1. The development of the english vocabulary.

3,000 languages grouped into 300 language families divided on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammar. The Indo-European language family is one of them.

The Indo-European language family is made up of most of the language of Europe, the Near East, and India. The prehistoric Indo-European parent language is a highly inflected language, in which the various forms of a given word showed its relationship to other words in a sentence.

The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another. The similarity bears a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eight principle groups, which can be grouped into an Eastern set and a Western set.

Growth of present-day english vocabulary

Reasons:

1. Rapid growth of science and technologybreeds such new words asgreen revolution,benzine,calorie, electon, sputnik, spacecraft, radium.

2. Social, economic and political changesbeing about an increasing number of new words, relating to food, clothing, music, television and films, politics and economy, education, women’s liberation and drug culture, such asfast food,hip huggers,disco, Watergate, telequiz, chairperson, soft drug, iron, curtain, cold war, emancipation, capitalism

3. The influence of other culture and languagescan be felt in many different fields, like cuisine (stir frying), black nationalist (dashhikies), American fashion (Mao jacket), martial arts (kungfu).Cinema, newsreel, Technicolour.

4. Fashionfor the phenomena:lambada.

Channels of vocabulary development:creation, semantic change, borrowing, reviving archaic or obsolete words, coinage.

Creation: the formation of new words by using the existing materials, namely roots, affixes and other elements. It is the most important way of vocabulary expansion.

Semantic change: An old form which takes on a new meaning to meet the new need. It does not increase the number of word forms but creates many more new usages of the words.

Borrowing: taking over words from foreign languages. They play a vital role in the development of vocabulary. Borrowed words constitute 6-5% of all new words.

Reviving archaic or obsolete words: give no longer used words some new meanings to meet new need.

Coinageis the invention of totally new words:xerox, kleenex, nylon, aspirin.