An Introduction to English Linguistics PDF

TABLE OF CONTENTS* *TO BE USED FOR INTERNAL EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. ANY MISUSE WILL BE PROSECUTED I. LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS..................................... 11 LEXICOLOGY............................................................................................................................ 11 THE WORD................................................................................................................................... 11 Orthographic words...................................................................................... 12 Phonological words.................................................................................. 12 Words as vocabulary items..................................................................... 13 Grammatical words................................................................................. 14 BRANCHES OF LEXICOLOGY.................................................................................................... 15 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEXICOLOGY AND OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS.........................................................................................................................................15 II. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY.................................. 17 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY..................................... 17 The Old English period (450-1066).............................................................. 17 The Middle English period (1066-1500)................................................. 18 The Early Modern English period (1500–1800).................................... 19 The Modern English period (from 1800 onwards)................................ 21 SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY........................................................................... 22 Native words in English........................................................................... 22 BORROWED WORDS IN ENGLISH.......................................................................................... 23 Reasons for borrowing............................................................................ 24 Adaptation (nativisation) of loanwords................................................ 26 Direct and indirect borrowing................................................................ 27 Latin words in English............................................................................ 27 Scandinavian words in English.............................................................. 29 Greek words in English............................................................................ 31 French words in English.......................................................................... 31 Words from other European languages in English.............................. 34 Words from non-European languages in English................................. 36 Recent loans in English.......................................................................... 38 III. WORD FORMATION.................................................................... 39 FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES......................................................................................... 39 ROOT............................................................................................................................................ 40 AFFIX........................................................................................................................................... 40 STEM............................................................................................................................................ 43 MAIN MEANS OF WORD-FORMATION................................................................................... 43 Derivation....................................................................................................... 43 Prefixation................................................................................................................... 43 Suffixation...................................................................................................... 46 Compounding........................................................................................... 50 Orthographic characteristics of compounds................................................. 50 1 Phonological characteristics of compounds................................................. 50 Morphological characteristics of compounds............................................... 51 Syntactic characteristics of compounds........................................................ 54 Semantic characteristics of compounds........................................................ 55 Conversion................................................................................................ 56 Nouns obtained by conversion...................................................................... 57 Adjectives obtained by conversion................................................................ 59 Verbs obtained by conversion....................................................................... 59 Adverbs obtained by conversion................................................................... 60 MINOR MEANS OF WORD FORMATION................................................................................. 61 Clipping..................................................................................................... 61 Contraction............................................................................................... 62 Back-formation........................................................................................ 63 Folk etymology......................................................................................... 63 Deflection.................................................................................................. 64 Change of accent...................................................................................... 65 Abbreviation............................................................................................. 65 Alphanumerics......................................................................................... 66 Eponyms................................................................................................... 66 Nonce words........................................................................................... 69 IV. WORD MEANING......................................................................... 70 SAUSSURE’S APPROACH TO THE LINGUISTIC SIGN............................................................ 70 OGDEN AND RICHARDS’ “SEMIOTIC TRIANGLE”.................................................. 71 BÜHLER’S “ORGANON MODEL”........................................................................... 72 WORD MEANING....................................................................................................................... 73 Denotation and reference........................................................................ 73 Denotation and sense............................................................................... 74 Denotation, connotation and markedness............................................. 75 SENSE RELATIONS BETWEEN WORDS................................................................................... 77 Synonymy................................................................................................. 78 General characteristics of synonyms............................................................. 78 Types of synonyms......................................................................................... 79 Sources of synonymy...................................................................................... 83 Antonymy................................................................................................. 85 General characteristics of antonyms............................................................. 86 Types of antonyms......................................................................................... 87 Hyponymy and meronymy..................................................................... 88 Homonymy............................................................................................... 90 Types of homonyms....................................................................................... 90 Sources of homonymy................................................................................... 92 POLYSEMY................................................................................................................................... 93 POLYSEMY AND HOMONYMY.................................................................................................. 94 SEMANTIC CHANGE.................................................................................................................. 96 Causes of semantic change...................................................................... 96 Extra-linguistic causes of semantic change................................................... 96 Linguistic causes of semantic change............................................................ 97 Results of semantic change..................................................................... 98 Extension or widening of meaning................................................................ 98 Narrowing or restriction of meaning............................................................ 98 Degradation of meaning................................................................................ 98 2 Elevation of meaning..................................................................................... 99 Transfer of meaning.............................................................................. 100 Metaphor.......................................................................................................100 Metonymy.....................................................................................................101 V. MULTI-WORD UNITS IN ENGLISH.............................................. 103 COLLOCATIONS........................................................................................................................103 Definition................................................................................................. 103 Characteristics and classification......................................................... 104 IDIOMS.......................................................................................................................................113 Definition................................................................................................. 113 Characteristics and classification......................................................... 114 Pragmatic idioms................................................................................... 123 MULTIWORD VERBS...............................................................................................................124 Definition................................................................................................. 124 Characteristics and classification......................................................... 124 BINOMINALS.............................................................................................................................126 Definition................................................................................................. 126 Characteristics........................................................................................ 126 PROVERBS.................................................................................................................................127 Definition................................................................................................. 127 Characteristics........................................................................................ 128 VI. LEXICAL STRATA IN ENGLISH.................................................. 129 DIACHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA.............................................................................................129 Archaisms................................................................................................ 129 Neologisms.............................................................................................. 130 SYNCHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA............................................................................................134 Geographical varieties of English......................................................... 134 Ethnic varieties of English..................................................................... 139 Social varieties of English..................................................................... 142 Standard English...........................................................................................142 Slang..............................................................................................................146 Written and oral varieties of English................................................... 149 VII. WORDS IN DICTIONARIES....................................................... 156 TYPES OF DICTIONARIES........................................................................................................156 ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY......................................................................................................158 British lexicography............................................................................... 158 American lexicography.......................................................................... 163 3 FOREWORD […] OMISSIS […] L. Frăţilă *TO BE USED FOR INTERNAL EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. ANY MISUSE WILL BE PROSECUTED 4 I. LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS Lexicology As its name shows (the term lexicology comes from the combination of the Greek words lexis, meaning “word” and logos, meaning “science”), lexicology is, broadly speaking, the science of words. Starting from this very simple definition, attempts have been made at providing others, enlarging upon various aspects connected either with its “word” part or with its “science” part. Thus, some of the definitions of lexicology found in general dictionaries of English include the following:  “… the study of the form, meaning and behaviour of words” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 2005);  “… a branch of linguistics concerned with the signification and application of words” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2003);  “… the branch of linguistics that deals with the lexical component of language” (American Heritage College Dictionary, 2002). Numerous linguists have also provided definitions of lexicology in their books. For Bejan and Asandei (1981: 110), lexicology is “the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of words as the main units of language.” Mc Arthur (1992: 5) defines lexicology as “an area of language study concerned with the nature, meaning, history and use of words and word elements and often also with the critical description of lexicography”, while Jackson and Amvela (2007) suggest that it represents “the study of lexis, understood as the stock of words in a given language, i.e. its vocabulary or lexicon (from Greek lexis, “word”, lexikos “of / for words”)”. Once we have seen that there is general agreement upon the fact that words represent the object of study of lexicology, it would be useful to answer the question of what words themselves are. The word Unlike lexicology, the word has not been given very clear definitions, the lack of clarity being due to the multitude of angles from which it has been approached. Things have got more and more complicated since Bloomfield suggested in 1926 that the word is “a minimum free form”, meaning that it is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used independently to convey meaning. For example, child is a word that cannot be divided into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand alone; if we contrast it with the word childish, we notice that the latter is 5 Words about Words made up of the independent meaningful word child and the particle –ish, which no speaker of English recognizes as capable of conveying some meaning when used in isolation (though, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means something like ”having the qualities of”). One of the endeavors to shed some light upon what is understood by a word belongs to Katamba (2005), who bases his explanations on recognizing a number of different senses in which the term “word” may be used. Before proceeding with the explanations proper, he usefully introduces the term “word-form”, “the physical form which realizes or represents a word in speech or writing” (Katamba 2005: 11). Orthographic words The easiest way to recognize a word is to consider it the strings of letters (and orthographic signs) occurring between two blank spaces in written language. Seen from this perspective, the word may be considered an orthographic word. However, as simple as this approach may seem, it is not universally valid. There is a degree of flexibility in the way words are written down. Being or not being separated by a space may in itself not be a sure sign of words status. Attention should be drawn upon the fact that, if, for example, compound words, either solid or hyphenated (e.g. blackboard, schoolboy, bedroom or mother-in-law, forget-me-not) may be correctly identified as single units of the vocabulary on the basis of the orthographic criterion, what are known in linguistics as clitic groups may not. A clitic group is made up of a host word and the clitic itself. There are two classes of cliticsin English: the class 1 clitic – the ‘s genitive, and the class 2 clitics – the reduced auxiliaries ‘ll, ‘re, ‘m, ‘d coming from shall / will, are, am, had / would and the contracted negation n’t for not. All of these clitics are appended to full words, the host words, but do not function as words themselves (although the full lexical items whose reduced forms they are doso). One more reason for which clitics do not qualify for word status is of a phonological nature – in order for a group of sounds to qualify for a word inEnglish, there must be a vowel among them. The requirement that words must contain vowels not being met, clitics cannot function as independent words. Phonological words Words as physical objects exist not only in writing, but also in speech. Seen from this perspective, they are known as phonological words. The recognition of spoken words seems to be a more difficult task than their recognition in writing, primarily due to the fact that the readily identifiable breaks at the boundaries of a written word are no longer present in speech. When spoken, words are not separated distinctly from 6 Lexicology – The Science of Words each other, they come in a torrent, they overlap. Yet, even if individual words do not stand out discretely in the flow of speech, separated by a pause that could be equated to a space in writing, speakers are able to identify them. There are hundreds of pages written on speech recognition but, for the purpose of this book, it will suffice to say that the process of the identification of a spoken word begins with the phonetic stage, when the listener hears a number of noises. S he then goes through the phonological stage, when s/he identifies what sound a particular noise represents and then, on the basis of his / her linguistic competence (s he is unlikely to be conscious of), the relevance of the sounds uttered for the actual context in which they are produced and the syntactic-semantic environment of those sounds, s he is able to instantaneously retrieve a word with the appropriate meaning from the tens of thousands of vocabulary items stored in his / her mental lexicon. Words as vocabulary items Lexicology distinguishes between words as word-forms and words as lexical items or lexemes. The lexeme is an abstract entity with different variants that is found in dictionaries and that has a particular meaning. Word-forms are the concrete objects that we write (orthographic words) or utter (phonological words), whenever we use language. The relationship between a lexeme and its word-forms is, according to Katamba (2002: 20) one of realization, representation or manifestation. For example, the lexeme ring occurs in dictionaries as such and may be represented when language is actually used by one of the following word- forms: ring, rang, rung, rings, ringing. The lexeme good may manifest itself in actual speaking or writing as good, better, the best. The lexemechild may be realized as child or children, etc. The distinction between word-forms and lexemes is not difficult to understand. It is a matter we, as language users, are aware of even at a very early age and it is the distinction on which word-play in puns and in intentional ambiguity in everyday life depends. In their Ladybird Book of Jokes and Rhymes, the Youngs (1981) suggest the following joke, illustrative in a very clear way of the difference between words as lexical items and words as word-forms: ‘Waiter, do you serve shrimps?’ ‘We serve anyone, sir. We don’t mind what size you are!’ The humor lies in recognizing that the word-form shrimp can belong to two different lexemes with unrelated senses: one meaning “an edible, long, slender crustacean” and the other meaning, in colloquial English, “tiny person”. The word serve may also be given two interpretations: “to dish up food” and “to wait upon a person at table”. If we 7 Words about Words combine meanings 1 and 2 of each of these words, we get completely different meanings of the short conversation. Thus, word-play exploits the lexical ambiguity arising from the fact that the same word-form represents two distinct lexemes with very distinct meanings. Grammatical words Seen from a grammatical perspective, words play an essential role in syntax, since sentences contain strings of words. A word as a lexical item with a particular meaning and certain morphological and syntactic characteristics is referred to as a grammatical word. The same word-form of a lexeme may be used as different grammatical words, a phenomenon known in linguistics as syncretism. If we consider sentences (1) and (2) below: (1) She paid the telephone bill yesterday. (2) She has paid the telephone bill., we notice that the verb pay is realized by the same word-form, namely “paid” in both sentences, although in sentence (1), “paid”, as a grammatical word, indicates that the action took place at a definite moment in the past, while, in sentence (2), it indicates that the action has been completed recently. In sentence (1), “paid” is described grammatically as the past tenseof the verb “pay”, in sentence (2), it is described as the past participle of the same verb. Syncretism does not characterize verbs only. It may be the attribute of other word classes as well. Sentences (3) and (4) below illustrate the phenomenon of syncretism in the case of nouns: (1) I saw a sheep and a deer. (2) She saw two sheep and two deer. Although the word-forms “sheep” and “deer” belong to the same lexemes and are unchanged in form in both sentences, in sentence (3), they realize the words with the grammatical properties [+noun, +singular], while in sentence (4), they represent the plurals of the same nouns. According to Katamba (2002), grammatical words are characterized by positional mobility on the one hand, and by stability or internal cohesion on the other. By positional mobility, the author means that words can be shifted around in a sentence, without affecting its globalgrammatical meaning, but with giving it a somewhat different emphasis, as it can be seen from the sentences below that contain the same words, but have different word orders and slightly different grammatical features: (5a) The Roman army started the war, unfortunately. 8 Lexicology – The Science of Words (5b) Unfortunately, the Roman army started the war. (5c) Unfortunately, the war was started by the Roman army. (5d) The war, unfortunately, was started by the Roman army. However, if the position of words in a sentence may be changed to suit the speaker’s or the writer’s communicative intentions, the elements inside a word itself occur in a rigidly fixed order – e.g. in a word such as impossibility, the order of the component elements im-, possible, -ity cannot be reversed to one’s liking. *Possibleimity, *ityimpossible, *ityposisbleim are not acceptable words in English. This is what Katamba (2002) means by stability or internal cohesion of grammatical words. Thus, a generally acceptable definition of the word, based on the four approaches mentioned above, may be that suggested by Bejan and Asandei (1981: 8): “The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds [and letters] capable of a particular grammatical employment”. Branches of lexicology Lexicology has two main divisions, established according to the degree of generality in tackling phenomena specific of words. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language, is known as general lexicology. Special lexicology concentrates on the description of the characteristic peculiarities of the vocabulary and its specific phenomena in a given language. This book is an introduction to such a study. Both these major branches of lexicology may be further divided into at least two other sub-branches. On the one hand, the approach of the vocabulary of a language from a diachronic point of view forms the domain of investigation of historical lexicology, which counts at length on etymology, the study of meaning, origin and development of individual words. Descriptive lexicology, on the other hand, operates synchronically, i.e. it deals with the characteristics of vocabulary at a given stage in its evolution. A third sub-branch of lexicology is lexicography, the compilation and writing of dictionaries. The relationship between lexicology and other branches of linguistics As Tătaru (2002) points out, it is clear, from the manner in which the word has been defined, that lexicology relies heavily on othermainstream branches of linguistics: phonology, morphology and syntax, 9 Words about Words semantics. In addition to these, etymology, lexicography, pragmatics, dialectology, socio-linguistics and psycholinguistics may also relate to lexicology. Phonology accounts for the ways in which words are spelt and pronounced. Morphology dictates the acceptable combinations of particles that generate words. Functionally, it accounts for the different morpho- syntactic values of words and, consequently, for their status as parts of speech. The relationships between words, both along the syntagmatic and along the paradigmatic axis (to be enlarged upon later in the book) can best be defined in context. Therefore, syntax also plays an important role in a lexicological study. Semantics deals with the meaning of words, a kind of study without which the compilation of dictionaries would be impossible. Etymology studies the history of words, with an emphasis on their origin, while lexicography, which Jackson (1988) considers “applied lexicology”, plays an undeniably important role in the writing and compilation of dictionaries. Pragmatics goes beyond the surface level of words and teaches us, for example, how to infer the right meaning of a word in a particular context. Dialectology studies the peculiarities of words from a given region or from a given historical period, for example. Socio-linguistics shows, for instance, how the use of words is determined by the characteristics of the participants in a linguistic exchange, while psycholinguistics deals with matters such as how words are stored in our brains and how it is possible for language users to retrieve the right word at the right time from this warehouse. These are only some of the possible ways in which lexicology interacts with other branches of linguistics. They are by no means exhaustive, but they suffice to demonstrate that an introduction to lexicology carries the advantage of offering insights into other areas of knowledge and investigation of words as well. 10 II. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY Historical development of the English vocabulary The most important intervals in the development of the English vocabulary are the Old, the Middle, the Early Modern and the Modern periods. Each of these will be briefly described below, following Jackson and Amvela’s (2007) description. The Old English period (450-1066) The first Old English (OE) manuscripts were nothing more than a few inscriptions, unable to offer much information about the characteristicsof the language, brought by the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and the sixth centuries. Only after the arrival of the Christian missionaries from Rome (587), did the literary age modestly begin, with a number of glossaries of words from Latin and their translation in OE, and a few inscriptions and poems. The most important literary work that survived from this period is the heroic poem Beowulf, written around the year 1000. Together with it, a number of shorter poems, some with Christian topics, others reflecting Germanic traditions, have been preserved. Although a greater number of OE texts were written after 900, when many Latin texts were translated, including Bede’s (731) Ecclesiastical History, the corpus of such texts remains reduced. As Crystal (1995: 10) points out, “the number of words in the corpus of OE compiled at the University of Toronto, which contains all the texts, is only 3.5 million – the equivalent of about 30 medium-sized novels”. The alphabet used in these writings resembles the one still in use today quite closely. Major dissimilarities are the absence of capital letters in OE, the different shapes of a few letters and the inexistence of the letters j, v, f, q, x and z in the older times. The spelling of OE was rather inconsistent, with variations within the same text and even on the same page of a manuscript. OE is characterized by the frequent use of coinages, known as “kennings”, a terms from Old Norse used to describe colourful figurative descriptions often involving compounds. Sometimes, the meaning of kennings is transparent, but there are cases when it is rather obscure and its interpretation is not a straightforward endeavour. Famous kennings include hronrad, “whale-road” for the sea, banhus, “bone-house” for the body. Often, phrases and compound words are used as kennings. “God” is, for example, described as heonfonrinces weard, i.e. “guardian of heaven’s kingdom” or as moncynnes weard, i.e. “guardian of mankind”. 11 Words about Words Besides spelling and the extended number of kennings, OE exhibits a number of other characteristics that make it differ from the present day situation in the language. On the one hand, the Anglo-Saxon preference for synonyms and the ingenuity of forming compounds exceeds by far that found in Modern English. On the other hand, the absence of an extensive number ofloanwords, forced OE to rely on word-formation processes based on native elements to build the lexical items needed. The consequence of this is the fact that OE had much larger families of morphologically related wordsthan Modern English does. Thirdly, late OE was characterized by the introduction of numerous calques or loan translations. These are lexical items obtained by word-for- word translation of words belonging to another language (eg. superman is a calque of the German “Ubermensch”). Examples of calques from Latin in OE include (as quoted by Jackson and Amvela 2007: 29): Latin OE praepositio foresetnys conjunction gedeodnys unicornis anhorn aspergere onstregdan Fourthly, grammatical relationships used to be expressed mainly with the help of inflections in OE (unlike they are today, mainly by word order). The explanation Jackson and Amvela (2007) offer for the disappearance of OE inflections is that it became increasingly difficult to hear them because of the way words came to be stressed with the evolution of Germanic languages. By placing the stress at the beginning of words, their different endings, especially the ones that were phonetically similar, became more and more inaudible until they disappeared completely (e.g. en, on, an in faren, faron, faran). Finally, the OE corpus is believed to have numbered about 24,000 words which were, however, different from the words English speakers use today. About 85% of the OE lexical items have fallen out of use. Furthermore, only about 3% of the words in OE were borrowed from other languages, compared with over 70% in Modern English. While the OE vocabulary was predominantly Germanic, this is no longer the case in present day English. The Middle English period (1066-1500) As compared to OE, Middle English (MidE) has a much richer documentation. At the beginning of the period, the number of public and private documents increased due to the national and local surveys made by 12 Sources of the English Vocabulary the newly centralized monarchy. Having been written in Latin and French, these are of a lesser documentary value for the evolution of English (the only English data that can be selected refer to personal and place names). Materials in English started to appear beginning with the thirteenth century and increased in number in the next one hundred years, under the form of translations of Latin and French texts and textbooks for teaching these languages. Beginning with the fourteenth century, ME enriched under the influence of the literary works written by authors such as John Gower, John Wycliff, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland. It is this body of literature, in the modern sense of the word, that bridged the transition from MidE to Modern English. Like in OE, spelling in MidE was quite diverse. Variation even within the same text continued to be a feature of the language for some time: variants of neuer, “never”, such as naure, noeure, ner, neure could be found within the same text. However, the more the period progressed, the more spelling changed to approximate that of Modern English. Unlike OE, MidE is characterized by intensive and extensive borrowing from other languages (in particular, the Norman Conquest, in 1066, paved the way for massive borrowing from French into the English vocabulary). Loan words that entered English affected the balance of the vocabulary in such a way that, while in early MidE, 90% of the words were of Anglo-Saxon origin, at the end of the period, the native stock decreased to 75%. However, loan words were by no means the only source that led to the enrichment of the English vocabulary. Word formation processes, such as affixation and compounding, already established in OE, continued to be active and were extended in various ways. The Early Modern English period (1500–1800) Early Modern English (EME) represents a period of transition from MidE to Modern English. However, while the existence of this period is generally acknowledged, there seems to be disagreement as to when its beginning should be set. Some consider an earlier date, around 1400 or 1450, others speak about a later date, around 1500, to mark its beginning. But many consider the printing revolution, initiated in 1476, when Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster, the safest starting point of Early Modern English. The introduction of printing by Caxton lead, on the one hand, to more and more books being published and spread over wider areas and, on the other hand, to spelling and punctuation starting to become standardized. Furthermore, in the sixteenth century, scholars began to discuss language problems more seriously, making observations on grammar, vocabulary, the writing system and style. EME encompasses the Renaissance (which runs from the middle of the fifteenth century to around 1650), a period of revived interest in the 13 Words about Words classical languages, rapid development of sciences and the arts and exploratory voyages to Asia, Africa and the Americas. All these factors had a major impact on the vocabulary of English, especially under the form of new loan words having been introduced from languages the Brits entered in contact with. Writers began to borrow from other European languages to refer to the new concepts, techniques and inventions originating in Europe. As explorations developed worldwide, words came into English from languages spoken on the other continents as well, some directly, some indirectly, via other European languages. Moreover, thousands of Latin and Greek words were introduced as a result of the English translators’ inability to find precise equivalents for these terms, especially in fields such as medicine and theology. The massive influx of foreign words was, in fact, considered the most prominent feature of English in the Renaissance, despite the opposition it was faced with on the part of purists supportive of the native stock of English. The last decades of the Renaissance witnesses the two most important influences on the development of the English language in the EME period: the works of William Shakespeare and King James Bible of 1611. The former offers valuable information on areas such as pronunciation, word formation, syntax and language use and plays an important role in the development of the English lexicon, by having introduced and promoted thousands of new words in the language. The latter, however, had an opposite impact. It contributed to the preservation of the native stock by opting for a more conservative style than Shakespeare’s and for older forms of the language, even when modern alternatives were available. Many phrases in King James Bible entered bothliterary and everyday English and have been preserved and extensively used ever since (at places, with minor changes): can the leopard change his spots, an eye for an eye, fight the good fight, if the blind lead the blind, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, money is the root of all evil, the skin of one’s teeth, new wine in old bottles, a thorn in the flesh, etc. Between 1530 and 1660, the lexicon of English grew very fast. Borrowings continued to enter the language at an accelerated pace, new words were formed by various internal means and many of the existing ones underwent semantic changes. With such a rapid and extensive development, the need was felt to “stabilize” the language. Unlike in France and Italy, where linguistic norms were imposed by the Academy, neither Britain nor the United States resorted to such a body to preserve the stability and consistency of the English language. Instead, grammars, spelling and pronunciation guides and dictionaries were produced by various scholars. In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published the first “dictionary of hard words”, which comprised about 3000 entries of difficult words in English, mostly borrowings. His work was followed by Nathaniel Bailey’s AUniversal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). This represented an 14 Sources of the English Vocabulary improvement as compared to its predecessor work, with more numerous and extensive entries. However, the definitions were still not relevantlyenough illustrated and the author offered little guidance on usage. The first really remarkable dictionary of English is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. As Crystal (1995) points out, although this was a smaller book than Bailey’s, it is considered more wide-ranging. The preface to the alphabetical entries contains an outlining of the author’s aims and procedures, a short history of the language and a grammar, with sections on orthography and prosody. Johnson changed the earlier prescriptive approach into a descriptive one, since, as he himself pointed out in the preface to his dictionary, his aim was “not to form, but to register the language”, a principle which marked the beginning of a new era in lexicography. The 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, “the first attempt at a truly principled lexicography” (Crystal 1995: 75), remained an authoritative work for almost a century, until it began to be criticized. The Modern English period (from 1800 onwards) The Modern English (ME) period is characterized by three main features: an unprecedented growth of the scientific vocabulary, the establishment of American English as a dominant geographic variety and the emergence of other varieties known collectively as the “New Englishes”. On the one hand, English scientific and technical vocabulary has been developing steadily since the Renaissance, but, in the nineteenth century, the rhythm of growth accelerated, as an outcome of the industrial revolution and the period of scientific exploration and discovery followingit. With a higher and higher level of education, people became more and more interested in science and technology and, consequently, more knowledgeable of their specific terminology. By the end of the nineteenth century, one could speak of “the English of science” as a well-defined variety of the language, whose characteristics were highlighted quite often in grammar books and in the style sheets of scientific journals. On the other hand, the strength American English gained may be explained, at least partly, by the fact that the United States became the leading economic power of the twentieth century. The assertion ofAmerican English is made even stronger by the fact that the Americans are the most numerous speakers of English as a mother tongue. In fact, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) point out, the USA has nearly four times as many speakers of English as a first language than the UK and, according to Crystal (1995), these two countries comprise about 70% of all the native English speakers in the world. The impact of American English on British English as well as on other (European) languages is felt especially in the lexical area, under the 15 Words about Words form of borrowings from the former into the latter. It is true though, that British English and these other languages have also input words to American English. This two-way transfer of words is due to the improvement of the communication systems and the development of the mass media beginning with the twentieth century, to the USA’s enhanced involvement into the world affairs and to the opening of various countries to the American culture. Thirdly, a number of “new Englishes” have developed during the modern period in the colonial area, as a result of the adaptation of British English to the regional linguistic and cultural needs of the speakers in countries such as India, the Philippines, Singapore, Cameroon, Ghana or Nigeria. The part of the language in which the peculiarities of these new varieties of English are best identifiable is vocabulary. In addition to the geographical varieties of English, those based on subject matter have also known an accelerated development in the ME period. Of these, some, such as the language of computers or that of telecommunication and business are relatively new, other such as the legal and religious varieties originate in earlier periods. Sources of the English vocabulary English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, which includes the following: Hellenic, the mother of ancient Greek, Germanic languages (e.g. German, English, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic), Romance languages (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian - all descendants of Latin), Celtic languages (e.g. Breton, Welsh, Welsh, Irish), Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Czech) and Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Kurdish, Persian). Languages of the same family inherit from the parent language phonological, morphological and syntactic features as well as core lexical items (the more closely related two languages are the greater their resemblance). Being a Germanic language, English has preserved its Germanic inheritance, which, together with the Old English and Anglo-Saxonelements, lie at the core of its present day vocabulary. Native words in English The native words are estimated to represent only 25-35% of the English vocabulary, but they form the bulk of the most frequently used lexical items. They include most of the form words such as auxiliary and modal verbs, some of the pronouns, numerals, prepositions and conjunctions and the majority of content words - nouns, adjectives, verbs 16 Sources of the English Vocabulary and adverbs. Native words denote, according to Crystal (1995: 124) parts of the body (arm, bone, chest, ear, eye, foot, hand, heart), the natural landscape (field, hedge, hill, land, meadow, wood), objects connected to domestic life (door, floor, house), members of the family (mother, father) divisions of the calendar (day, month, moon, sun, year), animals (cow, dog, fish, goat, hen, sheep, swine), natural phenomena (rain), common properties (black, dark, good, long, white, wide) and actions (do, eat, fly, go, help, kiss, live, life, love, say, see, sell, send, think). The words that arrived with the Germanic invaders and are still used in modern English are usually short. According to Crystal (1995: 18), the most frequent two hundred words, both in British (BrE) and in American English (AmE), are monosyllabic. There are a few two-syllable words (40 in AmE and 24 in BrE) and a handful of trisyllabic forms (3 in AmE and 2 in BrE) which have a concrete meaning and a great word-forming power. There is only one four-syllable item in AmE, the word American itself, while, in BrE, there is none. Native words are also concrete and have a great word-forming power. They tend to be preferred in everyday speech due to their being vague enough to convey many shades of meaning, as opposed to borrowed words, which are more precise and concrete and less easy to handle. Furthermore, as Jackson and Amvela (2007: 54) point out, native English words “are considered more human and emotional, whereas many polysyllabic loans from Greek, Latin or the Romance languages are considered cold and formal. For example, in an informal everyday situation,when faced with the choice between initiate, commence and start, or between nourishment, nutrition and food, most people would opt for the short, Anglo-Saxon word. In formal situations, however, it may seem more appropriate to allude to a nauseating odour or even an obnoxious effluvium rather than a nasty smell”. Borrowed words in English Apart from the native stock, English is a mosaic of words borrowed from a number of other languages, in various moments along its development (reference will be made to the periods in its evolution mentioned above, to highlight the most generous sources from which English has taken some elements of its vocabulary). Lexical items from other languages have been borrowed into English for various reasons, some of which are analyzed by Katamba (2005). His ideas in this respect will be summarized in the following section. 