The etymology of english words

Etymology (from Greek etymon "truth" + logos "learning") is a branch of linguistics that studies the origin and history of words tracing them to their earliest determinable source.

English is generally regarded as the richest of the world's languages. English owes its exceptionally large vocabulary to its ability to borrow and absorb words from outside.

e.g. atomic, cybernetics, jeans, khaki, sputnik, perestroika are just a few of the many words that have come into use during XX century. They have been taken from Italian, Hindi, Greek and Russian.

Before giving the description of the English word stock let’s make some special mention of some terms.

In linguistic literature the term ‘native’ is conventionally used to denote words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles from the continent in the 5^th century by Germanic tribes – the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Practically, however, the term is often applied to words whose origin cannot be traced to any other language. Thus, the word path – тропа, дорожка, is classified as native just because its origin has not yet been established with any degree of certainty. Professor A.I.Smirnitsky relying on the earliest manuscripts of the English language suggested another interpretation of the term native – as words which may be presumed to have existed in the English word-stock of the 7^th century. This interpretation may have somewhat more reliable criteria behind it, but it seems to have the same drawback – both viewpoints present the native element in English as static.

The term ‘borrowing’ is used in linguistics to denote the process of adopting words from other languages and also the result of this process in the language material itself. The English vocabulary has been enriched throughout its history by borrowings from foreign languages. A borrowing (a loan word) 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.

The process of borrowing words from other languages has been going on for more than 1,000 years. The fact that up to 70--80 per cent of the English vocabulary consists of borrowed words is due to the specific conditions of the English language development. When the Normans crossed over from France to conquer England in 1066, most of the English people spoke Old English, or Anglo- Saxon — a language of about 30,000 words. The Normans spoke a language that was a mixture of Latin and French. It took about three centuries for the languages to blend into one that is the ancestor of the English is spoken today. Latin and Greek have been a fruitful source of vocabulary since the 16^th century. The Latin word mini, its converse maxi and the Greek word micro have become popular adjectives to describe everything from bikes to fashion.

There are practically no limits to the kinds of words that are borrowed. Words are employed as symbols for every part of culture. When cultural elements are borrowed from one culture by another, the words for such cultural features often accompany the feature. Also, when a cultural feature of one society is like that of another, the word of a foreign language may be used to designate this feature in the borrowing society.

Such words become completely absorbed into the system, so that they are not recognized by speakers of the language as foreign.

We may distinguish different types of borrowing from one foreign language by another:

1. when the two languages represent different social, economic, and political units;

2. when the two languages are spoken by those within the same social, economic, and political unit.

The first of these types has been usually called "cultural bor­rowing" while the second type has been termed "intimate borrowing". Another principal type is between dialects of the same language. This is called

3. "dialect borrowing".

Sometimes the idea of a word rather than the word is borrowed. When we talk about life science instead of biology, it is a type of borrowing the meaning of the Greek derivative, but not the actual morpheme. This type of borrowing is rather extensive, particularly in scientific vo­cabulary and trade languages.

There are many words that have changed their meaning in English, e.g. mind originally meant "memory", and this meaning survives in the phrases "to keep in mind", "time out of mind", etc. The word brown preserves its old meaning of "gloomy" in the phrase "in a brown study". There are instances when a word acquires a meaning opposite to its original one, e.g. nice meant "silly" some hundreds of years ago.

Thus, there are two main problems connected with the vocabulary of a language: (1) the origin of the words,

(2) their development in the language.

The etymological structure of the English vocabulary consists of the native element and the borrowed elements.

Words of Native Origin

Diachronically native words are subdivided into three main groups.

1. Words of the Indo-European origin. Indo-European elements are meant words of roots common to all or most languages of the Indo-European group. English words of this group denote elementary concepts without which no human communication would be possible and express the most vital, important and frequently used concepts. The following semantic groups can be identified:

- family relations (kinship terms), e.g. father, mother, son, daughter, brother;

• words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature, e.g. sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone;

• names of animals and plants, e.g. goose, wolf, cow, swine, corn, tree, birch;

• words denoting parts of the human body, e.g. ear, tooth, eye, foot, heart, lip; nose, lip;

• words naming concrete physical properties and qualities (including some adjectives denoting colour), e.g. hard, quick, slow, red, white, new;

• numerals from one to a hundred, e.g. one, two, twenty, eighty;

—- pronouns' (personal, demonstrative, interrogative), e.g. /, you, he, my, that, who;(except the personal pronoun they which is a Scandinavian borrowing)

—some of the most frequent verbs, e.g. hear, do, be, sit, eat, know, stand and others.

2. Words of Common Germanic origin.

The Common Germanic stock includes words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch,Icelandic.

It contains a great number of semantic groups some of which are the same as in the Indo-European group of native words:

• nouns denoting parts of the human body, e.g. head, hand, arm, bone, finger;

• nouns denoting periods of time (seasons of the year), e.g. summer, winter, spring, time, week; (autumn is a French borrowing).

• words naming natural phenomena, e.g. storm, rain, flood, ice, ground, sea, frost, earth;

• words denoting artefacts and materials, (human dwellings and furniture) e.g. bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth;

• words naming different kinds of garment, e.g. hat, shirt, shoe;

• words denoting abstract notions, e.g. care, evil, hope, life, need;

• names of animals, birds and plants, e.g. sheep, horse, fox, crow, bear, fox, calf, oak, grass;

• landscape features, e.g. sea, land;

• various notional verbs, e.g. bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make. meet, rise, see, send, speak, tell, say, answer, give, drink, shoot;

• adjectives, denoting colours, size and other properties, e.g. broad, dead, deaf, deep. grey, green, white, blue, small, thick, high, old, good;

• adverbs, e.g. down, out, before.

3. English words proper

Engluish words proper do not have cognates in other languages. These words are few and stand quite alone in the vocabulary system of Indo-European languages, e.g. bird, boy, girl, lord, lady.

Native words for the most part are characterized by:

1. a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency and high frequency value (e.g. the verb watch (from OE wseccan) can be used in different sentence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and can be combined with different classes of words:

Do you mind if I watch?

Harriet watched him with interest.

She's a student and has to watch her budget closely. American companies are watching Japanese developments closely.

I feel like I’т being watched;

2. a developed polysemy (e.g. the noun watch has the following meanings: 'a small clock to be worn, especially, on the wrist, or carried'; 'the act of watching'; 'a person or people ordered to watch a place or a person'; 'a fixed period of duty on a ship, usually lasting four hours'; 'a film or programme considered in terms of its appeal to the public'; etc.);

3) a great word-building power (e.g. watch is the center of a numerous word-family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness, watchword, watchable, watchfire, etc.);

4) the capacity of forming phraseological units (e.g. watch enters the structure and forms the semantics of the following phraseological units: to be on the watch, to keep watch, to watch one's back, to watch one's step).