Seminar 1

1. Etymology of English
The term Lexicology is of Greek origin (from lexis - word and logos - learning).
More than two-thirds of the English vocabulary is made up of borrowings. Basically, these are
words of Romance origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words differ from native
ones in their phonetic structure, in morphological structure, and also in their grammatical forms.
The Roman invasion, the adoption of Christianity, the Scandinavian and Norman conquests of
the British Isles, the development of British colonialism, as well as trade and cultural relations,
contributed to a significant increase in the vocabulary of the English language.
English has now become a "giving" language, it has become the lingua franca of the twentieth
century.
Borrowed funds can be classified according to various criteria:
a) according to the borrowed aspect,
b) according to the degree of assimilation,
c) according to the language from which the word was borrowed.
Only 30% of the English vocabulary is of native English origin, and 70% are borrowed words
and phrases. The term "borrowing" is used in linguistics to refer to the process of borrowing
words from other languages, as well as the result of this process - the language material itself.
The first borrowings that came into English from written manuscripts were Latin scholastic
concepts; others as of French origin - during the Norman invasion; and others are Old Norse
(like Scandinavian).
There is a postulate: when two or more peoples are next to each other, their languages enter
into a so-called relationship. There you can see the process of borrowing words by one people
from their neighbors. As long as these peoples coexist side by side, so many words and
expressions from their languages will intersperse each other on a reciprocal basis.
2. Sources of Воrrоwіпgs. Latin, Greek, Scandinavian and French
Loans.
In the 1st century B.C. the Germanic tribes, that later gave rise to the present-day nation of
Englishmen, lived on the territory of Europe, which was occupied by the Roman Empire. So the
1st layer of borrowings represents those from the Latin language.
Latin borrowings may be divided into 3 groups:
 Ancient borrowings which goes back as far as the 1st century B.C. when the Anglo-
Saxon tribes were still on the continent and came into contact with the Romans through

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 trade. The Latin borrowings of this period are: dish, cup, butter, cheese, wine, cherry,
plum, hare, spices, pepper and kitchen.
 Borrowings which came to Britain in the 6th-7th centuries when Christianity was
introduced: abbot, alter, angel, bishop, saint, candle, monk, nun, pope, Christ, school.
 Words borrowed during the revival of Classical learning and art – the Renaissance in
the 14th century and since then the invasion of classical terms has never stopped. Many
of them are distinctly learned words: senior, major, minor, junior, accept, educate,
basis, area, idea, aggravate.
The 5th century A.D. as several of the Germanic tribes migrated across the English Channel to
the British Isles they were confronted by the Celts, the original inhabitants of the Isles. Through
their numerous contacts with the Celts, the Anglo-Saxon languages assimilated a number of
Celtic words, e.g. Modern English bald, down, glen, druid, bard, cradle etc. Especially numerous
among the Celtic borrowings were place names, names of rivers, hills etc., e.g. Avon, Exe, Esk,
Usk, Ux originate from the Celtic words meaning ‘river’ and ‘water’. The name of the English
capital originates from Celtic Llyn+dun in which the former is another Celtic word for ‘river’
and the latter stands for ‘a fortified hill’, the meaning of the whole being ‘ a fortress on the hill
over the river’.
Besides, during this period some Latin words entered the Anglo-Saxon languages through
Celtic, such as street (<Lat. strata via), wall (<Lat. vallum).
The 7th century A.D. became significant for Christianization of England. Loans came mostly
from church Latin and indicated in the first place persons, objects and ideas associated with
church and religious rituals, e.g. priest (<Lat. presbyter), bishop (<Lat. episcopus), monk (<Lat.
monachus), nun (<Lat. nonna), candle (<Lat. candela).
From the end of the 8th century to the middle of the 11th century England underwent several
Scandinavian invasions which also left their trace on the English vocabulary. Examples of early
Scandinavian borrowings are: to call, to cast, to die, to take, law, husband (<Sc. Hus+bondi, i.e.
‘inhabitant of the house’), window (<Sc. Vindauga, i.e. ‘the eye of the wind’), ill, loose, low,
weak.
French borrowings are especially numerous in English. They may be roughly divided into old,
or Norman borrowings, and new, or Parisian, borrowings.
After the Norman conquest in 1066 French or rather Northern-French became the official
language in England. The first French borrowings were terms connected with war, fare, court,
law, soldiers, army, crown, country, piece, justice, office, government, parliament and state.