17 Words about Words Reasons for borrowing One of the reasons for borrowing vocabulary items from one language into another is identity. Language is not only a means of communication but also a symbol of its user’s identity. By using a particular language, a speaker suggests ways in which s/he perceives herself / himself and would like to be perceived by the others. Thus, if in a Spanish doctor’s surgery in Great Britain or the United States, a patient of the same nationality initiates a discussion in Spanish, s/he might want to signal solidarity, to emphasize their belonging to the same ethnic group. Alternatively, the two may resort to code-switching, i.e. to interspersing English with Spanish words. In mentioning the role played by code- switching in the process of borrowing, Katamba’s (2005: 139) opinion isthat “if foreign words are used habitually in it, they may pass from one language into another and eventually become fully integrated and cease being regarded as foreign. That is probably how words like chutzpah (“brazen impudence”), schlemiel (“a very clumsy, bungling idiot who isalways a victim”), schmaltz (“banal sentimentality”) and goyim (“gentile”) passed from Yiddish into (American) English. The fact that there is noelegant English equivalent to these Yiddish words was no doubt also afactor in their adoption”. Closely connected to identity is prestige. The desire of some to signal that they are related to a fashionable foreign culture, they are modern, the “crème de la crème”, manifests itself in these people’s using words belonging to the language of that culture. French, for example, has been a source of such loan words for English as well as for other European languages. Katamba (2005: 139) quotes the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, who, in his parody of the pardonnez-moi brigade, emphasizes this point succinctly: Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardonnez- moi, who stand so much on the new form that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench? O, their bons, their bons! (Romeo and Juliet, II, iv). Another reason for borrowing is to fill a gap created by the unavailability in English of a word to refer to a particular concept, creature, artefact, institution, religion initially belonging to a foreign culture. At various periods in history, different civilizations have been in leading positions in a particular domain and, as a normal consequence of this, their language in that domain has become the lingua franca of the field. Thus, in the late medieval and early modern periods, when many voices raised against the inadequacy of English for poetry, an infusion of 18 Sources of the English Vocabulary Latin and Greek words was found to be the solution for the improvement of a prosaic language that lacked the sophisticated metrical resources andpoetic devices that the classical languages boasted of. One of those who shared this concern was Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in his The Governor, a book meant for training the gentlemen who were going to be employed at court, enthusiastically introduced Latin and Greek words in order to improve English. Some such words are: devulgate, describe, attempate, education, dedicate, esteme. Others followed in his footsteps so that words from the classical languages flooded in: commemorate, invidious, frequency, expectation, thermometer, affable (Baugh and Cable 2002: 214- 215, quoted by Katamba 2005: 140). Not all borrowings were from Latin or Greek in the Middle Ages. Arabic was, for example, another rich source of words that passed into English during this period, especially in the field of science and the Islamic religion. Examples for the former category include alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, alkali, zenith, zero, while the latter category may be illustrated with words such as Koran, imam, caliph, muezzin, mullah, Ramadan, etc. Many of these have made their way into English via French, which borrowed them itself from Spanish, a very important carrier of the Arabic science and culture to Europe, since Spain was occupied by theMoors. For centuries, French was the language of politics, protocol, diplomacy, the government and the military. Hence, a large amount ofwords in these semantic fields that are used in English originate in French. Katamba (2002: 141) provides the following examples to support this statement: Military: cordon sanitaire, barrage, hors de combat, materiel, reveille; Diplomacy and protocol: corps diplomatique, charge d’affaire, communiqué; Government and politics: ancien regime, dirigiste, coup d’etat, laissez- faire, agent provocateur, etc. Names of people, animals, birds and plants have entered English from all kinds of languages spoken around the world: Sherpa, Gurka (Nepal), chimpanzee (Angola), koala (Australia), zebra (Congo). The arts and culture domain is represented in terms of borrowings by words such as samba (Brazil), rhumba (Cuba), tango (Argentina), didgeridoo (Australia). Numerous words referring to food have been imported in English: goulash (Hungarian), enchiladas, tacos, nachos (Mexican Spanish), moussaka (Greek), etc. The interference of English culture with other cultures of the world has resulted into the former’s having borrowed foreign words referring to articles of dress as well. Included in this category are: sarong (Malay), parka (Aleutian), anorak (Greenlandic Eskimo), kimono(Japanese), shawl (Persian), etc. In principle, new words may be coined in 19 Words about Words English to describe all of the above, but importing the object together with its name has proved a simpler and more appropriate solution. The same way out was resorted to in situations when English had a word or phrase to refer to a particular person, object, phenomenon or abstraction, but this was considered insufficiently appropriate to render all the features of its referent. This is how French words such as chic, flair, esprit de corps, naïve, blasé or ménage a trois have been borrowed into English. Any speaker of English would agree that the loan translations “a feeling of loyalty that exists between the members of a group” for esprit de corps or “a household with three partners” for ménage a trois lack the flavoured connotation of the French phrases and do not quite “roll off the tongue” (Katamba 2002: 142). Last but not least, some of the English euphemisms are borrowed lexical items. In their case, it seems that less embarrassment is caused when awkward things are said using words from a foreign language. Decency lies behind the use of the euphemistic words pudenda and genitalia, of Latin origin, and it is also the rationale behind the importation of several words used to talk discreetly about shady sexual activities and the participants in them. Maison de randezvous and madame from French and gigolo and bordello from Italian are illustrative of the latter. Adaptation (nativisation) of loanwords The foreign words that are borrowed into English may undergo changes under the influence of the recipient language or they may survivein their original form. In the former case, depending on the degree to which they change, we speak about completely and, respectively, partially assimilated loan words. In the latter case, we speak about unassimilated loans. Completely assimilated loans have become fully integrated in the system of English from an orthographic, phonetic and morphological point of view, so that someone who is not particularly knowledgeable in the field of etymology can no longer distinguish them from indigenous English words. Many of the French loanwords are included in this category: animal,aunt, chair, change, colour, cost, dinner, escape, flower, poor, table, etc. On the other hand, completely unassimilated loans have preserved all the characteristics they had in the language of origin. English has not exerted any influence either on their spelling or on their pronunciation and morphological peculiarities. If the recognition of the examples just quoted as originally French words is problematic, no speaker of English would find it difficult to identify words and phrases such as auberge, gendarme, mistral, maitre d’hotel, mauvais sujet, facon de parler as being French imports into English. In between the completely assimilated and the fully unassimilated loans, there are those which are not totally foreign but not totally Anglicised 20 Sources of the English Vocabulary either. “Even after a long period of use in English, some words fail tobecome fully adopted. Instead, they remain on the fringes, as tolerated aliens with one foot in and one foot out of the English lexicon”(Katamba 2002: 145). Loanwords that have preserved their original grammatical characteristics or spelling but have adapted to the English pronunciation – Lat. radius-radii, bacterium – bacteria, Fr. reveille (pronounced /rivæli/ in English) - are such aliens. Direct and indirect borrowing If a language takes a word directly from another, as English has taken omelette from French, we talk about direct borrowing. If, on the other hand, a word is passed from one language to another and then to another and to another, as it is the case of the English coffee, taken from theDutch koffie, arrived here from the Arabic kahva, itself an adaptation of the Turkish kahveh, the process is called indirect borrowing (we may consider the English coffee an indirect loan word of the Turkish kahveh). If words are borrowed indirectly, a distinction must be made between the source and the origin of the borrowing. The source is the language from which a particular word or phrase has entered another language, while the origin is the language to which the etymon of the loan lexical item can be traced back. Thus, in the above example, the source of the English coffee is the Dutch word koffie, while its origin is the Turkish word kahveh. In the case of direct borrowing, since there is no intermediary means between the donor and the recipient language, the source and the origin of the loan words coincide. Latin words in English To varying degrees, Latin has exerted a major influence on English from the OE period up to the modern times. The first borrowings from Latin date from the very beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period and are the result of the contacts the Anglo-Saxons had with the Roman population and, especially, with the Roman armies, on the continent. Some of the Latin words that the former brought back to their island were concerned with the military domain, commerce and agriculture. Others were related to plants, animals, clothing, the domestic life, legal institutions and religion (the last penetrated English beginning with 597, the year that marks the introduction of Christianity in England). Examples include: cheese, pepper, wine, butter, dish, beet, pear, lily, lion, ass, candle, shrine, monk, nun, abbot, bishop, belt, shirt, shoemaker, city, wall, tile, etc. The process of borrowing Latin words in the OE period has modest