Growth of present-day english vocabulary
Reasons:
Rapid growth of science and technology breeds such new words as green revolution, benzine, calorie, electon, sputnik, spacecraft, radium.
Social, economic and political changes being about an increasing number of new words, relating to food, clothing, music, television and films, politics and economy, education, women’s liberation and drug culture, such as fast food, hip huggers, disco, Watergate, telequiz, chairperson, soft drug, iron, curtain, cold war, emancipation, capitalism
The influence of other culture and languages can be felt in many different fields, like cuisine (stir frying), black nationalist (dashhikies), American fashion (Mao jacket), martial arts (kungfu). Cinema, newsreel, Technicolour.
Fashion for the phenomena: lambada.
Channels of vocabulary development: creation, semantic change, borrowing, reviving archaic or obsolete words, coinage.
Creation: the formation of new words by using the existing materials, namely roots, affixes and other elements. It is the most important way of vocabulary expansion.
Semantic change: An old form which takes on a new meaning to meet the new need. It does not increase the number of word forms but creates many more new usages of the words.
Borrowing: taking over words from foreign languages. They play a vital role in the development of vocabulary. Borrowed words constitute 6-5% of all new words.
Reviving archaic or obsolete words: give no longer used words some new meanings to meet new need.
Coinage is the invention of totally new words: xerox, kleenex, nylon, aspirin.
The origin of the english words
native words (about 30%)
borrowings/loan-words
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Indo-European |
father, nose, cow, tree, red, be, to stand, to sit |
Germanic |
to see, to hear, fox, grass, fur, head, old, good |
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Proper English |
bird, boy, lady, girl, lord, woman, daisy, always |
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degree of assimilation
borrowed aspect |
denizen (fully-assimilated) |
face, husband, table |
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alien (partially-assimilated) |
rajah, restaurant, cliché, datum |
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barbarism/exotism |
avocado, chao, lambada |
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phonetic borrowing (loan word proper) |
chair, bank, apparatchik, soprano, duet, lobby, iceberg |
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translation or lexical loan/calque |
pipe of peace, fair sex (< par coeur) |
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semantic loan/calque |
brigade, pioneer to dwell OE "to wander" VS ME "to live" < Scandinavian dvelja ("live") |
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morphemic borrowing (etymological hybrids) when the elements of words are derived from different languages |
eatable, distrust, beautiful un|mis|take|able un|mis- English take- Scandinavian -able Romanic |
interna-tional words |
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anaconda, football, leggings |
BORROWINGS differ from native words by their phonetic structure; their morphological structure; their grammatical forms; many borrowings are not motivated semantically.
Borrowing - " a word which was borrowed" + "process of borrowing".
Loan - "a word which was borrowed"
Source of borrowing - language from which the borrowing was taken.
Origin of borrowing - language to which the word may be traced.
p aper < Fr papier < Lat papyrus < Gr papyros
source etymon origin
Etymology studies history and origin of words. The linguistic form which a later form derives is called etymon. Folk etymology arises when a word is assumed to come from a particular etymon, because of some association of form or meaning, whereas in fact the word has a different derivation. A word which provides a translation or explanation of another word is known as a gloss.
c rayfish "Norway lobster" fish folk etymology etymon
folk etymology gloss
etymology - [O.F. crevisse "креветка"]
Borrowings can be classified according to different criteria:
in the format of linguistic archeology:
b asic (Continental borrowings) street, wine, butter
religious (6th - 7th cs) mask, monk, nun LATIN
literary (Renaissance) democratic, juvenile, enthusiasm BORROWINGS
scientific (17th - 18th cs) nucleus, formula IN ENGLISH
according to the language from which the words come: e.g. Romance borrowings (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish).