270 D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y

cyberpunk, eco(logically)friendly, e-(lectronic)mail, Eur(ope)asia, Eurovision, guestimate (guess + estimate), mini disc, mis(sing)per(son), paratrooper (parachutist trooper), worka(lco)holic.

With acronyms, a process which has also become increasingly popular over the last decades (cf. Crowley & Thomas, 1973)), the first letters of a string of words are put together to form an abbreviated form of this string. There are two options: either the letters are pronounced separately, or they form a phonological string that can be pronounced as if it were a normal word. For want of a convenient designation we might perhaps call these ‘letter acronyms’ and ‘word acronyms’.

Letter acronyms of the last years are: asap (as soon as possible), ATM (automatic teller machine), BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), CD (compact disc), DJ (disk jockey), DVD (digital video disc), EC (European Community), EU (European Union), HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), PC (personal computer, political correctness), VAT (value added tax), which by some speakers is, however, also treated as a word acronym.

Word acronyms are: Aids (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), Care (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), dink(y) (double income, no kids), LAN (local area network), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), PIN (personal identification number), SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant), yuppie (young urban/upwardly mobile professional (people) + -ie).

4.6Conclusion

Packing the history of the expanding vocabulary of a language like English into less than a hundred pages is difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, all that could be done in this chapter was to highlight and exemplify some of the most conspicuous aspects. One was the gradual internationalisation of the language through borrowing from languages such as Latin, Scandinavian, French, Greek and many others. As a result, the Modern English vocabulary is less Germanic than foreign, at least as far as the lexical types go – in terms of lexical tokens, however, it still is basically Germanic, because the most frequent token instances come from this source. As a consequence, the originally homogeneous Germanic wordformation system was changed into a dual system with overlapping native and non-native patterns having different properties with regard to their morphological, morphophonemic and phonological structure. The study of the vocabulary is as much a mirror of the internal developments of the language as it is a reflection of the external history in terms of political and cultural changes, language contact and language conflict, and one of the major objectives of this chapter was to illustrate this close interrelationship between the external and internal history of a language in the domain of its vocabulary.