9.Borrowing.Classifiation of borrowings according to the degree of assimilation.

According to the origin, the word-stock may be subdivided into two main groups: one comprises the native elements; the other consists of the borrowed words. The term native denotes words which belong to the original English stock known from the earliest manuscripts of the Old English period. They are mostly words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles in the 5th century by Germanic tribes.Linguists estimate the Anglo-Saxon stock of words as 25-30 per cent of the English vocabulary. 

A borrowed (loan) word is a word adopted from another language and modified in sound form, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of English. According to Otto Jespersen loan-words are “the milestones of philology, because in a great many instances they permit us to fix approximately the dates of linguistic changes”. But they may be termed “the milestones of general history” because they show the course of civilization and give valuable information as to the inner life of nations. Through its history the English language came in contact with many languages and borrowed freely from them. The greatest influx of borrowings mainly came from Latin, French and Old Norse (Scandinavian). Latin was for a long time used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse and French (its Norman dialect) were the languages of the conquerors: the Scandinavians invaded the British Isles and merged with the local population in the 9th, 10th and the first half of the 11th century. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 Norman French was the language of the upper classes, of official documents and school instruction from the middle of the 11th century to the end of the 14th century. The greatest number of borrowings has come from French. Borrowed words refer to various fields of social-political, scientific and cultural life. About 41 per cent of them are scientific and technical terms

Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech and through written speech. Oral borrowings took place chiefly in the early periods of history, in recent times, written borrowings did. Words borrowed orally (L. Street, mill, inch) are usually short and undergo more changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. French communi¬que, belles-letres, naivete) preserve their spelling, they are often rather long and their assimilation is a long process.

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 . Grammatical assimilation. As a rule, borrowed words lost their former grammatical categories and influence and acquired new grammati¬cal categories and paradigms by analogy with other English words, as for example: the Russian borrowing 'sputnik'. 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 ex¬ample the word 'cargo' which is highly polysemantic in Spanish

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.

1. 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

2. 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').