Etymology is both the study of the history of words and a statement of the origin and history of a word. Etymologically, all English words are divided into native words and borrowings.
A native word is one which hasn't been borrowed from another language, but represents the original English wordstock as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the OE period (5 th -7 th c.).
A borrowed word, also called a borrowing or a loan-word, is one which has come into English from another language.English has a great number of borrowed words (about 70%), which is explained by the eventful history of the country and numerous international contacts.
The original English word stock contains:
(a) the Indo-European element,
(b) the Germanic element,
(c) the Anglo-Saxon (or the English proper) element.
The Indo-Buropean element consists of words common to all or most IE languages. The roots denote elementary notions without which no communication could be possible:
· terms of kinship: father, mother, brother, son, daughter, etc.;
· parts of the human body: nose, lip, heart, foot, etc.;
· animals: cow, swine, goose, fish;
· plants: tree, birch, corn;
· times of day: day, night;
· heavenly bodies: sun, moon, star;
· adjectives: red, new, glad, sad;
· numerals: from one to one hundred;
· pronouns: all personal pronouns except they which is a Scandinavian borrowing; demonstrative pronouns;
· verbs: be, stand, sit, eat, know.
the Germanic element of English comprises words with roots common to all or most Germanic languages, but not found in other IE languages:
· parts of the human body: head, arm, hand, finger, bone;
· animals: bear, fox, calf;
· plants: grass, oak, fir;
· seasons of the year: spring, summer, winter (but autumn was borrowed from French);
· natural phenomena: rain, frost; but snow is IE;
· landscape features: sea, land;
· human dwellings, furniture: house, room, bench;
· sea-going vessels: boat, ship;
· adjectives: green, blue, grey, white, small, thick, high, old;
· verbs: see, hear, speak, tell, say, answer, make, give, drink.
The English proper element contains words which have no cognates in any other language,
e.g. bird, girl, boy, lord, lady, woman, always.
Though native words are fewer in number, they play a very important role in English due to their characteristics:
1) They possess great stability, i.e. they have existed for centuries and are sure to exist for centuries to come.
2) They belong to very important semantic fields without which no communication would be possible as they denote everyday notions and objects.
3) They are monosyllabic, as a rule, and structurally simple, which makes them flexible, i.e. they serve as bases for numerous derivatives.
4) They are polysemantic.
5) They possess a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency, i.e. they enter into innumerable collocations.
6) They are used in a great number of phraseological units.
7) They have a high frequency value in speech.
Borrowing can have both linguistic and extralinguistic causes.
Extralinguistic causes are close contacts between different language communities, which may be of two kinds: on the one hand, wars, invasions, conquests when a foreign language is forced upon a reluctant conquered nation; on the other hand, trade and cultural links, which are more favourable for borrowing.
Linguistic causes are the necessity to fill in gaps in the vocabulary to name new objects and concepts.
Loan-words may enter a language in two ways:
1) through oral speech by immediate contact between people,
2) through written speech (e.g. books, periodicals) by indirect contact.
Oral borrowing are usually short and completely assimilated,e.g. street, mill, inch, pound
Written borrowings often preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of pronunciation; their assimilation takes more time,e.g. naiveté, resumé
There are certain criteria which can be used to identify a word as a borrowing (and maybe even determine the source language):
1) spelling and pronunciation, i.e. "alien" sounds and sound clusters, position of stress, unusual correlations between sounds and letters,
ch is read [∫] in late French borrowings (machine) and [k] in words of Greek borrowing : epoch, chemist;
2) irregular plurals: criterion - criteria, datum - data, crisis - crises, etc.
3) morphological structure, i.e. some words may be recognized as Latin or French borrowings by suffixes and prefixes,e.g. -ant/ -ent: convenient, constant, -ute: attribute, contribute,
Note: sometimes foreign affixes can be added to native stems: talkative, drinkable.
4) "alien" concepts and object of different cultures (realia) denoted by words,
e.g. burqa "muslim woman's long enveloping garment worn in public", paella, pagoda, balalaika.
Assimilation of borrowings- (adaptation)
There are different types of assimilation:
(1) Phonetic assimilation is substituting native sounds for foreign ones, as well as a shift of stress.In French and Latin borrowings the stress is usually shifted to the first syllable,e.g. garage [gæ'ra:3] > ['gæra:3]
(2) Grammatic assimilation is the change of grammatical categories and paradigms of borrowed words,e.g. cactus - Pl. cacti and cactuses;
(3) Compounds and dirivatives are borrowed as simple words. But if a number of loan-words have the same structure it becomes clear, morphemes are singled out and in the course of time they may be even used to derive new words from native stems,e.g. eatable, drinkable, talkative.
(4) Semantic assimilation consists in changes in the semantic structure of loans.
Polysemantic words are usually borrowed in one meaning,
e.g. kulak (Rus) "well-to-do Russian peasant".
According to the degree of assimilation, borrowings are completely assimilated, partially assimilated and unassimilated (called barbarisms).
Completely assimilated loan-words comply with all the norms of the language, their foreign origin is entirely obscured; they are usually old borrowings, characterized by high frequency of usage and stylistically neutral,
e.g. cheek, wrong, cockroach.
Partially assimilated loan-words may not be assimilated phonetically (regime, foyer ['foiei]); graphically (corps [ko:]; buffet [ei]); morphologically, i.e. they preserve foreign plurals (corpus - corpora); semantically, i.e. denote "alien" notions and objects (jihad "religious war of Muslims against unbelievers", mullah, sarong).
Unassimilated loans are foreign words used by English people, but not adapted in any way and for which there are English equivalents ,
e.g. carte blanche (Fr) - a free hand, Status quo (L) - unchanged position.
Translation loans are words and expressions formed from morphemes available in English after patterns characteristic of the source language by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme translation,e.g. Übermensch (Ger) - superman
Semantic borrowing is the appearance of a new meaning in an English word's semantic structure under the influence of the correlated word in the source language,
e.g. reaction acquired the political meaning "tendency to oppose change or return to former system" under the influence of the French word.
Etymological doublets are two (or sometimes more) words derived by different routes from the same source. They differ to a certain degree in form, meaning and usage. Etymological doublets may be:
1) two native words which were originally dialectal variants of the same OE word,
e.g. hale f. hāl (Northern dialect) and whole f. hōl (Southern and Eastern dialects), both originally f. OE hāl;
2) a native and a borrowed word,
e.g. shirt (native) and skirt (Scandinavian), both originally f. Gc *skurt "short";
3) two borrowings from different languages which are etymologically descendant from the same root,
e.g. canal (L) - channel (Fr) , etymologically f. L canalis;
4) words borrowed from the same language twice but at different time,
e.g. corpse - corps (originally f. L corpus "body"), both borrowed from French, but corpse was borrowed from Norman French after the Norman conquest, while corps was borrowed during the Renaissance period.
Etymological triplets are rare,
e.g. hospital (L) - hostel (Norman Fr) - hotel (Fr during the Renaissance).
International words are words of the same origin that exist in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successsive borrowing from one ultimate souce. Usually they are words of Latin or Greek origin. Here belong:
· scientific terms, e.g. philosophy, mathematics, medicine, antenna;
· terms of art, e.g. music, tragedy, comedy, theatre, museum;
· political terms, e.g. policy, democracy, anarchy, progress;
· foodstuffs, e.g. banana, chocolate, coffee, cocoa.
English has also contributed quite a few international words to world languages, e.g.
· sport terms: football, tennis, box, match, knock-down;
· clothes: sweater, pullover, tweed, jersey, nylon;
· entertainment: film, club, jazz, cocktail, etc.
