Loan word in english language

A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language.^[1][2] This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin, and calques, which involve translation. Loanwords from languages with different scripts are usually transliterated (between scripts), but they are not translated. Additionally, loanwords may be adapted to phonology, phonotactics, orthography, and morphology of the target language. When a loanword is fully adapted to the rules of the target language, it is distinguished from native words of the target language only by its origin. However, often the adaptation is incomplete, so loanwords may conserve specific features distinguishing them from native words of the target language: loaned phonemes and sound combinations, partial or total conserving of the original spelling, foreign plural or case forms or indeclinability.

Examples and related terms[edit]

A loanword is distinguished from a calque (or loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by word-for-word translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.^[3] Loanwords, in contrast, are not translated.

Examples of loanwords in the English language include café (from French café, which means «coffee»), bazaar (from Persian bāzār, which means «market»), and kindergarten (from German Kindergarten, which literally means «children’s garden»). The word calque is a loanword from the French noun calque («tracing; imitation; close copy»);^[4] while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are calques of the German nouns Lehnwort^[5] and Lehnübersetzung.^[6]

Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.^[7][8]

Although colloquial and informal register loanwords are typically spread by word-of-mouth, technical or academic loanwords tend to be first used in written language, often for scholarly, scientific, or literary purposes.^[9][10]

The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language (the superstrate).^{[11][relevant?]}

Most of the technical vocabulary of classical music (such as concerto, allegro, tempo, aria, opera, and soprano) is borrowed from Italian,^[12] and that of ballet from French.^[13] Much of the terminology of the sport of fencing also comes from French. Many loanwords come from prepared food, drink, fruits, vegetables, seafood and more from languages around the world. In particular, many come from French cuisine (crêpe, Chantilly, crème brûlée), Italian (pasta, linguine, pizza, espresso), and Chinese (dim sum, chow mein, wonton).

Linguistic classification[edit]

The studies by Werner Betz (1971, 1901), Einar Haugen (1958, also 1956), and Uriel Weinreich (1963) are regarded as the classical theoretical works on loan influence.^[14] The basic theoretical statements all take Betz’s nomenclature as their starting point. Duckworth (1977) enlarges Betz’s scheme by the type «partial substitution» and supplements the system with English terms. A schematic illustration of these classifications is given below.^[15]

The phrase «foreign word» used in the image below is a mistranslation of the German Fremdwort, which refers to loanwords whose pronunciation, spelling, inflection or gender have not been adapted to the new language such that they no longer seem foreign. Such a separation of loanwords into two distinct categories is not used by linguists in English in talking about any language. Basing such a separation mainly on spelling is (or, in fact, was) not common except amongst German linguists, and only when talking about German and sometimes other languages that tend to adapt foreign spellings, which is rare in English unless the word has been widely used for a long time.

According to the linguist Suzanne Kemmer, the expression «foreign word» can be defined as follows in English: «[W]hen most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Schadenfreude (German).»^[16] This is not how the term is used in this illustration:

On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen (1950: 214f.) distinguishes three basic groups of borrowings: «(1) Loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution…. (2) Loanblends show morphemic substitution as well as importation…. (3) Loanshifts show morphemic substitution without importation». Haugen later refined (1956) his model in a review of Gneuss’s (1955) book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one by Betz (1949) again.

Weinreich (1953: 47ff.) differentiates between two mechanisms of lexical interference, namely those initiated by simple words and those initiated by compound words and phrases. Weinreich (1953: 47) defines simple words «from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category ‘simple’ words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalysed form». After this general classification, Weinreich then resorts to Betz’s (1949) terminology.

In English[edit]

The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicisation.

Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. For example, the Hawaiian word ʻaʻā is used by geologists to specify lava that is thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the English pronunciation, , contains at most one. The English spelling usually removes the ʻokina and macron diacritics.^[17]

Most English affixes, such as un-, -ing, and -ly, were used in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the verbal suffix -ize (American English) or ise (British English) comes from Greek -ιζειν (-izein) through Latin -izare.

