Borrowings

The significance of the borrowed words in any national vocabulary much depends on the historical development of the language that is on the direct linguistic contacts as well as political, economic, cultural and all other relations between nations. The English history contains innumerable occasions for all types of such contacts. It’s know that up to 70% of the modern English vocabulary consists of loan words and only 30% are the native lexicon. However, this fact is not due to some special tolerance of the foreign elements in English, but rather to the specific conditions and peculiarities of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, as well other specific features marking the long development of British colonialism, caused important changes in the modern English vocabulary.

From the very beginning we should distinguish between the two different basic terms: the source of borrowing, the origin of borrowing.

The source of borrowing is the language from which the loan word has been directly taken.

The origin of borrowing is the language to which the word may be traced.

For example the English word paper came from papier, so that the French language is the source of the borrowing. But papier in its turn came from papyrus which is a Latin word and papyros which is Old Greek. So old Greek is the language of origin of this word.

Apart from the loan words proper we should distinguish between translations or calks and semantic loans. Loan translations are words and expressions “constructed” from the native material, but staying in accordance with the patterns of another language. Such loans are coined by way of literal morpheme-to-morpheme or word-to-word translation. E.g. the word chain-smoker is a calk from the German Kettenraucher; the expression it goes without saying comes from French cela va sans dire; the word pioneer meant in English “explorer” and the one among the first in some new activity or field, however under the influence of the Russian word пионер it also began to denote a member of a young politicians organization in the USSR.

Foreign borrowings in the English language, especially those, which are considered old, penetrate the English vocabulary so deeply that it may become difficult to separate them from native words. This is due to the high degree of assimilation of such words to the English language system. Some evident examples here are words like cheese, street, wall, wine, which all belong to the earliest layer of Latin borrowings. However, many loan words, in spite of all the changes they have undergone, retain some peculiarities in their morphology, spelling, pronunciation, etc.

E.g. the initial position of sounds [v], [dз], [з] shows that the word is borrowed, like vacuum (Latin), valley (French), vanilla (Spanish), gem (Latin), jewel (Old French), genre (French), gendarme (French). Initial letter j, x, z, combinations of ph, kh, eau in the root also denote borrowings. Examples are numerous: philosophy (Greek), khaki (Indian), beau (French). The combination of ch if read as [ш] certainly denotes French origin. The same ch red as [k] denotes Greek origin.

Monosyllabic character of native words and polysyllabic of borrowings should also be noted. Thus company, condition, continue, government, important are among the most frequently used borrowed words.

If a stress in an English word falls on the last syllable it for sure denotes are borrowing: hotel, magazine, event, cigarette (although can be pronounced with first syllable stressed), cigar, etc. However, the stress may be shifted and adapted to the English phonetic system even in the most evident borrowings like café.