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 In the 17th century there was a change in the character of French borrowings. New borrowings
mainly from the Parisian dialect preserved their French forms as a rule: campaign, garage,
ballet, rouge, bucket, and matinee, machine.
Greek borrowings were usually adopted through Latin and French. Many Latin Christian terms
were of Greek origin: abbot, bishop, school, Christ, monk; chair, police, policy, chronicle came
to English from Greek through Latin and French.
The direct borrowing of the Greek words into English started only in the period of the
Renaissance: literature owes the following terms – tragedy, comedy, drama… Greek elements,
affixes and roots are widely used in English to create new terms: telephone, photography,
telegramme etc.
3.Words of native origin and their characteristics.
2.1 Words of Indo-European stock
Words of the Indo-European stock have cognates in different Indo-European languages: Greek,
Latin, French, Italian, Polish, Russian and others. The words those which having cognates in the
vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been supervised
that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship
(mother, father, son, daughter), names of animals and birds (cat, wolf, goose), parts of human
body (arm, eye). Some of the most frequent verbs belong to this word stock: come, sit, stand.
Most numerals are also of the IndoEuropean origin.
2.2 Words of Common Germanic stock
The Common Germanic stock includes words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch,
Icelandic.
It contains a great number of semantic groups some of which are the same as in the Indo-
European group of native words:
– nouns denoting parts of the human body, e.g. head, hand, arm, bone, finger;
– nouns denoting periods of time (seasons of the year), e.g. summer, winter, spring, time, week;
(autumn is a French borrowing).
– words naming natural phenomena, e.g. storm, rain, flood, ice, ground, sea, frost, earth;
4. Foreign elements in Modern English vocabulary.
Alongside loan words proper, we distinguish loan translation аnd semantic loans.
Translation loans are words or expressions formed from the elements existing in the English
language according to the patterns of the source language. It is quite obvious that it is only
compound words (i. e. words of two or more stems) which can be subjected to such an operation,
each stem being translated separately: masterpiece (from Germ. Meisterstück), wonder child
(from Germ. Wunderkind).
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 During the 2nd World War the German word Blitzkrieg was also borrowed into English in two
different forms: the translation-loan lightning-war and the direct borrowings blitzkrieg and blitz.
The term semantic loan, is used to denote the development in an English word of a new
meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language.
Sometimes the borrowing process is to fill a gap in vocabulary.
When the Saxons borrowed Latin words for butter, plum, beet, they did it because their own
vocabularies lacked words for these new objects. For the same reason the words potato and
tomato were borrowed by English from Spanish when these vegetables were first brought to
England by the Spaniards.
But there is also a great number of words which are borrowed for other reasons. There may be
a word (or even several words) which expresses some particular concept, so that there is no gap
in the vocabulary and there does not seem to be any need for borrowing. Yet, one more word is
borrowed which means almost the same, — almost, but not exactly. It is borrowed because it
represents the same concept in some new aspect, supplies a new shade of meaning or a different
emotional colouring.
Lexical correlations are defined as lexical units from different languages which are
phonetically and semantically related. The number of Ukrainian-English lexical correlations is
about 6870.
The history of the Slavonic-German ties resulted in the following correlations:

beat − бити, widow − вдова,

call − голос, young − юний.
day − день,

Semantically Ukrainian-English lexical correlations are various. They may denote everyday
objects and commonly used things:

brutal − брутальний, lily − лілія,

cap − капелюх, money − монета,
cold − холодний, quart − кварта,
ground − грунт, sister − cecтpa,
kettle − котел, wolf − вовк
kitchen − кухня,
Some Ukrainian - English lexical correlations have common Indo-European background:
garden − город,
murder − мордувати,
soot − сажа.
Beside Ukrainian - English lexical correlaitons the Ukrainian language contains
borrowings from modern English period:
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 брифіг − briefing; xiт парад − hit parade;
диск-жокей − disk- кітч, халтура − kitch;
jockey; масс-медія − mass
ескапізм − escapis; media;
естеблішмент − cepiaл − serial.
establishment;

5. Assimilation of borrowings.
Assimilation is a process of adjusting in Phonetics and Lexicology.
There are three main types of Assimilation:
Phonetic assimilation means changes in sound form add stress. For instance, the long [ e] and
[ε] in recent French borrowings, quite strange to English speech rendered with the help of [ei]-
communique, cafe, etc. The German spitz [spits], was turned into English [spits].
Grammatical assimilation -when borrowed words are acquired new grammatical categories and
paradigms by analogy with the other. Loan words not assimilated grammatically retain their
foreign grammatical forms like some nouns borrowed from Latin which keep their original plural
inflexions, e.g. phenomenon – phenomena.
Lexical assimilation - when semantic structure of the borrowed word undergoes some changes
(it takes 50-100 years). Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one or 2 of the meaning.
Degree of Assimilation depends on the following factors:
 The time of borrowing. The older the borrowing is, the more thoroughly it’s assimilated
 The frequency of usage
 The way in which the word was adopted. Oral borrowings are assimilated more rapidly
and more completely than literary borrowings, e.g. borrowings through writing.
According to the degree of Assimilation, borrowings are subdivided into:
 completely assimilated words.
They correspond to all phonetic, morphological and semantic laws of English and do not felt as
borrowings. They are found in all the layers of older borrowings (Latin, Scandinavian, French).
Many of them belong to the native word stock of English (cheese, street – Latin; husband, to die,
to take Scandinavian; table – French).
 partially assimilated borrowed words.
They’ve retained:
 foreign pronunciation (vase, restaurant)
 foreign morphological characteristics (datum – data)