Languages other than English[edit]

Transmission in the Ottoman Empire[edit]

During more than 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and administrative language of the empire was Turkish, with many Persian, and Arabic loanwords, called Ottoman Turkish, considerably differing from the everyday spoken Turkish of the time. Many such words were adopted by other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Ladino, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. After the empire fell after World War I and the Republic of Turkey was founded, the Turkish language underwent an extensive language reform led by the newly founded Turkish Language Association, during which many adopted words were replaced with new formations derived from Turkic roots. That was part of the ongoing cultural reform of the time, in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk’s Reforms, which also included the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet.

Turkish also has taken many words from French, such as pantolon for trousers (from French pantalon) and komik for funny (from French comique), most of them pronounced very similarly. Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications tend to use more Arabic or Persian originated words, left-wing ones use more adopted from European languages, while centrist ones use more native Turkish root words.^[18]

Dutch words in Indonesian[edit]

Almost 350 years of Dutch presence in what is now Indonesia have left significant linguistic traces. Though very few Indonesians have a fluent knowledge of Dutch, the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch, both in words for everyday life (e.g., buncis from Dutch boontjes for (green) beans) and as well in administrative, scientific or technological terminology (e.g., kantor from Dutch kantoor for office).^[19] The Professor of Indonesian Literature at Leiden University,^[20] and of Comparative Literature at UCR,^[21] argues that roughly 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words.^[22]

Dutch words in Russian[edit]

In the late 17th century, the Dutch Republic had a leading position in shipbuilding. Czar Peter the Great, eager to improve his navy, studied shipbuilding in Zaandam and Amsterdam. Many Dutch naval terms have been incorporated in the Russian vocabulary, such as бра́мсель (brámselʹ) from Dutch bramzeil for the topgallant sail, домкра́т (domkrát) from Dutch dommekracht for jack, and матро́с (matrós) from Dutch matroos for sailor.

Romance languages[edit]

A large percentage of the lexicon of Romance languages, themselves descended from Vulgar Latin, consists of loanwords (later learned or scholarly borrowings) from Latin. These words can be distinguished by lack of typical sound changes and other transformations found in descended words, or by meanings taken directly from Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin that did not evolve or change over time as expected; in addition, there are also semi-learned terms which were adapted partially to the Romance language’s character. Latin borrowings can be known by several names in Romance languages: in Spanish, for example, they are usually referred to as «cultismos»,^[23][24] and in Italian as «latinismi».

Latin is usually the most common source of loanwords in these languages, such as in Italian, Spanish, French, etc.,^[25][26] and in some cases the total number of loans may even outnumber inherited terms^[27][28] (although the learned borrowings are less often used in common speech, with the most common vocabulary being of inherited, orally transmitted origin from Vulgar Latin). This has led to many cases of etymological doublets in these languages.

For most Romance languages, these loans were initiated by scholars, clergy, or other learned people and occurred in Medieval times, peaking in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance era^[26]— in Italian, the 14th century had the highest number of loans.^{[citation needed]} In the case of Romanian, the language underwent a «re-Latinization» process later than the others (see Romanian lexis, Romanian language § French, Italian, and English loanwords), in the 18th and 19th centuries, partially using French and Italian words (many of these themselves being earlier borrowings from Latin) as intermediaries,^[29] in an effort to modernize the language, often adding concepts that did not exist until then, or replacing words of other origins. These common borrowings and features also essentially serve to raise mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages, particularly in academic/scholarly, literary, technical, and scientific domains. Many of these same words are also found in English (through its numerous borrowings from Latin and French) and other European languages.

In addition to Latin loanwords, many words of Ancient Greek origin were also borrowed into Romance languages, often in part through scholarly Latin intermediates, and these also often pertained to academic, scientific, literary, and technical topics. Furthermore, to a lesser extent, Romance languages borrowed from a variety of other languages; in particular English has become an important source in more recent times. The study of the origin of these words and their function and context within the language can illuminate some important aspects and characteristics of the language, and it can reveal insights on the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in linguistics as a method of enriching a language.^[30]

Cultural aspects[edit]

According to Hans Henrich Hock and Brian Joseph, «languages and dialects … do not exist in a vacuum»: there is always linguistic contact between groups.^[31] The contact influences what loanwords are integrated into the lexicon and which certain words are chosen over others.

