Native and borrowed words

Native Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers – the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary. The native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

Borrowings-the term is used to denote the process of adopting words from other languages and also the result of this process. Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language. In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a thorough etymological analysis.

Source of borrowings. – is appliede to the lang from which particular words were taken into Engl. Original borrowings. – the term is applied to the language the word may be traced to. Assimilation – the process of the changing of the adopted words. A. of thr borrowings includes changes in: sound form; morphological strct; grammar charact-s; usage.

Completely assimilated borrowings – are the words which have undergone all types of Assimilation. They are active in word formation. Partially assim-d b. – the words which lack one of the types of A. They are subdivided into: borrow. not ass-d grammatically (nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek); borrow. not ass-d phonetically (contain peculiarities in stress, not standard for English); barbarisms – words from other lang. , used by English people in conversations or writing, but not assimilated in any way.

Why are words borrowed? Wars, conquests; trade, international and cultural relations; to fill the gap in vocabulary; words, which express some particular notion; enrichment of word groups (syn., ant).


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Native and borrowed words