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  they are not assimilated semantically denoting notion of foreign cultures, nature, customs
(steppe, taiga, sombrero). These are foreign realies which have no corresponding
equivalents in English.
 barbarisms (unassimilated borrowed words).
These are foreign words used by English people in oral speech or in writing but not
assimilated in any way. They usually have corresponding English equivalents, e.g. “Chao”
(Italian), “adio”.
6. Etymological doublets.
Etymological doublets are 2 or more words of the same lang-ge, derived originally from the
same route, but having entered the vocabulary at different periods of time, or from different
sources. They are different in form and often different in meaning.
Among groups of etymological doublets, the most important are:

1. doublets from different languages:

 English & Scandinavian, respectively: shirt (E), skirt (Sc), shabby (E), skabby(Sc);
 English & Latin: eatably (E.) – edible (L.), nakid (En.) – nude (L.);
 English & French: word (En.) – verb (Fr.);
 Latin & French: senior (L.) – sir (Fr.), canal – channel; captain – chietton.

2. doublets from different periods of the same language:

 Norman French: card, corpse. Perisian French – chart, corps;

 Earlier Latin (camp) – Later Latin (campus).

3. doublets from different changes within English itself:

 Loss of initial syllable: history – story; example –sample; accute – cute; adventure-
venture;
 Vowel interchange: shade – shed, mode – mood, snob – snub.

Etymological thriplets occur very rare in the language: (L.) hospital, (N-Fr) hostel, (Perisian-Fr)
hotel, (L) to capture, (N-Fr) to catch, (Per-Fr) to chase.

Hybrids or morphological borrowings – these are derivatives or compound words, which consist
of morphemes, originating from different languages.

e.g. violinist (Italian+Greek), unmistakable (E.+E.+Sc.+Fr), blameless (Fr.+E.)

7. International words.
Words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or
successive borrowings from one ultimate source are called international words.

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 Such words usually convey concepts which are significant in the field of communication, cf.:
Eng. telephone, organization, inauguration, consilium, Ukr. телефон, організація, інаугурація,
консиліум).
Many of them are of Latin and Greek origin. Most names of sciences are international,
cf.: philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, linguistics,
lexicology. There are also numerous terms of art in this group: music, theatre, drama, tragedy,
comedy, artist, primadonna.
It is quite natural that political terms frequently occur in the international group of
borrowings: politics, policy, revolution, progress, democracy, communism, anti-militarism.
20th c. scientific and technological advances brought a great number of new international
words: atomic, antibiotic, radio, television, sputnik.
The rate of change in technology, political, social and artistic life has been greatly accelerated
in the last decade and so has the rate of growth of international wordstock. A few examples of
comparatively new words due to the progress of science will suffice to illustrate the importance
of international vocabulary: algorithm, antenna, antibiotic, automation, bionics, cybernetics,
entropy, gene, genetic code, graph, microelectronics, microminiaturisation, quant, quasars,
pulsars, ribosome, etc. All these show sufficient likeness in English, French, Ukrainian and
several other languages.
The international wordstock is also growing due to the influx of exotic borrowed words
like anaconda, bungalow, kraal, orang-outang, sari, etc. These come from many different
sources.
The English vocabulary penetrates into other languages. We find numerous English words in
the field of sport: football, out, match, tennis, volley-ball, baseball, hockey, cricket, rugby,
tennis, golf, time, etc.
A large number of English words are to be found in the vocabulary pertaining to
clothes: jersey, pullover, sweater, nylon, tweed, etc. Cinema and different forms of entertainment
are also a source of many international words of English origin: film, club, cocktail, jazz.
Fruits and foodstuffs imported from exotic countries often transport their names too and, being
simultaneously imported to many countries, become international: coffee, cocoa, chocolate,
coca-cola, banana, mango, avocado, grapefruit.
It is important to note that international words are mainly borrowings. The outward similarity
of such words as the Eng. son, the Germ. Sohn and the Ukr. син should not lead one to the quite
false conclusion that they are international words. They represent the Indo-Euroреаn group of
the native element in each respective language and are cognates, i. e. words of the same
etymological root, and not borrowings.
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