beginnings and it cannot boast a tremendous enlargement up to the end of this interval either. It is generally estimated that a total of around five 21 Words about Words hundred words passed from Latin into English during the entire period. As Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain, this is a relatively small number if compared with that of the Latin lexical items borrowed at later times. Furthermore, many of the words borrowed from Latin in the OE period were not widely employed and some of them fell out of use quite soon. Some, however, were borrowed again later, sometimes with a slightly different meaning. Modern English sign and giant seem not to be survivors from the OE Latin loans sign and gigant, but rather recent borrowings from French, where their original form is signe and geant. Borrowings from Latin in the OE period are frequently split into two categories in terms of register: popular and learned (Pyles, Algeo 1993: 288). The former, such as wine, plant, cat, street, were transmitted orally and are part of the everyday vocabulary used in non-specialized communication. The latter, such as clerk, demon, martyr, came into English either through the church or through various classical written sources which increased in number especially after 1000, “owing to renewed interest in learning encouraged by King Alfred and the tenth century Benedictine monastic revival” (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 40). In the Middle English period, it was French that was the most productive source of loan words into English. Though outnumbered by French loans, Latin ones kept entering English. The latter belonged to fields such as religion: mediator, redeemer, collect (short prayer); law: client, conviction, subpoena; the sciences: dissolve, equal, essence, medicine, mercury, quadrant; scholastic activities: library, simile, scribe. Seen from a morphological perspective, the great majority of the words borrowed from Latin in the Middle English period were nouns: meditation, prolixity; adjectives: complete, imaginary, instant, populous; and verbs: admit, commit, discuss, seclude. A distinctive feature of Modern English is rooted in the process of simultaneous borrowing from French and from Latin characteristic of the time span under discussion: sets of three lexical items, all expressing the same fundamental notion, but slightly differing in meaning or connotation. Kingly – royal – regal; rise – mount – ascend; fast – firm – secure; holy – sacred – consecrated are examples of such triplets. In these synonymic series, the first element is a native word and it belongs to the common language, the second is borrowed from French and it pertains to the literary language, and the third comes from Latin and is considered more learned. Borrowing from Latin continued into the Modern English period (when words were borrowed from Greek via Latin, too). The avalanche of Latin words that entered English between 1500 and 1800 includes: abdomen, area, digress, editor, fictitious, folio, graduate, imitate, lapse, medium, notorious, orbit, peninsula, quota, resuscitate, sinecure, urban, vindicate (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 41). The later Modern period was the time when English fashioned the loans from Latin in an original way, under the form of neo-classical or neo- 22 Sources of the English Vocabulary Latin words which are, at present, used not only in the international vocabulary of science and technology, but also in other areas of modern life. Examples of such coinages offered by Jackson and Amvela (2007: 41) are: aleatoric meaning “dependent on chance” (from the Latin aleator meaning “gambler”), circadian, meaning “functioning or recurring in 24-hour cycles” (from circa diem, “around the day”), pax americana meaning “peace enforced by American power” (modeled on pax romana), vexillology, “study of flags” (from the Latin vexilum meaning “flag”). Scandinavian words in English The second major influence of a foreign language on the vocabulary of English was the result of the Vikings’ (mainly Danes, but also Norwegians) raids on Britain, which began in 787 and continued intermittently for about two hundred years. By the mid ninth century, the Danes came to control most of the north and eastern part of England which was named, after the invaders, the Danelaw. Further invasions in the tenth century culminated in 991, with the English king having been forced to take the way of exile and the throne having been taken by the Danes. England remained under Danish rule for 25 years after this event. The prolonged contact between the native population and the Danish settlers had, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain, a threefold linguistic consequence. First, a large number of Scandinavian place names entered English. Second, many proper names of Danish origin were borrowed and third, a lot of Danish common words became part of the everyday English vocabulary. Examples of place names of Scandinavian origin include words ending in –by, the Scandinavian word for farm or town: Derby, Grimsby, Rugby, Naseby. Other such words end in –thorpe, meaning “village” (Baugh, Cable 2002: 98): Althorpe, Astonthorpe, Linthorpe, while still others have – thwaite, “clearing” or –toft, “homestead” in theircomposition: Braithwaite, Applethwaite, Storthwaite, Lowestoft, Eastoft, Sandtoft, etc. A strong Scandinavian influence on proper names is felt especially in the north and east, in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where over 60 percent of these seem to be the result of the native and foreign cultures having been in contact for so long. The majority of proper names of Scandinavian origin end in –son: Davidson, Jackson, Henderson. When the Vikings settled in England, they did so largely as equals of the natives, a fact which resulted in “adstratum influence” (Allegrini 2003: 4) i.e. neither of the two languages was politically or culturally dominant. They were supposedly mutually intelligible and bilingualism was most likely fairly spread among the Scandinavians (Kastovsky 1992: 329). This, together with the fact that the English and the Scandinavians had pretty similar cultures, enabled a close unity between them. Moreover, 23 Words about Words Scandinavian was mostly a spoken language in the conquered territories, usually banned from writing on the grounds of the existence of equivalent English forms used on paper, which were considered more formal and more literary and, therefore, more appropriate for this variant of the language. Consequently, many of the Scandinavian loan words were informaleveryday lexical items, belonging to the core of the vocabulary, which is, according to Barber (2000: 133), one of the most obvious of their characteristics. Most of the words of Scandinavian origin were made to conform to the English sound and inflectional systems. For example, as Pyles and Algeo (1993) emphasize, very common verbs such as get and give came to be used in Modern English not as variants of the OE gitan and giftan, but as survivors of their Scandinavian cognates. The personal pronouns they, them, their replaced earlier native forms. In addition, “the replacement of sidon by are is almost certainly the result of Scandinavian influence, as is the spread of the third personal singular –s ending in the present tense in other verbs” (Crystal 1995: 25). Numerous words beginning with the consonantal cluster sc- / sk- are of Scandinavian origin: scathe, scorch, score, scowl, scrape, scare, scrub, skill, skin, skirt, sky. Sometimes, the process of borrowing fromScandinavian languages involved the mere substitution of the native word or phrase with the foreign one (as in the case of window which replaced vindauga). Other times, however, loan words were introduced to fill in a lexical gap in the recipient language – this was, for example, the case of Scandinavian legal terms or words denoting Viking warship. A large number of duplicates (pairs of words having the same referent, of whichone was native and the other was borrowed) also arose from the contact of English with the Scandinavian languages. In some cases, the loan word was preserved, while the native one was discarded: egg vs. OE ey, sister vs. OE sweoster, silver vs. OE sealfor. In others, the OE word survived, while the Scandinavian was lost: path vs. ON reike, sorrow vs. ON site, swell vs. ON bolnen. There were situations, however, when both words made their wayin the language up to the modern times, but developed a difference in meaning. Below are a few examples of such pairs (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 43): ON dike OE ditch hale whole raise rise sick ill skill craft skirt shirt Sometimes, in cases of duplicates that survived, one member of the pair is used in the standard language, while the other is restricted to 24 Sources of the English Vocabulary dialectal use. In the following examples, the former word, of OE origin, is considered standard and the latter, a loan from ON, is dialectal: cast – werpan, yard – garth, church – kirk, leap – laup, no –nay, true – trigg. After the 11th century, Scandinavian languages ceased to be a rich source of borrowings for English. However, modest influences continued to be felt along the centuries up to the period of Modern and present day English, when words such as muggy, rug, scud, ski, geyser, rune, saga, ombudsman have been imported. Greek words in English Though less influential than Latin, which was the language of literature, science and religion as well as the medium of instruction for about fifteen centuries (even longer in some parts of the world), Greek played its role in the evolution of the English vocabulary. Initially, words of Greek origin were imported into English indirectly, mostly via Latin, before the Norman conquest, in 1066 and via French and Latin from the Middle English period onwards. It was only at the beginning of the Early Modern English period, after 1500, that English started borrowing directly from Greek. This must have been the consequence of the boost that Greek studies received with the coming of the Greek scholars to Europe after Constantinopole was conquered by the Turks, in 1453. Greek provided English with a considerable number of technical terms from almost all branches of human knowledge. Greek words that were borrowed via Latin include: allegory, anaesthesia, chaos, dilemma, drama, enthusiasm, history, metaphor, paradox, “phenomenon”, rhythm, theory, zone. Center, character, chronicle, democracy, ecstasy, harmony, machine, tyrant came from Greek via French, while acronym, autocracy, idiosyncrasy, pathos, telegram, xylophone were taken directly from Greek. As representatives of technical vocabulary mainly, the majority of the words of Greek origin in English are considered learned and are restricted to the specialized varieties of the language. A smaller part of them managed to pass into the stock of everyday vocabulary. French words in English The most far-reaching contact that English has had through the ages has been with French. Undoubtedly, it was the period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 that witnessed the greatest impact that French had ever exerted over English. However, borrowing from French took place in an anterior epoch and has been an active phenomenon in the modern times as well. Before 1066, the English and the French cultures got into contact with the exile of Edward the Confessor to Normandy. Edward lived there 25 Words about Words for twenty-five years and returned to England in 1041. Many of the French nobles who accompanied him on his return were given high positions in court when he acceded