34. Sources of most recent loanwords

French is still the largest supplier of words to English, which may be because of the geographical proximity of France and Britain. We would, therefore, expect more French words to enter via British English than American. Similarly, Spanish loanwords are often borrowed from African Spanish into American English. The increase in the importance of Japanese as a source of loans is probably a consequence of the increased commercial importance of Japan in the world generally. The decline of Latin as a source of loanwords may have a dual explanation: on the one hand, it may be argued that English has already borrowed so much of Latin vocabulary that there is relatively little left to be borrowed; on the other hand, rather than borrowing directly from Latin, English now often makes new Latinate words from English morphemes originally from Latin.

35. Synonymy

Synonymy is a wide-spread relation in the vocabulary of English, for which the good evidence is provided by many synonym dictionaries and thesauruses. Beseech – implore (умолять), glitter – sparkle (блестеть), havoc – devastation (опустошение), lazy – indolent, native – indigenous, near – close, plentiful – abundant (обильный).

Beg – entreat – beseech – implore - supplicate. They all signify making an appeal which is likely to be refused. Beg suggests insistence and sometimes self-abasement. By entreating somebody one hopes to persuade somebody by earnest pleading reasoning. Beseech and implore convey vigor anxiety which seems to inspire sympathy or pity. Implore may be stronger with a suggestion of fearfulness or evident anguish. Supplicate adds to entreat a humble, playful attitude.

Such an attempt implies that even between identifiable synonyms there is some difference in meaning.

36. Strict and loose synonymy

Many linguists make a distinction between “strict” or “absolute” synonymy and “loose” synonymy. In the strict sense, two words that are synonyms would have to be interchangeable (в-заменяемыми) in all their possible contexts of use: a free choice would exist for a speaker or writer of either one or the other word in any given context. The choice would have no effect on the meaning, style or connotation of what was being said or written.

Strict synonymy creates unnecessary redundancy (чрезмерность) in a language. It would appear that where, historically, two words have been in danger of becoming strict synonyms, one of them has either changed its meaning in some way or fallen out of use. Consider the following archaic or obsolete words, which have fallen out of use and been replaced by the items in brackets: culver (pigeon), divers (various), dorp (village), trig (neat) (чистый).

When we speak of synonymy, we mean dif. degrees of “loose” S-s, where we identify not only a significant overlap (частичное совпадение) in meaning between two words, but also some contexts at least where they cannot substitute for each other. Take the synonyms find and discover: they are substitutable in the context: She found/discover the ball behind the garden shed; but not in the context: He discovered radium in 1898. As is evident in this case, synonyms may be substitutable where their meaning overlaps (совпадает), but where a meaning falls outside of the shared area (discover = “to be the first one to come across something”, find = “experience something in some way”) one cannot be used instead of the other. Synonyms may overlap in meaning to a greater or lesser degree, though it is not clear how this might be measured, nor whether there is a limit at which the notion of synonymy becomes meaningless.