4 Vocabulary

Dieter Kastovsky

4.1Introduction

The ‘normal’ native speaker of a language will probably regard sounds and words as the most basic building blocks of a language, because they are the elements which can be perceived most easily without specific training. We put sounds together to form words, and we put words together to form larger structures, i.e. sentences realised as utterances (at least that is what we think we are doing). Therefore, speakers tend to react most readily to variation and change of pronunciation and vocabulary. Words, or rather lexical items or lexemes (= dictionary entries), can be regarded as intermediate elements between the level of sounds and the level of syntactic structure. But there are some additional reasons having to do with the existence of certain types of lexemes and their function why lexemes have this bridge function between phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon (see Section 4.1.5. below).

Lexemes are the means by which we make direct reference to extralinguistic reality, converting our basic perception of the world around us into language. Their basic function thus is to serve as labels for segments of extralinguistic reality which a speech community finds nameworthy, so that it can talk about it in a simple and direct way. And it is only when one has such ‘nameworthy’ entities that one can talk about their relationship (more precisely the relationship between their referents) in terms of more complex grammatical structures such as sentences (utterances): first one has to identify something to talk about before one can talk about it, i.e. one has to know ‘who is doing what to whom’. This is why lexemes are one of the most central categories in language: it is their existence that links the perception of more or less discrete extralinguistic phenomena (like bushes or trees, apes or monkeys, types of movement such as walk, fly, swim, manners of producing sounds such as talk, shout, whisper, bark, meow, chirp, etc.) to our perception of the world around us. On the other hand, it is often the case that the very existence of a lexeme creates a demarcation in an otherwise continuous extralinguistic referent. Thus in terms of its physical nature, the colour spectrum is continuous; linguistically it is divided into segments, whose number varies

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from language to language. Similarly, there is no visible dividing line between chin and cheek, but the existence of the lexemes chin and cheek forces us to make this distinction, which does not necessarily exist in all languages. In English we always make a distinction between hand and arm, foot and leg, but in Polish this

distinction is optional, and normally reka is used for both arm and hand, and

noga for both foot and leg. Lexemes thus not only act as labels for referents that have an autonomous extralinguistic existence, they also create such referents by introducing distinctions that are not given a priori in extralinguistic reality. Even closely related languages, such as English and German, or Italian, French and Spanish, will differ considerably as to the overall structure of their vocabulary, because of the different communicative needs of the speech communities involved and the vagaries of historical development. Thus why would German want to make a distinction between the ingestion of food or drink by human beings and animals in the form of essen (human being) : fressen (animal, but extended to human beings if they behave like an animal), trinken (human being) : saufen (animals, but also human beings who overdo it with a specific type of beverage, i.e. alcohol), when English simply makes do with eat : drink; and why, at least until recently, did British English differentiate between coach (long-distance) and bus (local), when German just has (Auto)-Bus?

The same is true of different historical stages of one and the same language, and for English this is perhaps even more striking than for any other European language. Its vocabulary structure was transformed profoundly between the first records of English and today, so that what we find in the eighth century at the level of vocabulary is basically unrecognisable to us, and today’s English would also be equally alien to someone from the eighth century, even disregarding phonological and morphological changes.

A simple example, viz. an OE Bible passage and its early Modern English and Modern English equivalents, might serve to illustrate this (the lexical differences between OE and the other periods are indicated by italics):

And it chaunced in thoose dayes that ther went oute a commaundment from Auguste the Emperour, that all the woorlde shuld be taxed. And this taxynge was the fyrst and executed when Syrenius was leftenaunt in Syria. And every man went vnto his awne citie to be taxed. (Early Modern English, Tyndale 1534)

Truely in these days it happened that an order was issued by the Emperor

Augustus that the whole world should be assessed for taxes. This taxing was the first and was implemented when Syrenus was judge in Syria. And everybody went to their place of birth to be taxed. (Modern English, translation DK)

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circumstances. The vocabulary of a language thus is also a link to the material and spiritual culture of its speakers; conversely, without knowing this material and spiritual culture one might often not know what someone is talking about. Let me illustrate this with two examples I came across during a recent stay in the US.

In a bar in New York I saw the following ad: When was the last time you were Jagermeistered?¨ In order to understand this, it is not enough to know that English has an expression to wine and dine a person (with the passive to be wined and dined), which in turn is based (at least for wine) on the pattern to water flowers, salt soup, butter the bread ‘provide something with x’, formally parallel to the verbs bomb, knife, stone, guillotine ‘attack, kill someone by x’. One also has to know that Jagermeister¨ fits into the wining/dining scenario and not the attack scenario, i.e. that this is a German liqueur and not the name of a person or instrument. Thus, on the basis of all this (extra)linguistic knowledge, one can eventually arrive at the interpretation ‘When were you last treated to a J¨agermeister?’ During the same trip I also learned that the doggy-bags, which have been an important part of American culture for many years, are now replaced by go-boxes, at least in some areas. Without the restaurant context and the familiar look of the bag (go-boxes still come in brown bags) I would probably not have been able to figure out what a go-box is.

Many changes in the English vocabulary are due to massive borrowing from the languages with which English came into contact in the course of its history, and this has also had far-reaching repercussions for morphology and phonology. If we take a bird’s eye view of the vocabulary of Modern English, we cannot but be amazed by its overall size: estimates range between 700,000 and more than a million documented lexical items; the second edition of the OED, our main source for the history of the English vocabulary, contains about 616,500 lexical items according to its own estimate (OED 1:xxiii), but it certainly makes reference to many more via suband run-on entries, although, admittedly, this source also contains much that is no longer used. But it is not just the sheer size of the vocabulary, it is also its heterogeneity which is remarkable. Almost unlimited borrowing since the tenth and eleventh centuries – first from Latin, then from Scandinavian, then from French, then again from Latin and Greek, and finally from almost any language English came into contact with – is responsible for this situation. As a result of its history, English is far less resistant than any other European language to borrowing, and since the battle against the ‘hard words’ in the seventeenth century there has never been any serious campaign against foreign elements comparable to the government-decreed measures in France, Slovakia, or Russia, or the Germanisation movement in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. About 70 per cent of present-day English vocabulary consists of loans, with loans from French and/or Latin (including Greek and Neo-Latin) taking up the lion’s share. Just over 350 languages have contributed to this wealth (see Section 9.4). When, in contradistinction, we look at recorded OE lexemes, only about 3 per cent are loans, basically from Latin (and often not recognisable as