Classification of borrowings according to the degree of assimilation

/The term assimilation of borrowing is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the English language and its semantic system/

The degree of assimilation of borrowings depends on the following factors:

a) from what group of languages the word was borrowed, if the word belongs to the same 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 are assimilated quicker,

c) 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, the more assimilated it is.

Accordingly borrowings are subdivided into: completely assimilated, partly assimilated and non-assimilated (barbarisms).

I. Completely assimilated borrowed words follow all morphological, phonetical and orthographic standards. They take an active part in word-formation. The morphological structure and motivation of completely assimilated borrowings remain usually transparent, so that they are morphologically analyzable and therefore supply the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in series of borrowed words that contain them (e.g. the French suffixes -age, -ance and –ment).

Completely assimilated words are found in all the layers of older borrowings, e.g. cheese (the word of the first layer of Latin borrowings), husband (Scand), face (Fr), animal (the Latin word borrowed during the Revival of Learning - R.of L.Возрождение, Ренессанс /о литературе/).

It is important to mention that a loan word never brings into the receiving language the whole of its semantic structure if it is polysemantic in the original language. And even the borrowed variants may change and become specialized in the new system. For example, the word sport had a much wider scope in Old French denoting pleasures, making merry and entertainments in general. Being borrowed into Middle English in this character, it gradually acquired the meaning of outdoor games and exercise. Russian borrowing sputnik is used in English only in one of its meanings.

II. Partially assimilated borrowed words may be subdivided into the following groups:

a) borrowings non-assimilated semantically, because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from the language of which they were borrowed, e.g. sari, sombrero, toreador, shah, pilau, taiga, kvass etc.

b) borrowings non-assimilated grammatically, e.g.nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek have kept their original plural forms: crisis – crises, phenomenon – phenomen, datum – data etc.,

c) borrowings non-assimilated phonetically. Here belong words with the initial sounds /v/ and /z/, e.g. voice, zero. In native words these voiced consonants are used only in the intervocal position as allophones of sounds /f/ and /s/ (loss-lose, life-live). Some Scandinavian borrowings have consonants and combinations of consonants which were not palatalized, e.g. /sk/ in the words: sky, skate, ski etc. ( in native words we have the palatalized sounds denoted by the digraph /sh/, e.g.shirt); sounds /k/ and /g/ before front vowels are not palatalized e.g. girl, get, give, kid, kill, kettle. In native words we have palatalization, e.g. German, child.

Some French borrowings have retained their stress on the last syllable, e.g. police, machine, cartoon. Some French borrowings retain special combinations of sounds, e.g. /a:/ in the words: camouflage, bourgeois, some of them retain the combination of sounds /wa:/ in the words: memoir, boulevard; d) borrowings can be partly assimilated graphically, e.g. in Greak borrowings /y/ can be spelled in the middle of the word (symbol, synonym). /ph/ denotes the sound /f/ (phoneme, morpheme), /ch/ denotes the sound /k/ (chemistry, chaos), /ps/ denotes the sound /s/ (psychology). French borrowings that came into English after 1650 retain spelling in which the final consonant is not pronounced: ballet, buffet. Some may keep a diacritic mark: cafe`, cliche`. Specifically French digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.)may be retained in spelling: bouquet, brioche.

III. Unassimilated borrowing or barbarisms

This group includes words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents, e.g. Italian addio, ciao – ‘good-bye’.

The changes a borrowed word has had to undergo depending on the date of its penetration are the main cause for the existence of the so-called etymological doublets. Etymological doublets are two or more words originating from the same etymological source, bur differing in phonetic shape and meaning. For example, the words whole (originally meant ‘healthy’, ‘free from disease’) and hale both come from OE hal: one by the normal development of OE a into o, the other from a northern dialect in which this modification did not take place. Only the latter /hale/ has survived in its original meaning.