to the throne. Furthermore, the monastic revival started in France and many of the English monks must have studied there. The consequence of these upon the English language was that a number of French words were imported into OE (though not very many). Among them, there were: servian (“to serve”), bacun (“bacon”), arblast (“weapon”), prison (“prison”), castel (“castle”), cancelere (“chancellor”). Following William, Duke of Normandy’s accession to the English throne, in 1066, French became the language of the government, the courts, the church and the upper social classes. However, the lower classes of the English society, which represented about 80% of the population, never learned French. They continued to speak English which thus remained a vibrant, though low-status language. In between the two ends of the social scale, there used to be the middle echelons of the “lower level officials of both church and state [who] needed to speak to the people in order to try to save their souls, to exact taxes from them, to administer justice to them, to make them work in the fields of the monastery or in the lord of the manor’s household and so on” (Katamba 2005: 152). This relatively small group of people were bilingual. With the advance of the period, the situation changed. Many of the nobles had properties both in Normandy and in England and had split loyalties so that, in many cases, they were closer to France and the French culture than to England and its culture. The Norman kings remained dukes of Normandy and some of them were present in France for longer than they were in England. Through marriage and conquest, their French possessions expanded so much that Henry II (1154 – 1189), for example, was not only king of England, but had become the ruler of almost two thirds of France. However, gradually, through intermarriage and closer and closer contact, the Normans were integrated into the English society. For the upper classes, this resulted into their having learnt some English, which however, they were able to use only within limits in the beginning, and mostly in code-switching contexts. Most of the borrowing took place after the middle of the thirteenth century, “after French had been knocked off its perch as the most prestigious language in everyday use in high places and had increasingly become a written language” (Katamba 2005: 153). About 10,000 French words made their way into English in The Middle Ages, most of them in the area of government: president, government, minister, territory, counselor, council, people, power; nobility: sovereign, royal, monarch, duke, prince, count, princess, principality, baron, baroness, noble; law: assizes, judge, jurisdiction, advocate, jury, court, law, prison, crime, accuse; war: “peace”, “battle”, admiral, captain, lieutenant. In the period 1200 – 1500, further steps towards reviving the fortunes of English were recorded. Not least among them was King John’s 26 Sources of the English Vocabulary loss of Normandy in 1204. Yet, it was the Hundred Year War between England and France, which began in 1337, that put an end to the linguistic hegemony of French. The ruling classes were forced to take on the task of learning and using English properly, as a consequence of giving up their French interests and becoming truly English having been imposed on them. The adoption of French words that followed the Norman Conquest continued unabated in contemporary English. The reasons behind this phenomenon are talked about by Chirol (1973), quoted by Katamba (2005). She suggests that using French projects upon the speaker or upon the matter or object talked about a “positive image of France” (Katamba 2005: 155). In broad lines, this image is that “of the French way of life, of high culture, sophistication in dress, food and social relations” (Katamba 2005: 155). The French contribution to civilization as a whole is widely known and acknowledged. France is perceived as the land of the arts – of literature, music architecture, ballet, painting and sculpture. Therefore, it is natural that many of the technical terms used in the vocabulary of arts should be French. Examples of such terms in English include, in literature: ballade, brochure, genre, denouement, résumé, dada, faux amis, pastiche; in painting: critique, avant garde, art nouveau, collage, baroque, renaissance, salon; in music: rêverie, ensemble, bâton, musique, concrete, conservatoire, suite, pot- pourri; in ballet: ballet, pirouette, gavotte, pas de deux, plié, tutu, jeté, etc. Society, refinement and fashionable living are also believed to be domains in which the French occupied a leading position. Hence, the borrowing of words and phrases such as the following, which enabled English speakers to take on the elegance of French: finesse, bizarre, tête-à- tête, rendez-vous, élite, protégé(e), savoire-vivre, personnel, fiancé(e), débutante, prestige, nouveau riche, élan, blasé, chauffeur, facile, c’est la vie, touché, etc. “Victorian values encourage the hypocritical ‘No-sex-please-we’re- British’ mentality. Figures in public life in Britain are hounded out of office and governments may collapse because of sexual peccadilloes. Probably this is why there is a secret admiration for the French who do not have such hang- ups about sex. The British admire the sexual prowess of the French – or, more precisely, the French attitude to sex”, Katamba says (2005: 157). This must be the reason for the borrowing of quite numerous words of French origin connected to love and sexual life. Among these, there are: amour, beau, belle, chaperon, liaison, affaire de Coeur, madame, etc. The French have always been renowned for their cuisine, so, many French words having to do with food and cooking have also been borrowed along the ages. Some were anglicized, others preserved their original form. On the menu, the latter “always add to the quality of the gastronomic experience and are deemed to be worth an extra pound or two on the bill” (Katamba 2005: 157). The “cuisine” French words and phrases that have 27 Words about Words been imported into English count among them examples such as: mustard, vinegar, beef, sauce, salad, cuisine, haricot, pastry, omelette, meringue, haricot, cognac, crème caramel, pâtisserie, liqueur, éclair, flan, nougat, glacé, sauté, flambé, garni, brasserie, à la carte, entrée, rôtisserie, hors- d’oeuvre, etc. French fashion has also been held in high esteem for centuries. Therefore, the list of loans from French includes words in the area of clothes, hair, cosmetics, etc, such as: coiffure, blonde, brunette, lingerie, bouquet, béret, chic, boutique, haute couture, après-ski, culottes, brassière. Some fashionable means of transportation get their names from French as well: coupé, cabriolet. Words from other European languages in English Besides French, English has borrowed from a number of other modern European languages. Starting with its Early Modern period, it has taken over words from Dutch and German, in the context of the commercial relationships that have been established between the Flemish / Dutch and the English- speaking peoples. As a consequence of the Dutch’s skillfulness in seafaring activities, English enriched with terms connected to sea life and navigation such as: bowline, bowsprit, buoy, commodore, cruise, deck, skipper, smuggle, yacht. The Dutch and the Flemish have also been famous for their cloth making and the commercial activities connected to it so that English borrowed terms in this area as well: cambric, duck, jacket, nap, spool. Loanwords from other Low German dialects include: boor, broke, isinglass, luck, snap, wagon, etc. The contact of the Americans with the Dutch settlers, especially in and around New York, resulted into a number of words referring to Dutch American food having been imported into English. Among these, there are; coleslaw, cookie, cranberry, waffle. Lexical items from various other fields may be added to the list: boodle, boss, caboose, dope, Santa Claus, spook, from Dutch spoken in America, and apartheid, commandeer, commando, kraal, outspan, spoor, trek, veld, from Dutch spoken in South Africa (Afrikaans). Unlike Low German, High German has had a less poignant impact on English. A number of words have been borrowed in specialized fields such as geology and mineralogy: cobalt, feldspar, gneiss, nickel, quartz, seltzer, zinc. Some food and drink terms have been imported together with the items they designate: delicatessen, frankfurter, noodle, schnapps, alongside a small miscellanea of other borrowings, including angst, ersatz, Gestalt, hinterland, leitmotiv, rucksack, umlaut, waltz, etc. Of the Romance European languages, English has borrowed from Italian, Spanish and Portuguese mainly. 28 Sources of the English Vocabulary Italian words started their way into English as early as the sixteenth century, with the adoption of items pertaining to the vocabulary of music, one of the arts particularly representative for the Italians. Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) quote a number of words dating from that period. Their examples include: duo, fugue, madrigal, violin. These were followed, they say, in the seventeenth century by allegro, largo, opera, piano, presto, sonata, solo and, in the eighteenth century, when the interest of the English for Italian music reached its peak, by adagio, andante, aria, cantata, concerto, crescendo, duet, finale, forte, oratorio, trio, trombone, viola. The process continued in the nineteenth century, with the adoption of alto, cadenza, legato, piccolo, prima-donna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Italians immigrated in large numbers to the United States. Many of them went into the food business and popularized Italian cuisine. Consequently, many Italian words connected to food and cooking entered American English and subsequently spread to other dialects of English as well. Some such words are: pizza, pasta, spaghetti, macaroni, ciabatta, cannelloni, lasagna, zucchini, pesto, tagliatelle, “macaroni”, scampi. Italian words from areas other than music and cuisine that have been borrowed include: balcony, balloon, carnival, dilettante, fresco, ghetto, regatta, stiletto, studio, torso, umbrella, vendetta, volcano. Spanish and Portuguese became suppliers of words to English in the sixteenth century. The former has been a rich direct source of loans, while the latter was less so. In addition, many non-European words from the colonies found their way into English via Spanish and Portuguese. As Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) point out, “many of these loanwords came from the New World: alligator, avocado, barracuda, canoe, chocolate, cigar, cockroach, domino, embargo, mosquito, peccadillo, potato, sombrero, tobacco, tomato, tornado, tortilla, vanilla”. The nineteenth century seems to have been the period when Spanish words penetrated English, especially its American variety, in large numbers. Among the words adopted then, there are: bonanza, canyon, lasso, mustang, patio, ranch, sierra, siesta, stampede. The twentieth century is characterized by loan translations such as moment of truth, a linguistic calque of the Spanish “momento de la verdad”, referring to the moment when the bull is killed by the toreador in the arena. As far as Portuguese words that were taken over into English are concerned, though the process of borrowing started much earlier, the great majority of them entered English during the modern period. This majority included: albino, copra, flamingo, Madeira, mango, marmalade,molasses, palaver, teak. From other European languages, English has borrowed few words. Sable came into English in Middle English times via