The origin of English words

NATIVE WORDS VERSUS LOAN WORDS

Litotes

Litotes ( 3) is a stylistic device of a peculiar use of negative constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective establishes positive feature in a person or thing.

1. It is not a bad thing. - It is a good thing.

2. He is no coward. - He is a brave man.

The negative construction is weaker than the affirmative one. But the negative constructions have a stronger impact on the reader than the affirmative. The latter have no additional connotation, the former have. These constructions are regarded as stylistic devices. Litotes is a deliberate understatement used to produce a stylistic effect. Here two meanings are materialized simultaneously: the direct (negative) and transferred (affirmative).The stylistic effect of litotes depends on intonation. Litotes is a construction with two negations, as in not unlike, not promising, not displeased. Two negatives make a positive. Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those which may be called the matter-of-fact styles

According to this feature the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A native word is a word, which belongs to the original Eng­lish stock, as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. A loan word, borrowed word or borrowing is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

The native words are further subdivided by diachronic linguistics into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin. The words having cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; parts of the human body: arm, ear, eye, foot, heart, etc. Some of the most frequent verbs are also of Indo-European com­mon stock: bear, come, sit, stand and others. The adjectives of this group denote concrete physical properties: hard, quick, slow, red, white. Most numerals also belong here.

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc., but none in Russian or French. It contains a greater number of semantic groups. The following list may serve as an illustration of their general character. The nouns are: summer, winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; the verbs are bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot and many more; the adjectives are: broad, dead, deaf, deep. Many adverbs and pronouns also belong to this layer.

Together with the words of the common Indo-European stock these Common Germanic words form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words of English.

Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy; they are often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch<OE wasccan is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sen­tence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and com­bined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean 'the act of watching', 'the guard' (on ships), 'a period of duty for part of the ship's crew', 'a period of wake-fulness', 'close observation', 'a time-piece', etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watchdog, watch­er, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are: be on the watch, watch one's step, keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb The watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The source, the scope and the semantic sphere of the loan words are all dependent upon historical factors. The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consists of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due to specific conditions of the English language de­velopment. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific fea­tures marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

The term "source of borrowing" should be distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing". The first should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus, the word paper<Fr papier<Lat papyrus<Gr papyros has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin.

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. The English word pioneer meant 'explorer' and 'one who is among the first in new fields of activity'; then under the in­fluence of the word nuoнep it has come to mean 'a member of the Young Pioneers' Organization'.

Many loan words in spite of the changes they have under­gone after penetrating into English, retain some special features in pronun­ciation, spelling, and morphology. Thus gives life to the issue of the loan words assimilation.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11