences until one parent languages splits into daughter languages. This is analogous to asexual reproduction in biology.
1.2 The reason of appearance of borrowed words in English vocabulary
Whenever two idiolects come into contact, one or both may be modified. In face-to-face communication, either speaker may imitate some feature of other’s speech; when the contact is indirect, as in reading, the influence can of course pass only in one direction. The feature which is imitated is called the model; the idiolect (or language) in which the model occurs, or the speaker of eat idiolect is called the donor; the idiolect which acquires something new in the process is the borrowing idiolect. The process itself is called ‘borrowing’, but this requires some cautions. Does not have to be paid back; the donor makes no sacrifice and does not have to be asked for permission. Indeed, nothing changes hands: the donor goes on speaking as before, and only borrower’s speech is altered [13, 805-813]. From this definition, we see that the conditions for borrowing are present constantly, as a natural accompaniment of every use of language except genuine soliloquy. In the contact of idiolects A and B, the changes that borrowing will actually occur depend on several factors, one of which is the unlikely, since neither speakers is apt so divergent that the speakers cannot understand each other, borrowings is equally unlikely. Between the two extremes we fined the situations in which borrowing is more probably. In practice, these situations can be classed roughly into two types. In one type, the two idiolects share a common core; under these conditions we speak of dialect borrowings. In the other, there is no common core but rather some degree of bilingualism or semi-bilingualism; in this case we speak of language borrowing. The mere contact of idiolects A and B does not guarantee that one will borrow from the other. For borrowing to occur, say from B to A, two conditions must be met: The speaker of A must understand, or think he understands, the particular utterance in idiolect B which contains the model. The speaker of A must have some motive, overt or convert, for the borrowings.
1.3 Potential of the borrowings in English language
The vocabulary of politics continues to grow. The following words were added to it in the 18th century: minister, ambassador (in literature first used in 1709), ministry, Premier, Prime Minister, party (with the word used in its present meaning). Administration, budget, estimates also appear at this time. At the end of 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century some of the vocabulary of the French Revolution entered the English language, for example, aristocrat, democrat and the old word despot acquired its present meaning; despotism was enlarged from ‘the rule of a despot’ to mean any arbitrary rule of unlimited power. Among other words should be mentioned royalism, revolutionary, revolutionize, conscription. Section, in its geographical use, and the 19th century word sectional, are derived from the division of France into ekectoral sections under the Directorate.
1.4 Classification of borrowings according to the degree of assimilation
The degree of assimilation of borrowings depends on the following factors: a) from what group of languages to which the borrowing language belongs it is assimilated easier, b) in what way the word is borrowed: orally or in the written form, words borrowed orally assimilated quicker;, с) how often the borrowing is used in the language, the greater the frequency of its usage, the quicker it is assimilated, d) how long the word lives in the language, the longer it lives, more than assimilated it- is. Accordingly borrowings are subdivided into: completely assimilated, partly assimilated and non-assimilated (barbarisms) [17, 368-372] Completely assimilated borrowings are not as foreign words in language , the French word ‘sport’ and the native word ’start’. Completely assimilated verbs belong to regular verbs, for example correct-corrected. Completely assimilated nouns form their plural by means of s-inflection, for example gate-gates. In completely assimilated French words the stress has been shifted from the last syllable to the last but one. Semantic assimilation of borrowed words depends on the words existing in the borrowing language, if it is polysemantic, for example the Russian borrowing ‘sputnik’ is used in English only in one of its meaning. Partly assimilated borrowings are subdivided into the following groups:
1.5 Loan words
Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language. The main story: some speakers know both languages and find it useful to borrow a word from the source language, perhaps to refer to something being introduced from the source culture (e.g. espresso), and if this repeated enough times the word enters the language and is available for all speakers. In some cases the word may always stand out (e.g., shampoo) and may cause some people to wonder how such a word came into the language [23, 326-336] The word ‘loanword’ is in fact a type of loanword itself. The word comes from the German word ‘lehwort’, which means precisely loanword. In this case, the meaning of the word has been borrowed into the English equivalents are used. A loanword can also be called a borrowing. The noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language. ‘Loan’ and ‘borrowing’ are of course metaphors, because there is no literal lending process. There is no transfer from one language to another, and no ‘returning’ words to the source language. The words simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one these words originated in. Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities.
1.6 The role of borrowings in the development of English vocabulary
Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers –the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words. In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions[25; 398-412]. Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language. In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a through etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language and the role played by themis determined by the historical development of the nation speaking the language.