French, from Slavic languages; polka came via French in the nineteenth century, from Czech, alongside later borrowings such as howitzer, pistol, robot. Mammoth was 29 Words about Words borrowed in the eighteenth century directly from Russian. Other more recent borrowings from Russian have not become completely naturalized: bolshevik, czar, glasnost, intelligentsia (ultimately from Latin), perestroika, tundra, vodka. From Hungarian, English has borroweddirectly goulash and paprika; while coach came via French, from the Hungarian kosci. Turkish and Tatar words in English include: bosh, caique, coffee, cossack, divan, fez, horde, kaftan, kavass, kebab, khan, kumiss,mammoth, pasha, shish, Tartar, turkey, turquoise, yoghurt. Words from non-European languages in English With the expansion of the British Empire, which facilitated the spread of English to all continents between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, and with the ascendancy of the United Stated immediately after the Second World War, when the British Empire started its decline, English came in contact with many languages around the world. The result of this contact has been two fold: English has influenced these languages to a lesser or a greater degree and has itself been affected by them. In North America, English borrowed from the Native American languages common words such as avocado, barbecue, buccaneer, cacao, cannibal, canoe, wampum, toboggan, iguana, maize, moccasin, papaya, tomahawk, skunk, squash, tobacco, coyote, “caribou”, poncho, tomato, yucca and a number of proper nouns such as mountain names: Appalachians, Alleghenies, the names of the Great Lakes: Erie, Ontario, Huron, Michigan, Superior, names of states: Oklahoma, Massachusetts and names of cities: Chicago, Saratoga, Tallahassie. On the other side of the world, the languages spoken in what are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been a source of verbal source to English that cannot be overlooked. Rao (1954), quoted by Katamba (2005) gives a quite comprehensive account of the Indian loans in English. He points out that the nature of the borrowed words has changed with the centuries, mirroring the developments outside the language. There are a few words designating trade goods which predate the Raj: copra, coir, pepper, sugar, indigo. Most of these words entered English indirectly, via Latin, Greek or French. Indian became a direct source of loan words starting from the very early years of the British colonization of India. Quite understandably, the words borrowed at this time were a reflection of the commerce between Britain and the newly colonized territory and included terms such as calico, chintz and dungaree. As time passed, the range of Indian words borrowed into English widened so that, besides words referring to mundane trade goods which continued their way into English, lexical items in the areas of religion, 30 Sources of the English Vocabulary philology, articles of dress and various other domains have also been imported. Katamba (2005: 161) reproduces Rao’s (1954) table to demonstrate the diversity and wealth of the Indian loan words: Hinduism: Buddha, Brahmin, karma, pundit, yoga, mantra, nirvana; Food: chutney, chapatti, curry, poppadom; Clothing: cashmere, pyjamas, khaki, mufti, saree; Philology (19th century): sandhi, bahuvrihi, dvandva; People and society: Aryan (Sanskrit), pariah, mem-sahib, sahib, coolie; Animals and plants: mongoose, zebu, bhang, paddy, teak; Buildings and domestic: bungalow, pagoda, cot; Assorted: catamaran, cash, chit, lilac, tattoo, loot, polo, cushy. Though a smaller number of words coming from farther east have entered English, at least some of them cannot pass unnoticed since they have come to be used quite frequently. Thus, the AskOxford website mentions the following as loan words from Chinese languages: china, chin- chin, chopsticks, chopsuey, chow chow, chow mein, dim sum, fan-tan, fengshui, ginseng, gung-ho, kaolin, ketchup / catsup, kowtow, kung fu, lychee, loquat, mahjong, pekoe, sampan, tai chi, taipan, Tao, tea, yang, yen, yin. According to the same source, aikido, banzai, bonsai, bushido, futon, geisha, haiku, hara-kiri, judo, jujitsu, Kabuki, kamikaze, kimono, koan, mikado, sake, samisen, samurai, sayonara, Shinto, shogun, soy(a), sushi, teriyaki, tofu, tycoon, yen, Zen have been taken from Japanese, while lama,Sherpa, yak, yeti, now present in English, originate in Tibetan. Languages from south and south-east Asia, though less known to non-linguists, have also given words to English. Hindi / Urdu is the source language for bungalow, crore, dacoit, deodar, dinghy, dungaree, ghee, gymkhana, jodphurs, lakh, loot, paisa, pakora, Raj, samo(o)sa, shampoo, tandoori, tom-tom, wallah. Bantam, batik, gamelan, junk come from Javanese. Malay has contributed amok, bamboo, caddy, camphor, cassowary, cockatoo, dugong, durian, gecko, gingham, gong, kampong / compound, kapok, kris, lory, mangosteen, orangutan, paddy, pangolin, rattan, sago, sarong. From Sanskrit, mainly indirectly, English received ashram, avatar, banya, banyan, beryl, brahmin, carmine, chakra, cheetah, chintz, chutney, crimson, guru, juggernaut, jungle, jute, karma, lacquer, mandarin, nirvana, palanquin, pundit, sapphire, sugar, suttee, swastika, yoga, etc. From Sinhala, it enriched with anaconda andtourmaline. and from Tagalog with boondock, ylang-ylang. Tamil has given English catamaran, cheroot, curry, mango, mulligatawny, pariah. 31 Words about Words Recent loans in English English is borrowing words on a regular basis. The process of importing lexical items from other languages has never stopped, it has only changed its characteristics lately. The main features that are peculiar to it at present are the fact that the frequency of borrowing is considerably reduced and that English seems to be spreading its tentacles and borrow from less and less known languages. To prove this, Jackson and Amvela (2007) quote Pyles and Algeo (1993: 310) who mention a study by Cannon (1987) of more than a thousand recent loan words from almost one hundred languages, which shows that “about 25% [of these] are from French, 8% each from Japanese and Spanish, 7% each from Italian and Latin, 6% each from African languages, German and Greek, 4% each from Russian and Yiddish, 3% from Chinese, and progressively smaller percentages from Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Malayo-Polynesian, Vietnamese, Amerindian languages, Swedish, Bengali, Danish, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Amharic, Eskimo-Aleut, Irish, Norwegian, and 30 other languages.” With all this diversity of sources, as the study itself demonstrates, the largest supplier of loan words to English remains, at present, French. This may be because of the geographical proximity of France and England. A reason of the same kind, Mexico’s vicinity with the United States, mightlie behind the frequent borrowing from American Spanish by American English. The increase in importance of Japanese as a source of loans might be the consequence of Japan’s having gained more and more power on the global market in general. As far as Latin, a former rich source of loans, is concerned, Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain its decline as a provider of words to English both by the fact that, since English borrowed from it so extensively in previous ages, there is relatively little left to be borrowed and by the fact that, rather than borrowing directly from Latin, English often now creates new Latinate words from English morphemes originally from Latin. The discussion so far about the sources of the English vocabulary has taken into account the native stock of the language and the various sources of borrowing, in different periods of time. Besides importing words from other languages, the English vocabulary has been continuously enriching by another means – the formation of new lexical items. The next chapter will explore word formation processes in more detail. 32 III. WORD FORMATION Before surveying the techniques of word formation that have given birth to new words in English, the introduction of the main concepts involved in such a presentation - free and bound morphemes, root, affix, and stem – might prove useful. Free and bound morphemes Originally, “morphology” meant the study of biological organisms. But nineteenth century students of linguistics borrowed the term and applied it to the study of word structure, so that, in linguistics, morphology came to mean the study of the formation and internal organization of words. The basic concept morphology operates with is the morpheme, “the smallest unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built” (Katamba 2005: 29). However, they are just theoretical constructs since, in practice, it is the variants of a morpheme that are used to form new words. These variants are called allomorphs and they are in a relation of mutual exclusiveness, i.e. only one allomorph can occur in a given context. For example, im-, in-, il-, ir- are variants of the same morpheme, employed on phonetic principles, according to the starting sound of the element to which they are added: im-possible, in-cautious, il-literate, ir-responsible; the selection of the morpheme –(e)s, the marker of the regular plural of nouns, is also determined by phonological factors so that it may be realized under the form of one of the following allomorphs: /s/ in hats, /z/ in games and /iz/ in oranges. The morphemes that constitute the core for the formation of new words are less sensitive to the phonetic environment and more so to the grammatical context in which they occur. This is obvious for irregular verbs morphemes, whose allomorphs differ on grammatical grounds: eg. the allomorphs drove and driven correspond, respectively, to the past simple and the past perfect of the morpheme drive. According to their distribution, morphemes fall into two broad categories, free morphemes and bound morphemes. The former can appear independently in an utterance and have a meaning of their own, while the latter cannot be used independently and do not have a notional or full meaning, but a functional or derivative one. Bound morphemes are always appended to free forms (eg. drive is a free morpheme, while –er is a bound one; if the latter is added to the former, we obtain the word driver which, in its turn, is another free morpheme, according to the above definition). 33 Words about Words Root The root is, Tătaru (2002: 22) says, “the necessary and sufficient structural constituent for a word to exist”, the part common to all the words in a word family (“the whole series of words and word-substitutes obtained from one root by all possible word-forming mechanisms” (Tătaru 2002: 38)), which is not further divisible into smaller parts that have a meaning (eg. care in the words careful, careless, carelessness, caring). If roots are equivalent to a word in the language and carry the notional meaning of this word into all the new words they form, they are considered free roots (eg. civil in civility, region in regional or person in personify). If, on the other hand, they are totally barred from occurring independently, they are considered bound roots (eg. sanct in sanctify, tox in toxic or loc in local). Affix The bound morphemes that are appended to the root are called affixes. Depending on their position to the root, affixes may be prefixes, if they are added before the root, suffixes, if they are added after the root and infixes, if they are added somewhere within the root (modern English has no infixes in its regular voca

An Introduction to English Linguistics PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript