3.2 Diachronic Approach: Etymological Survey of the English Word-Stock

3.2.1 Definition of Etymology

Etymology [L. etymologia, < Gr, etymologia, <etymon (etymon-- an earlier form of a word in the same language or an ancestral language or a word in a foreign language that is the source of a particular loanword) and logia (doctrine, study)] of words is the study of the origins and history of the form and meaning of words. The Living Webster defines etymology as an “explanation of the origin and linguistic changes of a particular word and the derivation of a word” (1977, p.337). It is a historical evolution of lexical units.

The term etymology was actually created by the Stoics, a group of Greek philosophers and logicians, at the beginning of the fourth century (Jackson & Amvela, 2004, p.6). The Stoics noticed irregularities between the form and the content of certain words. “Since they were convinced that the language should be regularly related to its content, they undertook to discover the original forms called the ‘etyma’ (root) to establish the regular correspondence between language and reality” (Jackson & Amvela, 2004, p.6). The Stoics accurately perceived the disjunction between words and their forms, and from the etymological point of view, they saw the English vocabulary as anything but homogenous. The English word-stock is comprised of the native word-stock and the word-stock of borrowings from other languages, with a borrowed vocabulary much larger than the native stock of words.

3.2.2 English Lexemes of Native Origin

The term “native” typically denotes words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles from the continent in the 5th century by the Germanic tribes — the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Nevertheless, the term is often applied to words whose origin cannot be traced to any other languages. As mentioned above, numerically, the native word-stock is not large. The Anglo-Saxon stock of lexical items (lexemes) is estimated to make only “25% to 30% of the English vocabulary” (Eliseeva, 2003, p.40). A comprehensive dictionary of Anglo-Saxon falls short of “fifty thousand words” (Pei, 1967, p.91). If to consider that half of the spoken lexemes failed to find their way to the dictionary, it can be safely asserted that the native Anglo-Saxon language did not comprise more than one hundred thousand lexemes. Shakespeare’s vocabulary, which consisted mostly of native words, is believed to be the richest ever employed by any single man, and “it has been calculated to comprise 21,000 words” (Jespersen, 1938).

Robertson estimates that only “about twenty thousand words” are in circulation today, and if this estimate is correct, it brings us up to Shakespeare’s total. Of these words, “one-fifth, or about four thousand, are said to be of Anglo-Saxon origin, three-fifths, or about twelve thousand, of Latin, French, and Greek origin” (1954). However, this does not mean that foreign words predominate in the English language in daily discourse. In fact, the most frequently used words are native. These native words include most of the auxiliary and modal verbs (shall, will, must, can, may, and have), main verbs (live, die, come, go, do, make, give, take, eat, drink, work, play, walk, and run), nouns (home, house, room, window, door, floor, and roof), pronouns (I, you, he, my, his, and who), prepositions (to, in, of, out, on, and under), numerals (one, two, three, and four), and coordinating and subordinating conjunctions (and, but, till, and as). Words of Anglo-Saxon origin include the words, denoting the following: outward, visible parts of the body (head, hand, arm, back, finger, thumb, mouth, nose, ear, arm, leg, etc.), members of the family and closest relatives (father, mother, brother, son, wife, etc.), natural phenomena and planets (snow, rain, wind, sun, moon, star, etc.), animals (horse, cow, sheep, cat, etc.), qualities and properties (old, young, cold, hot, light, dark, and long), and common actions (do, make, go, come, see, hear, eat, etc.). Mario Pei (1967) states that if we go into literary usage, we find that “words of the Bible are ninety-four percent native, Shakespeare’s ninety percent, Tennyson’s eighty-eight percent, and Milton’s eighty-one percent” (p.93).

Most of the native lexemes have undergone great changes, for example, the process of combining roots with prefixes and suffixes or with other roots, the process of changes in the semantic structure of the words (polysemy), the process of spontaneous creation of words, and the process of analogy, where the words are coined in imitation of other words. The relative stability and semantic peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon words account for their great derivational potential. Most words of native origin make up large clusters of derived and compound words in the present-day language. As a case in point, the word ‘snow’ is the basis for the formation of the following words: snowball, snowbell, snowberry, snowbird, snowblink, snowblader, snowbound, snow-broth, snowbush, snow-cap, snowdrift, snowdrop, snowfall, snowfield, snowflake, snowman, snowmobile, snowpack, snowplough, snowshoe, snow shed, snow slide, snowy, and so on. Most Anglo-Saxon words are root-words; therefore, it is easy to coin new words.

New words have been created from Anglo-Saxon simple word-stems mainly by means of affixation, word-composition, and conversion. Such affixes of native origin as –er, -ness, -ing, -dom, -hood, -ship, -ful, -less, -y, -ish, -ly, -ish, -en, un-, and mis- make part of the patterns widely used to build numerous new words: happiness, childhood, childish, chilly, friendship, friendly, freedom, untrue, and misunderstand. Conversion is a common way to convert one part of speech to another using a form that represents one part of speech in the position of another without changing the form of the word at all; for example, one may use “The lights gleam in the night,” ‘gleam’ being a verb, and “I can see the gleam in the night,” ‘gleam’ being a noun. Compounding of words is creating new words that consist of at least two stems which occur in the language as free forms, e.g., horse-fly, pot-pie, rifle-range, horsewhip, bagpipe, policeman, etc. Although not numerous in Modern English, words of Anglo-Saxon origin must be considered very important due to their stability, specific semantic characteristics, great word-forming power, wide spheres of application, and high frequency value. The native element comprises not only the ancient Anglo-Saxon core but also words which appeared later as a result of word-formation, split polysemy, and other processes operative in English.