9

Etymological Characteristic of the ModE Vocabulary

1. The notion of etymology.

2. The etymological background of the English vocabulary.

The term “etymology” means the origin of words. As to their origin words are subdivided into elements of native origin and borrowed elements.

A borrowed word is a word taken from another language and modified in phonetic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

A native word is one that belongs to the original English stock, as known from the earliest available manuscript of the OE period.

Native words:

The native words are further subdivided into words of the:

1. Indo-European stock

2. Common Germanic origin

The words having the cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find:

 terms of kinship: father, mother, daughter, brother, son

 words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, wind, hill, water, wood, tree, stone

 names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf

 parts of the human body: arm, ear, eye, foot, heart

 some frequent verbs: bear, come, sit, stand

 the adjectives of this group denote concrete physical properties: hard, quick, slow, red, white

 most numerals belong here

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic etc., but none in Russian or French.

It contains a great number of semantic groups. These words may serve as an illustration: winter, storm, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope; adjectives: broad, dead, deaf, deep.

Many adverbs and pronouns belong to this layer. Together with the words of Indo-European stock these common Germanic words form the bulk of the most frequently used words in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the most frequent words listed by Thorndile and Gorge.

Words of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by:

1. A wide range of lexical and grammatical valency

2. High frequency value

3. Developed polysemy

4. They are often monosyllabic

5. They show great word-building power

6. They enter a number of set-expressions

Let’s take the word “watch”, which is one of the 500 most frequent words. It may be used as a verb in more than 10 different sentence patterns. Thus its valency is the highest.

e.g. Are you going to play or to watch?

He was watching the crowd go by.

Watch me carefully.

He was watching for the man to leave the house.

The man is being watched by the police.

“watch” is in the centre of a numerous word family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness.

Borrowed words

English history is famous for all sorts of contacts with other countries and the English vocabulary is responsive to every change in the life of the speaking community.

The source, the scope and the semantic sphere of loan words are all dependent upon historical factors. It has been estimated that the English vocabulary consists of borrowed words (up to 70%). Only 30% of the words are native. It’s due to specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman Conquests, British colonialism and imperialism caused important changes in the vocabulary.

The term source of borrowing should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. Origin of borrowing refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus paper < Fr. papier < Lat. papyrus < Gr. papyros has French as its source and Greek as its origin.

Alongside loan words proper we distinguish translation loans and semantic borrowings. Translation loans are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in the language, but according to the patterns taken from another language, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme translation.

e.g. swan song from Germ. swanen gesung

masterpiece – meisterstuck

surplus value – mehrwehrt

a populist – народник

a collective farm – колхоз

a state farm – совхоз

The term semantic loan is used to denote the development in an English word of a new meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language.

The English word “pioneer” meant “explorer” and one who is the first. Now under the influence of the Russian word “пионер” it has come to mean “a member of the Young Pioneer Organization”.

“Dwell” – “to wander about” ( under the influence of Scandinavian - “to live”).

The number of loan words in English is very high. That’s why the mixed character of the English vocabulary cannot be denied. But the leading role in the history of this vocabulary belongs to word-formation and semantic changes which are genuinely English. This system absorbed and remade the vast majority of loan words according to its own standards so that it is sometimes difficult to tell an old borrowing from a native word.

e.g. cheese, street, wall, wine belong to the earliest Latin borrowings.

But some borrowings still retain some peculiarities in pronunciation, spelling and morphology. Thus the initial position of the sounds [v], [G], [Z] is a sign that the word is not of native stock.

e.g. vacuum (Lat.), valley (Fr.)

The initial [Z] occurs in comparatively late borrowings.

e.g. genre (Fr.)

The letters j, x, z in initial position and in combinations as ph, kh, eau in the root indicate the foreign origin of the word.

e.g. philosophy (Gr.), physics (Gr.), khaki (Ind.), beau (Fr.)

x is pronounced [ks] in words of native origin and [gz] in words of Latin origin.

e.g. six, exist

ch is pronounced [C] in native words and early borrowings; [S] – in late French borrowings; [k] – in words of Greek origin.

e.g. child, chair; machine, parachute; echo, epoch, chemist.

There are some suffixes and prefixes that show that the word is borrowed.

e.g. concentrate, disagree

L.Bloomfield points out that English possesses a great mass of words (he calls them foreign-learned words) with a separate pattern of derivation. Their chief characteristic is the use of certain suffixes and combinations of suffixes: ability, education. Another feature of these words is the presence of certain phonemic alterations.

e.g. receive – reception; provide – provision.