3.The etymology of English words. Native words.

Etymology is a brunch of linguistics that studies the origin and history of words tracing them to the earliest determinable source. English lang-ge owes its exceptionally large vocabulary to its ability to borrow and absorbed new words from outside. For.ex. words atomic, jeans, perestroyka have been commonly used during 20^th century and they have been taken from Italian, Hindi, Greek and Russian. The Eng. Vocabulary has been enriched throughout history from different foreign lang-ges. A borrowing is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of Eng. lang-ge. The process of borrowing words has been doing on thousands years. 70-80% of the eng. vocab-ry consists of borrowed words because of specific conditions of the eng. lang-ge development. When the Normans crossed over from France to conquer English in 1066 most of Eng. people spoke Old Eng. or Anglo-Saxon. The Normans spoke a lang-ge that was a mixture of Latin and French. The Normans gave such words as city, palace. The Anglo-Saxon: town, ring. The most important influence came from Latin ( transport, evidence, animal, create). There are practically no limits to the kinds of words that are borrowed. Words are employed as symbols for every part of culture. Such words become completely absorbed into the system , so they are not recognized by the speakers of the lang-ge as foreign. Thus there are 2 main problems connected with the vocab-ry of the lang-ge: 1) the origin of the words, 2) the development in the language. The etymological structure of the Eng. vocab-ry consists of the native and borrowed elements.

Native words.In linguistic literature the term “native” is conventionally used to denote words of Anglo-Saxon origin, brought to the British Isles from the continent in the 5^th century by the Germanic tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

Practically the term is often applied to words, whose origin can’t be traced to any other language. E.g. “path” is classified as native just because its origin hasn’t yet been established with certainty.

Pr. Smirnickiy relying on the earliest manuscripts of the English language suggested another interpretation of the term “native”- as words which have existed in the English word-stock of the 7^th century. This interpretation has more reliable criteria but both new points present the native element in English as static.

The native element is the basic element but only 20-30% of the words are native. Many linguists consider foreign influence to be the most important factor in the history of English. The wide-spread view-point is supported only by the evidence only of the English word-stock as the Grammar and Phonetic systems are very stable and not easily influenced by other languages.

The native and foreign elements are practically inseparable in language. Words of native origin consist for the most part of very ancient elements: Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic elements. Diachronically native words are subdivided into three main layers.

1. Words of the Indo-European origin. These words have cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages and form the oldest layer. Words belonging to this layer fall into definite semantic groups and express the most vital, important and frequently used concepts:

-kinship terms( mother ,father ,son)

-words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature(sun ,moon, star)

-names of animals and plants(goose ,wolf ,cow ,tree)

-words denoting parts of human body( eye, foot ,heart)

-words naming concrete physical properties and qualities(hard ,slow, red ,white)

-numerals from one to a hundred( one, two..)

-some of the most frequent verbs( bear ,do ,sit, stand)

2) Words of the Common Germanic origin. The Common Germanic stock includes words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, and Icelandic. It contains a great number of semantic groups.

-nouns denoting parts of the human body( heart arm finger)

-nouns denoting period of time (summer winter time)

-words naming natural phenomena(storm rain ice sea)

- words denoting artifacts and materials( bridge house shop)

- words denoting abstract notions( care hope need life)

- names of animals and plants(goose ,wolf ,cow ,tree)

-adverbs(down out before)

3) English words proper. English words proper do not have cognates in other languages. These words are few and stand quite alone in the vocabulary system of Indo-European languages e.g. bird boy, girl, lady.