French and Scandinavian Borrowings in English. In ME the main donors of borrowings to English were French and Scandinavian Languages:
Basis for Comparison |
French Borrowings
since the 11th c. (Norman Conquest)
10 000
French borrowings started to penetrate from the South and spread northwards.
French borrowings penetrated through oral and written speech and at first were adopted only by the high strata of the society (French was the language of the administration, king’s court, law courts, church (as well as Latin) and army).
Scandinavian borrowings were easier to assimilate as far as the Scandinavian Dialects as well as Old English Dialects were Germanic dialects (they all belonged to one and the same language group). So the languages were very similar and the assimilation was easy.
everyday life (cake, raft, skirt, birth, dirt, fellow, root, window, to die, etc.);
military (knife, fleet, etc.);
legal matters (law, husband, etc.);
some pronouns and conjunctions (they, their, them, both, though, etc.);
essential notion (N scar, anger; V to call, to take, to want to kill, to cast, to scare; Adj happy, ill, weak, wrong; Pron same, both; Prep till, fro, etc.).
Scandinavian borrowings are hard to distinguish from the native words as far as Scandinavian Dialects belonged to the same language group (Germanic). The only distinctive Scandinavian feature in English:
Scandinavian cluster [sk] (sky, skill, skin, skirt, etc.);
A lot of Scandinavian borrowings disappeared, some were left only in dialects;
Some Scandinavian borrowings replaced the native words (they, take, call, etc.);
Scandinavian borrowings enlarged the number of synonyms in English:
native to blossom – Scan. borr. to bloom,
native wish – Scan. borr. want,
native heaven – Scan. borr. sky , etc.
The surge of interest in the classics during the Age of the Renaissance led to a new wave of borrowings from Latin and Greek (through Latin mainly).
Latin | Greek |
abstract concepts (anticipate, exact, exaggerate, explain, fact, dislocate, accommodation, etc. ) | theatre (drama, episode, scene, theatre, etc.) |
literature (anapest, climax, epilogue, rhythm, etc. ) | |
rhetoric (dialogue, metaphor, etc.) | |
affixes de- (demolish, destroy, etc.), ex- (extract, , explore, explain, etc.), re- (reread, retell, retry, etc.), -ate (locate, excavate, etc.), -ent (apparent, present, turbulent, etc.), -ct (correct, erect, etc.) | roots for creation of new words ( ) |
affixes -ism (humanism, mechanism, aphorism, etc.), -ist (protagonist, terrorist, cyclist, etc.), anti- (antibody, antidote, antibiotic, etc.), di- (digest, diverse, etc.), neo- (neo-realism, neo-conservatism, etc.) | |
Greco-Latin Hybrids (words one part of which is Greek and the other one – Latin): e.g. tele-graph, socio-logy, tele-vision, etc. |
Fate of these Borrowings in English: Many of them underwent a shift of meaning: e.g. Lat. musculus (literally “little mouse”) à Eng. muscle; Gr. kosmos (“universe”) à Eng. cosmetics; Gr. climax (“ladder”) à Eng. climax (the top of something). Many of them formed the basis for international terminology:
e.g. Latin borrowings: facsimile, introvert, radioactive, relativity, etc.; Greek borrowings: allergy, antibiotic, hormone, protein, stratosphere, etc. Many of them increased the number synonyms in English:
Дата: 2019-03-05, просмотров: 218.