1.7 The contribution of the particular linguistic culture to the forming English vocabulary
An important distinctive feature which has not been discussed so far in this paper is that of origin. According to this feature the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed. A native word is 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 aword taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language. The native words are further subdivided by diachronic linguistic into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin. The words haing cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer[26’ 145-152]. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother.
1.8 Borrowimgs into English from other language
Borrowings from Scandinavian languageBy the end of the Old English period English underwent a strong influence of Scandinavian due to the Scandinavian Conquest of British Isles. Scandinavians belonged to the same group of peoples as Englishmen and their languages had much in common. As the result of this conquest there are about 700 borrowings from Scandinavian into English. The English and Scandinavian belong to the same Germanic racial, cultural and linguistic stock features and words. But changes had occurred in the languages during the couple of centuries of separation of the two sets of people. The Scandinavians came to settle, rather than conquer or pillage. They lived alongside the Anglo-Saxons on more or less equal terms. Under the Norman French, particularly, the two different groups fashioned a common life together as subjects. Under these conditions:
1.9 Forms of influence of one language on another Borrowing of vocabulary
The most common way that languages influence each other is exchange of words. Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of English words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, nor is it even very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from Latin , French and other languages into English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was more significant .Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognizable. Armenian borrowed so many words from Iranian languages, for example, that it was at first considered a branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades[33,314-458However, when language shift occurs, the language that s replaced (known as the substratum)can leave a profound impression on the replacing language (known as a superstratum), when people retain features of the substratum as they learn new language and pass these features on to their children, leading to the development of a new variety [34,94-152]. For example, the Latin that came to replace local languages in present-day France during Roman times was influenced by Gaulish and Germanic. The distinct pronunciation of the dialect of English spoken in Ireland comes from the influence of substratum of Irish.
2 The usage of borrowing at practice
2.1 The card index of Greek borrowings
In the order to examine the words in ‘God save the Queen’, an etymological dictionary will be needed. Such a dictionary does not explain what a certain word means, but instead it gives information on what the word meant years ago, where its origin lies and how it came into the language. I will not focus on the semantic change of the words, and neither will look at where a word originally comes from andtherefore not trace the word back to its ultimate origin. I will focus on finding out which words are borrowings and which languages the words to English. For this paper I will be using the Online Etymology Dictionary. I began the analysis by categorizing the words in their word classes. Grammarians and linguists are not in agreement on how many word classes there are, and how words are supposed to be classeified. Some believe that there are only seven word classes while others suggest as many as twenty. For this, I have decided to to choose a categorization that only has eight word classes in order to simplify the analysis. These major word classes are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, articles, and interjections.
2.2 The card-index of Latin Borrowings
Latin, being the language of the Roman Empire, had already influenced the language of the Germanic tribes even before they set foot in Britain. Latin loanwords reflected the superior material culture of the Roman Empire, which had spread across Europe: street, wall, candle, chalk, inch, pound, port, camp. Latin was also the language of Christianity, and St. Augustine arrived in Britain in A.D 597 to christianise the nation. Terms in religion were borrowed: pope, bishop, monk, nun, cleric, demon, disciple, mass, priest, shrine. Christianity also brought with it learning: circul, not (note), paper, scol (school), epistol. Many Latin borrowings came in the early MnE period. Sometimes, it is difficult to say whether the loanwords were direct borrowings from Latin or had come in through French (because, after all, Latin was also the language of learning among the French). One great motivation for the borrowings was the change in social order, where scientific and philosophical empiricism was the beginning to be valued. Many of the new words are academic in nature therefore: affidavit, apparatus, caveat, corpuscle, compendium, equilibrium, equinox, formula, inertia, incubate, momentum, molecule, pendulum, premium, stimulus, subtract, vaccinate, vacuum. This resulted in the distinction between learned and popular vocabulary in English. The Roman conquest and Latin borrowings.
2.3 The card-index of French borrowings
Along with the other major languages of Western Europe, both English and French are descendants of proto-Indo-European. English is a Teutonic language, derivative of proto-Germanic (along with Dutch, Yiddish and German); French is a Romance language, derivative of proto-Italic via Latin (along with Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian).
Conclusion
Many linguists consider foreign influence plays the most important role in the history of the English language. But the grammar and phonetic system are very stable (unchangeable ) and are not often influenced by other languages. Besides when we speak about the role of native and borrowed words in the English language we must not take into consideration only the number of them gut their semantic, stylistic character, their word-building ability, frequency value, collocability (valency) and the productivity of their word-building patterns. If we approach to the study of the role of native and borrowed words from this point of view we see, though the native words are not numerous they play an important role in the English language. They have high frequency value, great word-forming power, wide collocability, many meanings and they are stylistically neutral. Almost all words of native origin belong to very important semantic groups.