Лексикология английского языка. Учебник

3) There’s also a group of accidental or blind B, which appeared in the language for no particular reason. Some of them were soon rejected and forgotten. Others changed their meaning and entered synonymic groups of the language.

E.g., Large was B as a French “wide”, but it changed its meaning as it added nothing to the existing word and entered another synonymic group meaning “big in size”.

It must be pointed out that while the general historical causes of borrowing from different languages have been studied with a considerable degree of thoroughness the purely linguistic reasons for borrowing are still open to investigation.

Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech (by immediate contact between the peoples) and through written speech (by indirect contact through books, etc.).

Oral borrowing took place chiefly in the early periods of history, whereas in recent times written borrowing gained importance. Words borrowed orally (e.g., L. inch, mill, street) are usually short and they undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g., Fr. communiqué, belleslettres, naïveté) preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of

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their sound-form, their assimilation is a long and laborious process.

b)

Though borrowed words undergo changes in the adopting language they preserve some of their former peculiarities for a comparatively long period. This makes it possible to work out some criteria for determining whether the word belongs to the borrowed element.

1) In some cases the pronunciation of the word (strange sounds, sound combinations, position of stress, etc.), its spelling and the correlation between sounds and letters are an indication of the foreign origin of the word.

e.g. waltz (G.),. psychology (Gr.), soufflé (Fr.), volcano

(It.), vase (Fr.), vaccine (L.), jungle (Hindi), gesture (L.), giant (OFr.), zeal (L.), zero (Fr.), zinc (G.), in which the initial position of the sounds [v], [dз], [з] or of the letters x, j, z is a sure sign that the word has been borrowed.

2) The morphological structure of the word and its grammatical forms may also bear witness to the word being adopted from another language.

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e.g., The suffixes in the words neurosis (Gr.) and violoncello (It.) betray the foreign origin of the words; the irregular plural forms papyra (from papyrus, Gr.), pastorali (from pastorale, It.), beaux (from beau, Fr.), bacteria, (from bacterium, L.) and the like.

3) Last but not least is the lexical meaning of the word. Thus the concept denoted by the words ricksha(w), pagoda (Chin.) make us suppose that we deal with borrowings.

These criteria are not always helpful. Some early borrowings have become so thoroughly assimilated that they are unrecognisable without a historical analysis.

4) Sometimes the form of the word and its meaning in Modern English enable us to tell the immediate source of borrowing. Thus if the digraph ch is sounded as [∫], the word is a late French borrowing (as in echelon, chauffeur, chef); if it stands for [k], it came through Greek (archaic, architect, chronology); if it is pronounced as [t∫], it is either an early-borrowing (chase, OFr.; cherry, L., OFr.; chime, L.), or a word of Anglo-Saxon origin (choose, child, chin).

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c)

As to the types of B they are divided into:

1)Transliteration – preservation of spelling with different pronunciation (table d’haute, garage)

2)Transcription – preservation of sounds (jeans, football)

3)Translation-Loans are borrowings of a special kind. Being taken into the vocabulary of another language they undergo the process of translation. They are only compound words each stem being translated separately.

e.g., masterpiece, wonder child, first dancer, collective farm

4)Semantic loans mean borrowing of a meaning for a word already existing in the English language.

e.g. shock brigade (аварийная бригада) – ударная бригада (from Russian)

5) Etymological doublets are words originating from the same etymological source but differing in phonemic shape and

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in meaning. They may enter the vocabulary by different routes. They may:

- consist of a native word and a borrowed one: shirt -

skirt,

- be represented by 2 borrowings from different languages which historically have the same root: senior (Lat) – sir (Fr), canal (Lat) – channel (Fr),

-be borrowed from the same language twice, but in different periods: travel (Norm. Fr) – travail (Par. Fr), gaol (Norm. Fr) – jail (Par. Fr),

-consist of a shortened word and the one from which it was derived: history – story, fantasy – fancy, defence – fence, shadow – shade.

Etymological triplets (groups of 3 words of common root) occur rarer, but there are at least 2 examples: hospital (Lat)

– hostel (Norm. Fr) – hotel (Par. Fr), to capture (Lat) – to catch (Norm. Fr)- to chase (Par. Fr).

