35) The way borrowed words adopt themselves in the recipient language.

Most words when they migrate from one language into another adjust themselves to their new environment and get adapted to the norms of the recipient language. They undergo a number of changes that lead to assimilation. Sometimes assimilation is so strong, that a foreign origin of word is unrecognizable. For example – “dinner”, “cat”, ‘cup’, “to take” and others bear traces of their foreign background. Words “skin”, ‘sky’ and the others are Scandinavian, the words ‘police’ and ‘regime’ are French. We still feel it because the stress is syllabic. In general, borrowed words are adjusted phonetically, grammatically and semantically. Many Norman borrowings have been fully adapted to the phonetic system of the English language. Such words as ‘table’, ‘plate’, ‘courage’ carry no phonetic traces of their phonetic origin. Some of the latter borrowings, still sound French – coffee, ballet, matinee. In these words phonetic adaptation isn’t completed. Grammatical adaptation consists in a complete change of the system of the grammatical forms, peculiar to it as a part of speech. Nouns have declensions and verbs are conjugated according to the rules of the recipient language.

But some words adapt partially or don’t adapt at all. To Renaissance borrowings which didn’t adapt grammatically, we refer the following words: datum (data in plural), phenomenon (phenomena in plural), criterion (criteria in plural). But earlier Latin borrowings such as ‘cup’, ‘plum’, ‘street’, ‘wall’ were fully adapted to the grammatical system of the language long ago. The adjective ‘gay’ was borrowed from French in several meanings at once. – noble of birth, bright and shining and multicolored. Rather soon it developed a new meaning – ‘joyful, high-spirited’ and become a synonym of the native word ‘merry’.

36) The principle productive ways of word-building in the English language

Word-building is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary. There are four main ways of word-building in modern English: affixation, composition, conversion, contraction. There are also secondary ways of word-building: sound interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation.

Words are divisible into smaller units which are called morphemes. Morphemes do not occur as free forms but only as constituents of words. Yet they possess meanings of their own. All morphemes are subdivided into two large classes: roots (or radicals) and affixes. The latter, in their turn, fall into prefixes which precede the root in the structure of the word (as in re-read, mis-pronounce, unwell) and suffixes which follow the root (as in teach-er, cur-able, dict-ate).

Words which consist of a root and an affix (or several affixes) are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation (or derivation).Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary. Successfully competing with this structural type is the so-called root word which has only a root morpheme in its structure. This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or to earlier borrowings (house, room, book, work, port, street, table, etc.), and, in Modern English, has been greatly enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (e. g. to hand, v. formed from the noun hand; to can, v. from can, п.; to pale, v. from pale, adj.; a find, n. from to find, v.; etc.).Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consist-ing of two or more stems1 (e. g. dining-room, bluebell, mother-in-law, good-for-nothing). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called composition.

The somewhat odd-looking words like flu, pram, lab, M. P., V-day, H-bomb are called shortenings, contractions or curtailed words and are produced by the way of word-building called shortening (contraction).