Assimilation of loan words. The degree of assimilation

The problem of assimilation of borrowings is closely connected with the question of interaction of the borrowed units with the language system as a whole. The phenomenon of assimilation can be defined as partial or total conformation to the phonetic, syntactic, graphical and/or morphological standards of the receiving language as well as to its semantic system.

There also is a notion of the assimilation degree which much depends on the period of use of the word in the receiving language. Oral borrowings are naturally assimilated more rapidly and completely than bookish and written ones. There are 4 main groups into which all loan words can be classified from the viewpoint of their assimilation degree:

1. completely assimilated loans;

2. partially assimilated loans;

3. unassimilated loan words (barbarisms);

4. foreign insertions.

The words of the first group are the oldest borrowings, coming from Latin (cheese, street), Scandinavian (nouns husband, fellow, gate, route, wing, verbs call, die, take, adjectives happy, ill, low), French (table, chair, face, finish, matter) etc. This first group is much greater than the second one. Many of these words show little difference from the native stock (animal, article). They typically follow all morphological, phonetic and autographic standards of English. They usually occur as dominants in synonymic groups, they actively participate in word formation processes.

Apart from words assimilated may also be suffixes. E.g. –ese and –fier were borrowed from French, but turned into –ess and –fy. They are now easily combined with native roots like in goddess.

On the other hand, borrowed roots or stems are freely combined with native affixes. E.g. the root pain came from French peine, which came from Latin poena, which in its term came from Greek poine, which in Greek meant “penalty”. But in modern English we have words which resulted from the combination of this root with various suffixes, e.g. painful, painless, pained, etc. Such words may be absolutely undistinguishable phonetically, thus sport comes from French desporte meaning “to amuse oneself”, while start is native, showing connections with the Middle English word sterten.

The group of partially assimilated loans (group 2) falls into:

1. The words unassimilated semantically (because they denote objects peculiar to the country of the origin), like clothing (sombrero, sari), titles and professions (shah, sheikh, torero), food and drinks (sherbet, pilaw (плов)), currencies (rupee, zlote, rouble (Br.E)/ ruble (Am.E)).

2. The words unassimilated grammatically (because they are exceptions to English grammar system): phenomenon – phenomena, crisis – crises, etc. Some of such words already have two forms (index – indices/indexes).

3. The words not completely assimilated phonetically, having stress on their final syllable (cartoon, police). Also the words having specific sounds, like genre, regime, measure, prestige, or sound combinations like in memoir.

4. The words not completely assimilated graphically: ballet, debris, machine, cliché, etc.

Sometimes several of these peculiarities are combined in a single unit: Penelope, Hermione, Aphrodite.

Barbarisms are words of other languages not assimilated in any way, but having their equivalents among native words, e.g. ciao.

Foreign insertions are words and expressions unassimilated in principle. They always retain and show their foreign origin. E.g. musical term used in jazz scores ad libitum (Latin: “at pleasure”).