54. Archaisms. Neologisms. The classification of words according to time.

54.1. Archaisms are words and phrases that have fallen out of general use but are used for special effect, normally in literature. These vary in effect from the gently old-fashioned or jocular

Archaisms are most frequently encountered in poetry, law, science, technology, geography and ritual writing and speech. Their deliberate use can be subdivided into literary archaisms, which seeks to evoke the style of older speech and writing; and lexical archaisms, the use of words no longer in common use.

Examples (ЧТО БЫ ВАМ БЫЛО ПОНЯТНО, ЕСЛИ ЕГО УСТНО БУДЕМ ПЕРЕССКАЗЫВАТЬ.)

A type of archaism is using an older version of you: thou. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative), and the possessive is thy orthine.

"Though thou hast ever so many counsellors, yet ["yet" is generally not an archaism, but it is in this context] do not forsake the counsel of thy own soul." English proverb

"Today me, tomorrow thee."English proverb

The meaning of this proverb is that something that happens to a person, is likely to happen later to another who observes it, especially if the two people are similar.

"To thine own self be true."William Shakespeare

The meaning of this saying is simply that it is unwise to lie to yourself.

54.2. A neologism (pron.: /niːˈɒlədʒɪzəm/; from Greek νέο- (néo-), meaning "new", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "speech, utterance") is a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event. Νεολεξία(Greek: a "new word", or the act of creating a new word) is a synonym for it. The term neologism is first attested in English in 1772, borrowed from French néologisme (1734)

54.3. Four classification of words in point of time

new words

current words

archaic words

absolete words

55. Minor types of word formation

1) Shortening is the process and the result of forming a word out of the initial elements (letters, morphemes) of a word combination.

Shortenings are produced in 2 ways:

To make a new word from a syllable (rarer two) of the original words. The latter may lose it’s beginning (telephone – phone, defence - fence), it’s ending (holidays – hols, advertisement- ad), or both the beginning and the ending (influenza – flu, refrigerator - fridge)

To make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U.N.O – United Nation Organization, B.B.C. and etc.

2) Blending is the process of combining parts of two words to form one word. Blends (blended words, blendings, fusions) are formations, that combine 2 words, and include and include the letters or sounds, they have in common as a connecting element.

E.g. Smog=smoke + fog

3) Sound-imitation is formation of words from sounds that resemble those associated with the object or action to be named or that seem suggestive of its qualities.

The words of this group are made by imitating different types of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, human beings and inanimate objects. Sounds produced by the same kind of animals are frequently represented by different sound groups in different language:

The sound of the verbs to rush, to dash, to flash, may be said to reflect the brevity, swiftness and energetic nature of their corresponding actions.

4) In Reduplications new words are made up by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in buy-buy or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as inping-pong, chit-chat (the second type is called gradational reduplication).

5) Back-formation is the derivation of new words by subtracting a real or supposed affix from existing words through misinterpretation of their structure. In these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix “-er”. In the case of the verb to beg and to burgle the process was reversed: instead of a noun made from a verb by affixation (as in painter from to paint), a verb was produced from a noun by subtraction.

6) Sound-interchange is a change of a phoneme in a morpheme resulting in a new lexical meaning. The process is not active in the language at present.

E.g. Song – to sing, food – feed.

7) Some homographic, and mostly disyllabic nouns and verbs of Romanic origin have adistinctive stress pattern. The stress distinction is neither productive nor regular.

E.g. ’Conduct (n) (behavior) – con’duct (v) (to lead or guide in a formal way).