Leaps in meaning[edit]

In some cases, the original meaning shifts considerably through unexpected logical leaps. The English word Viking became Japanese バイキング (baikingu), meaning «buffet», because the first restaurant in Japan to offer buffet-style meals, inspired by the Nordic smörgåsbord, was opened in 1958 by the Imperial Hotel under the name «Viking».^[32] The German word Kachel, meaning «tile», became the Dutch word kachel meaning «stove», as a shortening of kacheloven, from German Kachelofen, a cocklestove.

See also[edit]

• Bilingual pun
• Hybrid word
• Inkhorn term
• Language contact
• Neologism
• Phono-semantic matching
• Reborrowing
• Semantic loan

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Best, Karl-Heinz, Kelih, Emmerich (eds.) (2014): Entlehnungen und Fremdwörter: Quantitative Aspekte. Lüdenscheid: RAM-Verlag.
• Betz, Werner (1949): Deutsch und Lateinisch: Die Lehnbildungen der althochdeutschen Benediktinerregel. Bonn: Bouvier.
• Betz, Werner (1959): «Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Vor- und Frühdeutschen». In: Maurer, Friedrich / Stroh, Friedrich (eds.): Deutsche Wortgeschichte. 2nd ed. Berlin: Schmidt, vol. 1, 127–147.
• Bloom, Dan (2010): «What’s That Pho?». French Loan Words in Vietnam Today; Taipei Times, [ SOCIETY ] What’s that ‘pho’? — Taipei Times
• Cannon, Garland (1999): «Problems in studying loans», Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 25, 326–336.
• Duckworth, David (1977): «Zur terminologischen und systematischen Grundlage der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der englisch-deutschen Interferenz: Kritische Übersicht und neuer Vorschlag». In: Kolb, Herbert / Lauffer, Hartmut (eds.) (1977): Sprachliche Interferenz: Festschrift für Werner Betz zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 36–56.
• Gneuss, Helmut (1955): Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen. Berlin: Schmidt.
• Grzega, Joachim (2003): «Borrowing as a Word-Finding Process in Cognitive Historical Onomasiology», Onomasiology Online 4, 22–42.
• Grzega, Joachim (2004): Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Heidelberg: Winter.
• Haugen, Einar (1950): «The analysis of linguistic borrowing». Language, 26(2), 210–231.
• Haugen, Einar. (1956): [Review of Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen, by H. Gneuss]. Language, 32(4), 761–766.
• Hitchings, Henry (2008), The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, London: John Murray, ISBN 978-0-7195-6454-3.
• Kersley, Leo; Sinclair, Janet (1979), A Dictionary of Ballet Terms, Da Capo Press, ISBN 978-0-306-80094-8.
• Koch, Peter (2002): «Lexical Typology from a Cognitive and Linguistic Point of View». In: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.): Lexicology: An International on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies/Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1142–1178.
• Oksaar, Els (1996): «The history of contact linguistics as a discipline». In: Goebl, Hans et al. (eds.): Kontaktlinguistik/contact linguistics/linguistique de contact: ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/an international handbook of contemporary research/manuel international des recherches contemporaines. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–12.
• Shanet, Howard (1956), Learn to Read Music, New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-0-671-21027-4.
• Stanforth, Anthony W. (2002): «Effects of language contact on the vocabulary: an overview». In: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.) (2002): Lexikologie: ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen/Lexicology: an international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, p. 805–813.
• Zuckermann, Ghil’ad (2003), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, (ISBN 978-1-4039-3869-5)

External links[edit]

• World Loanword Database (WOLD)
• AfBo: A world-wide survey of affix borrowing
• Daghestanian loans database

In lexicology, a loanword (also spelled loan word) is a word (or lexeme) imported into one language from another language. These words are also called a borrowed word or a borrowing. The term loanword, from the German Lehnwort, is an example of a calque or loan translation. The terms loanword and borrowing are, at best, imprecise. As countless linguists have pointed out, it’s extremely unlikely that a borrowed word will ever be returned to the donor language.

Over the past 1,500 years, English has adopted words from more than 300 other languages. «Loanwords make up a huge proportion of the words in any large dictionary of English,» notes Philip Durkin in Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. «They also figure largely in the language of everyday communication and some are found even among the most basic vocabulary of English.»

