2.3 The comparative analysis of process of loan in English and Ukrainian languages

Due to that fact, that Ukrainian is a Slavic language and English is an Indo-European language that was first spoken in early medieval England, these two languages have big differences. In my work I investigated the borrowings in these both languages. And now I can show the differences of borrowings in these languages.

Being a Slavic language, Ukrainian has a mutual intelligibility with some of them. Within Slavic, the Ukrainian language is considered to be the most closely related to Belarusian. Daco-Romanian and Hungarian language being non-Slavic languages also share the nonnegligible amount of vocabulary with Slavic languages and therefore with Ukrainian too.

In the 19th century the question of whether Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian languages are the dialects of a single language or three separate languages was actively discussed and wasn't entirely decided by linguistic factors alone. The political situation (Ukraine and Belarus being mainly part of the Russian Empire at the time) and the historical existence of the medieval state of Kyivan Rus, which occupied large parts of these three nations, led to the creation of the common classification known later as the East Slavic languages. The underlying theory of the East Slavic group of languages is their descent from a common ancestor. Nowadays Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are usually listed by linguists as separate languages. But we can say that these languages are really related. And I show the statistics.

Shared vocabulary with Ukrainian

Language	Common Vocabulary
Belarusian	84%
Polish	70%
Serbian	68%
Slovak	66%
Russian	62%
Hungarian	10%

Among 82 distinct phonetic and grammatical features of the Ukrainian language it shares with other Slavic languages:

Language	Features in common
Belarusian	29
Upper Sorbian	29
Lower Sorbian	27
Czech	23
Slovak	23
Polish	22
Bulgarian	21
Croatian	21
Serbian	20
Macedonian	20
Polabian	19
Slovene	18
Russian	11

If you already know another Slavonic language, and know the main differences between the ways words developed from their Old Slavonic roots into modern Polish, Slovak, Russian, Bulgarian etc., you can work out the meanings of many common words, for example, if you remember that the «ві-» (or «во-») beginnings of many Ukrainian words of Slavonic origin translate into “o” in quite a few of their equivalents in other languages. And now we can see some examples of related words in different Slavic languages. In the last colon there are the same words, which are in the first four colons, but in English. So in such a way we can compare the Ukrainian words, that are borrowed from the other Slavic languages and these words in English.

Ukrainian	Polish	Russian	Slovak	English
Він	on	Он	on	he
Вікно	okno	Окно	okno	window
Від	od	От	od	from
відповідати	odpowiadać	Отвечать	odpovedat′	reply
вогонь	ogień	Огонь	oheň	fire
Вісім	osiem	Восемь	osem	eight

And we see that the differences are evident.

Also I found that the words in a family of languages e.g. French, Italian, Spanish (the Romance languages) have developed from an earlier language, in this case, Latin; if you already know one of those languages, it should be easier to recognize some words in a related language.

Many basic Ukrainian words have a lot in common with words in other European (and, sometimes non-European) languages, because they have developed from one or more early “protolanguages”.

English has gone through many periods in which large numbers of words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the 8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman Conquest brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.

It is part of the cultural history of English speakers that they have always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they have come in contact with. There have been few periods when borrowing became unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in Britain, the U.S., or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.

There are 5 periods:

• Germanic period or Pre-Old English

• Old English Period (600-1100)

• Middle English Period (1100-1500)

• Early Modern English Period (1500-1650)

• Present-Day English (1650-present)

The following list is a small sampling of the loanwords that came into English in different periods and from different languages.

1. Germanic period or Pre-Old English

It can be deduced that these borrowings date from the time before the Angles and Saxons left the continent for England, because of very similar forms found in the other old Germanic languages (Old High German, Old Saxon, etc.). The source words are generally attested in Latin texts, in the large body of Latin writings that were preserved through the ages.

Old High German, Old Saxon, etc.	English(nowadays)
Butere	butter
ceas	cheese
cycene	kitchen
straet	Street
piper	pepper

2. Old English Period

   Latin		Celtic
   ceaster	City		Brocc	badger
   Paper	Paper		Cumb	Combe
   Circul	Circle		Cumb	valley

3. Middle English Period (1100-1500)

Most of these first appeared in the written language in Middle English; but many were no doubt borrowed earlier, during the period of the Danelaw (9th-10th centuries). Also Middle English French loans: a huge number of words in age, -ance/-ence, -ant/-ent, -ity, -ment, -tion, con-, de-, and pre-.

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a given word came from French or whether it was taken straight from Latin. Words for which this difficulty occurs are those in which there were no special sound and/or spelling changes of the sort that distinguished French from Latin.

4. Early Modern English Period (1500-1650)

The effects of the Renaissance begin to be seriously felt in England. We see the beginnings of a huge influx of Latin and Greek words, many of them learned words imported by scholars well versed in those languages. But many are borrowings from other languages, as words from European high culture begin to make their presence felt and the first words come in from the earliest period of colonial expansion.

Latin	Greek	Arabic via Spanish
agile, abdomen, anatomy, area, capsule, compensate, dexterity, discus, disc/disk, excavate, expensive, fictitious, gradual, habitual, insane, janitor, meditate, notorious, orbit, peninsula, physician, superintendent, ultimate, vindicate	anonymous, atmosphere, autograph, catastrophe, climax, comedy, critic, data, ectasy, history, ostracize, parasite, pneumonia, skeleton, tonic, tragedy	alcove, algebra, zenith, algorithm, almanac, azimuth, alchemy, admiral, amber, cipher, orange, saffron, sugar, zero, coffee

5. Present-Day English (1650-present)

About 1650 was the start of major colonial expansion, industrial/technological revolution, and significant American immigration. Words from all over the world begin to pour in during this period. Also, the tendency for specialists to borrow words from Latin and Greek, including creating new words out of Latin and Greek word elements, continues from the last period and also increases with the development of science, technology, and other fields. French continues to be the largest single source of new words outside of very specialized vocabulary domains (scientific/technical vocabulary, still dominated by classical borrowings).

German	Spanish	Italian
blitzkrieg, zeppelin, strafe, U-boat, delicatessen, hamburger, frankfurter, wiener, hausfrau, kindergarten, Oktoberfest, schuss, wunderkind, bundt (cake), spritz (cookies), (apple) strudel	armada, adobe, alligator, alpaca, armadillo, barricade, bravado, cannibal, canyon, coyote, desperado, embargo, enchilada, guitar, marijuana, mesa, mosquito, mustang, ranch, taco, tornado, tortilla, vigilante	alto, arsenal, balcony, broccoli, cameo, casino, cupola, duo, fresco, fugue, gazette (via French), ghetto, gondola, grotto, macaroni, madrigal, motto, piano, opera, pantaloons, prima donna, regatta, sequin, soprano, opera,

So we see a sharp difference between loans in English and Ukrainian. The main difference between loans in English and Ukrainian that words are borrowed from different groups of languages. In Ukrainian these are Slavic languages. In English these are the borrowings from the Indo-European family of languages.

Languages from which words in English and Ukrainian languages are most often borrowed will be presented in this comparative table:

Ukrainian	English
Slovak	French
Russian	Spanish
Hungarian	Latin
Serbian	Italian
Polish	German
Belarusian	Arabic
Bulgarian	Greek