Etymological review of English vocabulary. Native words.
Etymology is a branch of linguistics and extra-linguistics studying the origin of words, their change and development as well as linguistics and extra-linguistics causes modifying the structure, meaning and usage.
The term Etymology is derived from Greek words: etymon ( the true, original meaning of the word), logos (science, learning).
Native words have a higher frequency than borrowed words. They occur in spoken and written speech. Some morphological classes of words are made up mostly of native words:
1) Articles
2) Pronouns (ecxpect they, their, them)
3) Propositions
4) Conjunctions
5) Numerals (1-100)
The native element in English vocabulary is mostly monosyllabic.
Native words show great word-building power and make up the majority of proverbs and set-expressions.
water – watering – waterfall – to water – waterproof
“Blood is thicker than water.”
“There is no use cry over split milk.”
The native element of the English contain group of classes:
1) Indo-European
2) Common Germanic
3) English proper
1) Indo-European words in English are the oldest one. They have the cognates in other Indo-European languages (Romance, Slavic, Germanic)
- farther, mother, brother, son, bull, wolf, rose, heart, to sit, to stand, slow, red, 1-100
2) Common Germanic words have parallels in other Germanic languages (Norwegian, Dutch).
- hand, season, eyes, rain, house, ship, hat, life, hope, to go, to tell, to see, to drink, to have, dead, green, gray, he, self, etc.
3) English proper words don’t have any parallels in other languages.
- boy, girl, bind, always, word, etc.