Loanwords in Academics

Scholars such as Lyle Campbell and Philip Durkin as well as Ugandan-born British linguist Francis Katamba and even author and linguistic researcher Kerry Maxwell have commented on and explained loanwords. Read on to view what they said on the subject.

Lyle Campbell

«[One] reason why words are taken over from another language is for prestige, because the foreign term for some reason is highly esteemed. Borrowings for prestige are sometimes called ‘luxury’ loans. For example, English could have done perfectly well with only native terms for ‘pig flesh/pig meat’ and ‘cow flesh/cow meat,’ but for reasons of prestige, pork (from French porc) and beef (from French boeuf) were borrowed, as well as many other terms of ‘cuisine’ from French—cuisine itself is from French cuisine ‘kitchen’—because French had more social status and was considered more prestigious than English during the period of Norman French dominance in England (1066-1300).»

Philip Durkin

«Among Spanish loanwords that are likely to be used by most speakers of contemporary English without particular consciousness of their Spanish origin, and certainly not with reference only to Spanish-speaking cultures, are: machete (1575), mosquito (1572), tobacco (1577), anchovy (1582), plantain ‘type of banana’ (1582; 1555 as platano), alligator (1591); earlier lagarto)…, (probably) cockroach (1624), guitar (a. 1637, perhaps via French), castanet (1647; perhaps via French), cargo (1657), plaza (1673), jerk ‘to cure (meat)’ (1707), flotilla (1711), demarcation (1728; perhaps via French), aficionado (1802), dengue (1828; the ulterior etymology is uncertain), canyon (1837), bonanza (1844), tuna (1881), oregano (1889).»

«Today English borrows words from other languages with a truly global reach. Some examples that the Oxford English Dictionary suggests entered English during the past 30 years include tarka dal, a creamy Indian lentil dish (1984, from Hindi), quinzhee, a type of snow shelter (1984, from Slave or another language of the Pacific Coast of North America), popiah, a type of Singaporean or Malaysian spring roll (1986, from Malay), izakaya, a type of Japanese bar serving food (1987), affogato, an Italian dessert made of ice cream and coffee (1992)…

«Some words slowly build up in frequency. For instance, the word sushi [from Japanese] is first recorded in English in the 1890s, but the earliest examples in print all feel the need to explain what sushi is, and it is only in recent decades that it has become ubiquitous, as sushi has spread along the high street and into supermarket chiller cabinets in most corners of the English-speaking world. But, commonplace though sushi may be today, it hasn’t made its way into the inner core of English in the same way as words like peace, war, just, or very (from French) or leg, sky, take, or they (from Scandinavian languages).»

Francis Katamba

«By using a particular language, bilingual speakers may be saying something about how they perceive themselves and how they wish to relate to their interlocutor. For instance, if a patient initiates an exchange with a doctor in the doctor’s surgery in Yiddish, that may be a signal of solidarity, saying: you and I are members of the same sub-group. Alternatively, rather than choosing between languages, these two people may prefer code-switching. They may produce sentences which are partly in English and partly in Yiddish. If foreign words are used habitually in code-switching, they may pass from one language into another and eventually become fully integrated and cease being regarded as foreign. That is probably how words like chutzpah (brazen impudence), schlemiel (a very clumsy, bungling idiot who is always a victim), schmaltz (cloying, banal sentimentality) and goyim (gentile) passed from Yiddish into (American) English. The fact that there is no elegant English equivalent to these Yiddish words was no doubt also a factor in their adoption.»

Kerry Maxwell

«A tongue-in-cheek alternative to ringxiety is ‘fauxcellarm,’ an ingenious blend of the French loan word faux, meaning ‘false,’ cell, from cellphone, and alarm, which when spoken out loud sounds similar to ‘false alarm.’»

Loanwords in Popular Culture

The late British actor Geoffrey Hughes also provided an explanation of how loanwords work in a variety of languages, as the following quote from the soap opera star who also provided the voice of Paul McCartney in the film «Yellow Submarine,» shows.

