The reason of appearance of borrowed words in English vocabulary

It goes without saying that these sets are interesting, i.e. one and the same loan word often shows incomplete assimilation in several respects simultaneously.

The third group of borrowings comprises the so-called barbarisms; i.e. words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents. The examples are Italian addio, ciao 'good-bye', the French affiche for `placard' and coup or coup d'Etat `a sudden seizure of state power by a small group', the Latin ad libitum `at pleasure' and the like.

The incompleteness of assimilation results in some specific features which permit us to judge of the origin of words. They may serve as formal indications of loan words of Greek, Latin, French or other origin.

1.6 Loan words

Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language. The main story: some speakers know both languages and find it useful to borrow a word from the source language, perhaps to refer to something being introduced from the source culture (e.g. espresso), and if this repeated enough times the word enters the language and is available for all speakers. In some cases the word may always stand out (e.g., shampoo) and may cause some people to wonder how such a word came into the language [23, 326-336]

The word `loanword' is in fact a type of loanword itself. The word comes from the German word `lehwort', which means precisely loanword. In this case, the meaning of the word has been borrowed into the English equivalents are used.

A loanword can also be called a borrowing. The noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language. `Loan' and `borrowing' are of course metaphors, because there is no literal lending process. There is no transfer from one language to another, and no `returning' words to the source language. The words simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one these words originated in.

Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities. Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the two language contact, but often there is an asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other. In this case the source language community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing language community. For example, the Germanic tribes in the first few centuries A.D. adopted numerous loanwords from Latin as they adopted new products via trade with the Romans. Few Germanic words, on the other hand, passed into Latin.

The actual process of borrowing is complex and involves many usage events (i.e. instances of use of the new word). Generally, some speakers of the borrowing language know the source language too, or at least enough of to utilize the relevant word. They (often consciously) adopt the new word when speaking the borrowing language, because it most exactly fits the idea they are trying to express. If they are bilingual in the source language, which is often the case, they might pronounce the words the same or similar to the way they are pronounced in the source language. For example, English speakers adopted the word garage from French, at first with a pronunciation nearer to the French pronunciation than is now usually found.

Presumably the very first speakers who ised the word in English knew at least some French and heard the word used by French speakers, in a French- speaking context.

Those who first use the new word might use it at first only with speakers of source language who know the word, butat some point they come to use the word with those to whom the word was not previously known. To these speakers the word may sound `foreign'. At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and they hear it think another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Fahrvergnuegen (German). However, in time more speakers can become familiar with a new foreign word or expression. The community of users of this source language understand, and even use, the novel word themselves. The new word becomes conventionalize: part of the conventional ways of speaking in the borrowing language. At this point we call it a borrowing or loanword.

Conventionalization is a gradual process in which a word progressively permeates a lager speech community, becoming part of ever more people's linguistic repertoire. As part of its becoming more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic systems. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the word as loanword at all. Generally, thelonger a borrowed word has been in native words of the language, and the more frequently it is used, the more itresembles the native words of the language.English has gone through many periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the 8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman conquest brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.

It is part of the cultyarl history of English speakers that they have always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in Britain, the U.S., or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.

English has many loanwords. In 1937, a computerized survey about 80,000 words the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

-Fench, including Old French and early Anglo-French:28.3%

-Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin:28.24%

-Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English:25%

-Greek:5.32%

-No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%

-Derived from proper names: 3.28%

-All other languages contributed less than 1%

However, if the frequency of use of words is considered, words from Old and middle English occupy the vast majority.

The reasons for English's vast borrowing include:

-(to a relatively small extent) the existence of other languages native to Britain;

-The invasion of England by the Vikings and the Normans;

-Its modern importance;

-Its being a scientific language;

-Its development as trade language in the 18th century;

-The flexibility of its syllable structure.

This lack of restrictions makes it comparatively easy for the English language to incorporate new words. Compare this with Japanese, where word `club (itself originally from Old Norse) was turned into `kurabu' because of Japanese's inflexible syllable structure. However, the English pronunciations of loan words often differ from the original pronunciations to such a degree that a native speaker of the language it was borrowed from is not ale to recognize itas a loanword when spoken [24, 210-231]. English often borrows words from the cultures and languages of the British Colomies. For example there are at least 20 words from Hindi, including syce/sais, dinghy, chutney, pundit, wallah, pajama/pyjamas, bungalow and jodhpur. Other examples include trek, aardvark, larger and vld from Africaans, shirang, amok(Malay) and sjambok (Malay and Afrikaans).

The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add the contributions already made to the American people, by the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost all they were destined to know of the aborigines, and they had names for all the new objects thus brought to their notice and for most of the red man's peculiar ceremonials. A few translated Indian terms, e.g., squaw-man, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy-hunting ground, represent the meager fresh stock that the western pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his vivid proper names, e.g., Rain in the Face, Young Man Afraid of His Wife and Voice Like thunder. These names, and other word-phrases like them. Made an instant appeal to American humor, and were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the surviving coinages of that era is Old-Stick-in-the-Mud, which Farmer and Henley note as having reached England by 1823.

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian border, and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have already seen, prairie, bateau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse and lagniappe an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, was also of French origin. From the Spanish, once the Mississipi was crossed, and particularly after the Mexican wa, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange objects: lariat, lasso, ranch, loco(weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chapparal, corra, brancho, plaza, peon,cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, Eldorado, place and vigilate.

1.7 The role of borrowings in the development of English vocabulary

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers -the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words.

In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions[25; 398-412].

Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language.

In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a through etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language and the role played by themis determined by the historical development of the nation speaking the language.

The most effective ways of borrowing is direct borrowing from another language as the result of the contacts with other nations. Though, a word be also borrowed indirectly not from the source language but through another language.

When analyzing borrowed words one should distinguish between two terms-source of borrowing and origin of borrowing. The first term is applied to the language from which the word was immediately borrowed and second-to the language to which the word may be different approaches to classifying the borrowe stock of words.The borrowed stock of words may be classified according to the nature of the borrowing itself as borrowing proper, loans translation and semantic loans.

Loan translation or calque is a phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word translation.

Semantic loan is the borrowing of the meaning for aword already existing in the English language.

                                Bibliography

1. Sarah Thomson, Language contact-An Introduction, Edinburgh University Press 2001,-p.152

2. Секирин  В.П- Заимствования в Английском  языке.Киев-изд Киевс. Ун-та. 1954.-178с. Booker T.Washington-p.50

3. Haugen Einar, `The analysic of linguistic borrowing', 1950,-p.232

4. Weinreich, Uriel `Languages in contact: finding and problems'. The Hague: Mouton. 1953,-p.562

5. Grega, Jaochim, `Borrowing as a Word-Finding Process in Cognitive Historical Onomasiology',-p242.

6. Donald Winford, An Introduction to contact Linguistics,-p458

7. Антрушина  Г.Б., Афанасьева О.В., Морозова Н.Н.,- Лексикология английского языка.  English Lexicology. -M., 2001. (44-78)

8. Арнольд  И.В.- Лексикология современного  английского языка-М., 1959.