6) International words. In this case a word is borrowed by several languages. Such words usually convey notions which are significant in the field of communication. Many of them are

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of Latin and Greek origin. They are names of sciences (philosophy, mathematics, medicine, linguistics), political terms (politics, policy, democracy), words denoting scientific and technological advances etc.

The B stock of the E vocabulary contains not only words but a great number of suffixes and prefixes. When these first appeared in the E language they were parts of words and only later began a life of their own as word-building elements of the English language.

e.g., age, ance, ess, ment, etc.

This brought about the creation of hybrid words (shortage, lovable) in which a borrowed suffix is joined to a native root. A reverse process is also possible.

A word borrowed from another language never brings into the adopting language the whole of its semantic structure. In fact, it’s usually borrowed in one of its meanings (e.g., sputnik – artificial satellite).

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5.

Assimilation is the process of a word adjustment to the new environment, i.e., its adaptation to the norms of the recipient language.

B words are adjusted in 3 main areas of the new language system: the phonetic, the grammatical and the semantic.

Phonetic assimilation comprises substitution of borrowed sounds and sound combinations for sounds of the recipient language.

e.g., Norm. table, plate, courage; Fr. matinee, café, ballet, garage.

Sounds that were alien to the English language were fitted into its scheme of sounds. For instance, the long [e] and [ε] in recent French borrowings, alien to English speech, are rendered with the help of [ei] (as in the words communiqué, chaussée, café).

Familiar sounds or sound combinations the position of which was strange to the English language, were replaced by other sounds or sound combinations to make the words conform to the norms of the language, e.g., German spitz [∫pits] was

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turned into English [spits]. Substitution of native sounds for foreign ones usually takes place in the very act of borrowing. But some words retain their foreign pronunciation for a long time before the unfamiliar sounds are replaced by similar native sounds.

In words that were added to English from foreign sources, especially from French or Latin, the accent was gradually transferred to the first syllable. Thus words like honour, reason were accented on the same principle as the native father, mother.

Grammatical assimilation finds expression in the change of grammatical categories and paradigms of B words, change of their morphological structure.

e.g., fully adapted – cup, plum, street, wall

partially – datum, phenomenon

However, there are some words in Modern English that have for centuries retained their foreign inflexions.

e.g., a considerable group of borrowed nouns, all of them terms or literary words adopted in the 16th century or later, have preserved their original plural inflexion to this day: phenomenon (L.) — phenomena; addendum (L.) — addenda; parenthesis

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(Gr.) — parentheses. Other borrowings of the same period have two plural forms — the native and the foreign,

e.g., vacuum (L.) — vacua, vacuums, virtuoso (It.) — virtuosi, virtuosos.

All borrowings that were composite in structure in their native language appeared in English as indivisible simple words, unless there were already words with the same morphemes in it.

e.g., The French reflexive pronoun s- has become fixed as an inseparable element of the word. The former Italian diminishing suffixes -etto, -otta, -ello(a), -cello in the words ballot, stiletto, umbrella cannot be distinguished without special historical analysis, unless one knows the Italian language. This loss of morphological seams in borrowings may be termed simplification by analogy with a similar process in native words.

Sometimes in borrowed words foreign affixes are replaced by those available in the English language, e.g., the inflexion -us in Latin adjectives was replaced in English with the suffixes -ous or -al: L. barbarus > > E. barbarous; L. botanicus > E. botanical; L. balneus > E. balneal.

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Semantic assimilation includes changes in semantic structure and the formation of derivatives.

When a word is taken over into another language, its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great changes.

1)Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one or two of their meanings. E.g., The words cargo and cask, highly polysemantic in Spanish, were adopted only in one of their meanings — ‘the goods carried in a ship’, ‘a barrel for holding liquids’ respectively.

2)In some cases we can observe specialisation of meaning, as in the word hangar, denoting a building in which aeroplanes are kept.

3)In the process of its historical development a borrowing sometimes acquired new meanings that were not to be found in its former semantic structure. For instance, the verb move in Modern English has developed the meanings of ‘propose’, ‘change one’s flat’, ‘mix with people’ and others that the French mouvoir does not possess. As a rule, the development of new meanings takes place 50 — 100 years after the word is borrowed.

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