7.The origin of the English words: Assimilation of Borrowings.

Assimilation of Borrowings

Assimilation of borrowings is a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical or morphological standards of the receiving lan¬guage and its semantic structure.

Since the process of assimilation of borrowings includes changes in sound-form, morphological structure, grammar characteristics, meaning and usage, three types of assimilation are distinguished: phonetic, gram¬matical and lexical assimilation of borrowed words.

Phonetic assimilation comprises changes in sound form and stress. Sounds that were alien to the English language were fitted into its scheme of sounds. For instance, the long [e] in recent French bor¬rowings are rendered with the help of [ei:] cafe, communiquй, ballet; the consonant combinations pn, ps in the words pneumonia, psychology of Greek origin were simplified into [n] and [s] since pn and ps never occur in the initial position in native English words. In many words (especially borrowed from French and Latin) the accent was gradually transferred to the first syllable: honour, reason began to be stressed like father, brother.

Grammatical assimilation. As a rule, borrowed words lost their former grammatical categories and influence and acquired new grammatical categories and paradigms by analogy with other English words, as for example: the Russian borrowing 'sputnik' acquired the paradigm sputnik, sputnik's, sputniks, sputniks` having lost the inflections it has in the Russian language.

Lexical assimilation. When a word is taken into another language its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great changes. Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one or two of their meanings. For example the word 'cargo' which is highly polysemantic in Spanish, was borrowed only in one meaning - «the goods carried in a ship». In the recipient language a borrowing sometimes acquires new meanings. E.g. the word 'move' in Modern English has developed the meaning of 'propose', 'change one's flat', 'mix with people' and others that the corresponding French word does not possess.

There are other changes in the semantic structure of borrowed words: some meanings become more general, others more specialized, etc. For instance, the word 'umbrella' was borrowed in the meaning of 'sunshade' or ' parasole'(from Latin ' ombrella- ombra-shade').

Among the borrowings in the English word-stock there are words that are easily recognized as foreign (such as decollete, Zeitgeist, graff to and there are others that have become so thoroughly assimilated that it is ex¬tremely difficult to distinguish them from native English words.(There words like street, city, master, river).

Unassimilated words differ from assimilated words in their pronun¬ciation, spelling, semantic structure, frequency and sphere of application. However there is no distinct borderline between the two groups. Neither are there more or less comprehensive criteria for determining the degree of assimilation. Still it is evident that the degree of assimilation depends on the length of the time the word has been used in the receiving language, on its importance and its frequency and the way of borrowing (words borrowed orally are assimilated more completely and rapidly than those adopted through writing). According to the degree of assimilation three groups of borrowings can be suggested: completely assimilated bor¬rowings, partially assimilated borrowings and unassimilated borrow¬ings or barbarisms.

The third group is not universally recognized, the argument being that barbarisms occur in speech only and not enter the language.

I. Completely assimilated words are found in all the layers of older borrowings: the first layer of Latin borrowings (cheese, street, wall, and wing); Scandinavian borrowings (fellow, gate, to call, to die, to take, to

want, happy, ill, low, wrong); early French borrowings (table, chair, finish, matter, dress, large, easy, common, to allow, to carry, to cry, to consider).

The number of completely assimilated words is many times greater than the number of partly assimilated ones. They follow all morphologi¬cal, phonetical and orthographic standards.

II. The partly (partially) assimilated words can be subdivided

into groups:

a). Borrowed words not assimilated phonetically: e.g. machine, cartoon, police (borrowed from French) keep the accent on the final syl¬lable; bourgeois, mйlange contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language and do not occur in native words ([ wa:],the nasalazed [a]);

b). Borrowed words not completely assimilated graphically. This group is fairly large and variegated. These are, for instance, words bor¬rowed from French in which the final consonants are not pronounced: e.g. ballet, buffet, corps. French digraphs (ch, qu, ou, ete) may be re¬tained in spelling: bouquet, brioche.

c). Borrowed words not assimilated grammatically, for example, nouns borrowed from Latin and Greek which keep their original forms: crisis-crises, formula-formulae, phenomenon-phenomena.

d). Borrowed words not assimilated semantically because they de-note objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come: sombrero, shah, sheik, rickchaw, sherbet, etc.

III. The so-called barbarisms are 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

'ciao' ('good-bye'), the French 'affiche' for 'placard', 'carte blanche'

('freedom of action'), 'faux pas' ('false step').