ENGLISH LANGUAGE

1
ENGLISH LANGUAGE 2 YEARA HISTORY OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE

• Annalisa Federici, Ph.D.
• Textbook J. Culpeper, History of English,
  Routledge 1997.
• (units 4-5)

2
BORROWINGS

• One of the major changes in the English
  language over the centuries has been the
  expansion of vocabulary. This has mainly been
  achieved by importing words from other languages.
  Such words (LOANWORDS) have acquired different
  associations according to their origin. Another
  way to enlarge vocabulary has been the
  transformation of already existing words (NEW
  WORD FORMATIONS).

3
BORROWINGS

• The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, whose Germanic
  dialects gave rise to the English language, had
  borrowed a few words from LATIN even before they
  arrived in Britain (e.g. wall, street, cheap,
  wine). Even so, OE vocabulary was overwhelmingly
  Germanic it contained very few LOANWORDS (only
  3 vs. 70 of todays English), as compared to ME
  and ModE.
• OE vocabulary many Germanic Anglo-Saxon words
  have survived into ModE. with very little change
  in form and meaning (e.g. god, gold, hand, land,
  under, winter, word). The majority of the few
  loanwords were from Latin and relating to the
  Church (altar, angel, cleric, nun, temple, psalm,
  city, master, demon), as Latin was the language
  of religious culture and Christian missionaries
  were influential in spreading literacy.

4
BORROWINGS

• Anglo-Saxon English and the Scandinavian
  languages (Old Norse and Old Danish) brought by
  the Viking invasions were all Germanic languages
  to some extent mutually comprehensible.
• This similarity determined the adoption of words
  in all areas of vocabulary (e.g. are, die, leg,
  want, get, both give, same, they, them, their)
  and not just words with specialised meaning (as
  with religious terms from Latin).
• Ca. 1,800 words of Scandinavian origin have
  survived into present-day English, including are
  which became part of the most common verb to be.

5
BORROWINGS

• After the Norman invasion (1066), Norman French
  became the language of the court, law and
  administration. The ruling classes spoke French
  and spread French fashion, cooking and etiquette.
• Over 10,000 words were adopted from French during
  the ME period (e.g. parliament, baron, manor,
  noble, liberty, government, arrest, judge, jury,
  prison, beef, lettuce, mutton, pork, sausage,
  dress, jewel, art, beauty, romance, virtue,
  cloak).
• Sometimes French words replaced Anglo-Saxon ones
  (cf wyrd and fortune). Where the original
  Anglo-Saxon word and the loanword from French
  coexisted, they differentiated and specialised
  from a social point of view less refined vs.
  more refined (e.g. house vs. mansion, bloody vs.
  sanguine)
• Even when English displaced French after two
  centuries, French language and culture still had
  a powerful influence.

6
BORROWINGS

• Revival of Latin borrowings during the ME period,
  both directly and indirectly (via French words
  originally imported from Latin), in the areas of
  religion, science, law and literature (e.g.
  scripture, client, conviction, library, scribe,
  dissolve, quadrant, medicine, ulcer).
• In the Early Modern Period (Renaissance),
  learning was enhanced by printing and books
  became widely available. However, they were
  normally written in Latin (the language of
  scholarship) and translations became necessary.
  Latin words were adapted or used as such,
  together with Italian, French, Spanish words.
• Ca. 13,000 new loanwords entered the English
  language in the sixteenth century, and of these
  7,000 were from Latin (e.g. absurdity, benefit,
  exist, exaggerate, external, construction,
  relevant, vacuum, virus, fact, impersonal,
  expectation, eradicate, exact).

7
BORROWINGS

• ADAPTATION of words borrowed from Latin
• Some words (e.g. climax, appendix, exterior,
  delirium) still have their Latin form.
• Other words were adapted by cutting off the Latin
  ending (e.g. conjectural from conjectural-is,
  consult from consult-are, exclusion from
  exclusion-em, exotic from exotic-us).
• More often a further change was necessary to
  bring the word into accord with usual English
  forms the Latin ending -us in adjectives was
  changed into -ous (e.g. conspic-us gt conspicuous)
  or replaced by -al (e.g. extern-us gt external)
  in nouns the ending -tas was changed into -ty
  (e.g. brevi-tas gt brevity) words ending in
  -antia/-entia changed into -ancy/-ency/-ance/-ence
  (e.g. const-antia gt constancy, frequ-entia gt
  frequency).
• Many English verbs borrowed from Latin at that
  time end in -ate (e.g. create, consolidate,
  eradicate) and were formed on the basis of the
  Latin past participle because it was often
  equivalent to an adjective, and it was common for
  English to make verbs out of adjectives.

8
BORROWINGS

• Recent tendency decline in borrowing from
  Classical (Latin, from the end of the seventeenth
  century) and Romance (French, from the ME period)
  languages. These lost prestige and were displaced
  by English as the language of administration and
  culture.
• Borrowing is no longer the dominant source for
  vocabulary expansion. Nowadays words are mainly
  formed by adapting already-existing ones (e.g. by
  compounding).
• In present-day vocabulary, the three main sources
  (Germanic, French and Latin) have acquired a
  different status and are used in different
  contexts for different purposes. This is due to
  the fact that most Latin loanwords date back to
  the Renaissance, when Latin was the language of
  the written medium and books (INKHORN
  CONTROVERSY debate about the merits of the
  acquisition of artificial, bookish terms from
  Latin in place of natural, common Germanic
  vocabulary).

9
BORROWINGS

• Germanic French
  Latin
• Frequent vs.
  Rare
• Spoken vs.
  Written
• Informal vs.
  Formal
• Private vs.
  Public
• Simple vs.
  Complex
• Concrete vs.
  Abstract
• Affective vs.
  Neutral

10
BORROWINGS

• Exercise read the list of words below, rate them
  according to their formality/informality,
  rearrange them to form four rows of synonyms and
  try to guess their origin (Germanic, French or
  Latin). How does etymology correlate with
  formality?
• Fire
  Fear
• Holy
  Ascend
• Trepidation Flame
• Rise
  Sacred
• Conflagration Terror
• Mount
  Consecrated

11
NEW WORD FORMATIONS

• Ways in which new words were formed from old
  ones
• AFFIXATION ADDING AFFIXES TO FORM ANOTHER WORD.
• Affixes are parts of words (not words in their
  own right) added to a root word in order to form
  another. When placed at the beginning they are
  called prefixes, when at the end they are called
  suffixes.
• OE had many affixes, some of which still in use
  (happy, quickly, blackness, foolish, heartless).
  Other OE affixes are falling out of use (e.g. the
  prefix for- and the suffix -lock, today only in
  forgive, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn,
  forsake, forswear, wedlock, warlock). Other OE
  affixes (e.g. -dom and -wise) have undergone a
  revival.
• The major change over time has been the
  acquisition of affixes from other languages
  anti-, -ism and micro- from Greek (e.g.
  anticlimax, communism, microwave) -al, -ex,
  multi-, non- from Latin (e.g. accidental,
  exchange, multiracial, non-stop, rebuild) -ette,
  -esque from French (e.g. etiquette, picturesque).

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NEW WORD FORMATIONS

• Exercise more than one affix can be used to form
  a word. How many affixes are there in the
  following word, and from which languages have
  they been borrowed?
• antidisestablishmentarianism

13
NEW WORD FORMATIONS

• BACK FORMATION SUBTRACTING ELEMENTS (OFTEN
  AFFIXES) TO FORM ANOTHER WORD.
• The word editor appeared before the word edit.
  With the subtraction of the suffix -or, English
  gained edit, the word describing what an editor
  does (similarly burgle from burglar).
• Pea from pease the latter was originally both
  singular and plural. As it sounded as if it had a
  plural ending, the former was invented as a
  singular form to avoid confusion.

14
NEW WORD FORMATIONS

• COMPOUNDING COMBINING WORDS TO FORM ANOTHER
  WORD.
• Three forms of compounds open (e.g. new born),
  hyphenated (e.g. new-born), solid (e.g. newborn).
  Such conventions are arbitrary and there are
  differences between British and American English
  (which tends to avoid hyphenation).
• Older and shorter compounds are more likely to be
  solid.
• Some very old compounds are barely recognisable
  as such lord started as the compound hlaf-weard
  (loaf-keeper), but even in OE it was contracted
  as hlaford.

15
NEW WORD FORMATIONS

1. BLENDING FUSING ELEMENTS OF TWO OTHER WORDS TO
   OBTAIN A NEW ONE (e.g. smoke fog smog motor
   hotel motel breakfast lunch brunch).
2. FUNCTIONAL CONVERSION USING ONE PART OF SPEECH
   AS ANOTHER (e.g. conversions of nouns into verbs
   such as to head a department, to nose into
   somebodys affairs).
3. CLIPPING SHORTENING A LONGER WORD (USUALLY BY
   REMOVING SYLLABLES). Clips involve the creation
   of a new shortened form of a word, which in most
   cases supplants the original (e.g. bus for
   omnibus, vest for vestment, bra for brassière,
   ad/advert for advertisement).

16
NEW WORD FORMATIONS

• ACRONYMS COMBINING THE INITIAL LETTERS OF WORDS
  OR SYLLABLES (e.g. TV for television, TB for
  tuberculosis, VD for venereal disease).
• NEOLOGISMS NEW COINAGES ENTERING THE WORD STOCK
  (e.g. Shakespeares neologisms).
• N.B. These ways of creating new words can
  overlap they are not equally productive in
  generating vocabulary (compounding gt affixation gt
  functional conversion gt shortening (back
  formation, clips, acronyms) gt blending).