Lecture 10. Enrichment of the vocabulary in the MnE period

Plan

I. External sources.

1. The 16^th century borrowings: a) from Italian and Spanish; b) from Latin (latinisation of French borrowings, etymological doublets); c) from Greek

2. The 17^th century loans: a) colonial words; b) French borrowings.

3. The 18^th – 20^th centuries.

II. Internal ways of developing vocabulary (Word-building)

The Early MnE period coincided with the Late Renaissance and the epoch of the Great geographical discoveries. These phenomena influenced the development of English vocabulary considerably. The study of Italian, the language of the birthplace of the Renaissance, the appearance of new commodities from the New World, contacts with Spanish and Portuguese brought about an influx of loan words from these languages. Each language influenced the English vocabulary in some specific sphere of culture: the Italian language gave terms of music and art, American Indian languages brought the names of animals and plants. The flourishing of the classical philology, the study of Greek and Roman authors gave English a number of words borrowed from the classical languages. At first these words were bookish, but gradually they became a part of the common word stock.

Italian words refer mainly to the sphere of art: finale, fresco, violin, umbrella, balcony, grotto; but there are also bandit, volcano, motto.

Spanish borrowings belong to a different semantic field: armada, negro, desperado, mosquito, tornado.

Much more numerous were borrowings from Latin. The mixed character of English vocabulary promoted an easy adoption of words from Latin. The following derivational types are most frequent:

1) verbs in –ate derived from the past participle (in –atum) of Latin verbs: aggravate, abbreviate, exaggerate, frustrate, narrate, emancipate, locate, separate;

2) verbs in –ute derived from the past participle (in –utum) of another group of Latin verbs: constitute, contribute, attribute, pollute;

3) verbs derived from past participle of some other Latin verbs in –ss or –ct: dismiss, affect, collect, contradict, correct;

4) verbs derived from the infinitive of some Latin verbs: permit, admit, compel, deduce, induce, produce, introduce, include, exclude, preclude, allude;

5) adjectives derived from Latin present participles in –ant/-ent: arrogant, reluctant, evident, transparent, lenient, obedient, patient; and also nouns with the same suffix: accident, incident, occident, orient, crescent;

6) adjectives derived from the comparative degree of Latin adjectives with the suffix –ior/(or): superior, inferior, interior, exterior, senior, junior, minor, major.

The nouns ending in –tion are very difficult to classify. It is often hard to tell whether the word was adopted from Latin or from French.

When a word was borrowed from Latin it would occasionally happen that the same word had been borrowed from French in the 13^th – 14^th centuries, often with a different meaning. In such cases pairs of doublets would appear in the English language. For example, the Latin noun traditio meant “giving over”. Its meaning developed in 2 directions: “to pass something over to the enemy” i.e. “treason”; and “to pass something over from generation to generation”, i.e. “tradition”. Thus, treason and tradition are etymological doublets. The Latin word factum had 2 meanings: “something that has been done” and “something that has happened”. In OFr it got the meaning “feat” in while in scientific Latin it got the meaning “fact”.