1.2. Loan words

The quantity of loan words in Old Germanic languages was not large. They constituted about 3% of their entire lexicons. Word-borrowing in Old Germanic languages was motivated mostly by the needs of nomination of new concepts arising in the process of the development of the society.

Among the donor-languages the major source of borrowing words into Old Germanic lexicons was Latin. It was the language of a higher civilization Germanic tribes had contacts with and a civilization from which they had much to learn.

The influence of Latin already on the earliest stages of evolution was obvious in the lexicons of all Germanic languages. Their lexicons were enriched with the words of Latin and Greek origin (borrowed indirectly through Latin) in several waves. It depended on the number of contacts of Germanic peoples with the Romans. As far as contacts with Roman civilization, at first commercial and military, later religious and intellectual, extended over many centuries and was constantly renewed.

As for English, it experienced three waves of Latin influence.

The first Latin words to find their way into the English as well as other Germanic languages owe their adoption to the early contact between the Romans and the Germanic tribes on the continent. Several hundred Latin words were found in various Germanic dialects at an early period. The second wave of Latin borrowings in English took place through Celtic transmission due to early Romanization of Celts, inhabiting the British Isles and the third wave was connected with the spread of Christianity. Similar conditions of Latin influence, surely with some nuances, experienced all Germanic dialects. These earliest loan words shared by Germanic languages fall into the following semantic domains, each of them being connected with particular sphere of social activity influenced by the Roman Empire: trade, objects of commerce (cheap; wine; mint, butter, cheese); units of measurement (mile, pound); building, objects built and building materials (street, wall, castle); names of plants (elm, lily, palm); names of animals (mule, tiger); church and religion (abbot, altar, angel); medical treatment (balsam, fever); musical instruments (cymbal, organ).

The majority of the early Latin borrowings are shared by West Germanic langiages, and alot of them occur in Scandinavian and even East Germanic languages as well.

Latin was not the only source of borrowings for Germanic languages. Other sources of borrowings are Celtic, other Germanic languages, Slavonic. Their qualitative and quantitative parameters depended on the peculiarities of migrations, settlement of dialect-speakers and the type of language contacts they had.

English is known by its early borrowings from Celtic. Celtic borrowings are few. The evidence of contacts of Anglo-Saxons with Celts is obvious chiefly in place-names. Such names of counties, regions, rivers as Kent, Deira, Bernicia, York, the Thames, Avon, Dover are of Celtic origin. Other districts preserve in their present-day names traces of their earlier Celtic designations as they contain elements of Celtic etymology: Cornwall, Devonshire, Winchester, Gloucester, Cumberland, Duncombe, Torhill, etc.

Outside of place-names the influence of Celtic on English is almost negligible. Celtic borrowings in English include binn “basket, crib”, brocc “brock, badger”, cumb “valley”.

The lexicons of other Germanic languages experienced not more significant influx of Celtic borrowings.

Some Germanic languages were enriched with loans from Slavonic languages as well.

Among borrowed words there are instances of loan-translations. Loan-translation (a calque) is a word borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation. In other words the borrowing of morphological pattern of a word which is built with the help of native roots. It is the main way of borrowing for such “conservative” Germanic languages as Icelandic, Feroese.

The first loan-tranlsations in Germanic languages appeared from Latin and Greek. For example, most days of the week are loan-translations, cf.: Engl. Thursday, Du. donderdag, Dan. torsdag “Thor’s day” from Latin dies iovis "day of Jupiter"; Engl. Friday, Du. vrijdag, Ger. Freitag "Frigga's day", translation of Latin dies Veneris “”day of Venus. The procedure was to substitute the name of the corresponding Germanic god for the Roman one.

Loan-translation as the way of vocabulary enrichment can be regarded as a sort of resistence of language to foreign influence, because instead of adopting a foreign word, it produces its equivalent using native resources.