Geoffrey Hughes

«A threefold distinction derived from German is applied by scholars to loan words on the basis of their degree of assimilation in the new host language. A Gastwort (‘guest word’) retains its original pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Examples are passé from French, diva from Italian, and leitmotiv from German. A Fremdwort (‘foreign word’) has undergone partial assimilation, as have French garage and hotel. Garage has developed a secondary, Anglicized pronunciation (‘garrij’) and can be used as a verb; hotel, originally pronounced with a silent ‘h,’ as the older formulation an hotel shows, has for some time been pronounced like an English word, with the ‘h’ being sounded. Finally, a Lehnwort (‘loan word’) has become a virtual native in the new language with no distinguishing characteristics. Loan word is thus an example of itself.»

Sources

• Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English, 2014
• Geoffrey Hughes, A History of English Words. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2000
• Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. MIT Press, 2004
• Philip Durkin, «Does English Still Borrow Words From Other Languages?» BBC News, February 3, 2014
• Francis Katamba, English Words: Structure, History, Usage, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005
• Kerry Maxwell, «Word of the Week.» Macmillan English Dictionary, February 2007

Have you ever wondered why there are three different concepts for one word in the English language, for instance weird, odd and strange? This is because native and foreign terms co-exist in English: weird derives from Old English, odd from Old Norse and strange from Old French.

This lexical variation is not a new development: throughout the history of our language, English has been adding thousands of words to its lexicon by acquiring new words from other, often unrelated, languages: risotto and pizza comes from Italian, vodka from Russian, Goulash from Hungarian, coffee and yoghurt from Turkish and ketchup from Chinese.

Lexical borrowing

Borrowing means that words which originated in one language are now used in another, even by people who don’t speak the ‘lending’ language. Many terms are borrowed or coined to cover the lexical gaps which have arisen as a result of technological developments, for instance the word television derives from Greek tele ‘far’ + Latin visio ‘thing seen’.

But it gets even more grammatical… According to Haugen (1950), there are five different types of lexical borrowing:

• Loanword: the word and the meaning are borrowed, e.g. hummus (or humous)
• Loan-translation: literal word-for-word translation of both parts of the lending compound, e.g. superman derives from the German ‘Übermensch’
• Loan-rendition: the translation vaguely captures the original meaning: refrigerator is translated as ‘ice-box’ in Chinese
• Loan-blend: one part of the compound is borrowed, the other one translated
• Semantic loan: only the meaning is borrowed, not the word

RELATED: How India Influenced the English Language

Borrowing in the English language

Already in Old English times, many Celtic loans were used to describe place names, e.g. Cumberland is ‘the land of the Cymry or Britons’. Latin loans were mainly used for terms associated with Christianity, for instance munuc ‘monk’ or mæsse, ‘mass’. Old Norse and Old English were mutually intelligible and therefore many everyday terms were borrowed from Old Norse: common nouns (fellow, sky), adjectives (ugly, loose, ill), verbs (take, cast), prepositions (till), conjunctions (though), pronouns (they).

In Middle English over 10,000 French loan words arrived in two stages. Before 1250 mainly technical words were borrowed from Norman French: legal (government, prison, court), religious (clergy, abbot, sacrament), military (army, soldier, sergeant) and miscellaneous (pork, beef, mutton) terms. And after 1250 mainly cultural terms were acquired from Parisian French: fashion (fashion, dress, coat), domestic settings (curtain, towel, blanket), social life (leisure, dance, music) and literature (poet, prose, romance).

In Early Modern English the largest expansion of vocabulary was through word-formation processes and borrowing: mainly from Latin (perfect, logic) and French (elegant, decision), but also from other languages, such as Greek (theology, trilogy), Italian (opera, balcony), Spanish and Portuguese (alcohol, alligator).

Borrowings in the English
Vocabulary. Main Groups of Loan Words in English. Translation Loans
and Semantic Borrowings

Borrowing words from other languages has always been one of the
important means of replenishing of the English vocabulary. There are
many words in English that are of foreign origin. The language from
which the loan word was taken into English is called the source of
borrowing. The original language to which the word may be traced is
called the origin of borrowing, e.g. the word “infantry” (пехота)
has French as its source of borrowing and Italian is its origin. In
etymological dictionaries the source comes first.

Main groups of loan words in English are
represented by borrowings from Latin, Scandinavian and French.
Though, a lot of other languages (Celtic, Greek, Russian, Italian,
Spanish, Arabic) also contributed to the development of the English
vocabulary. The history of the vocabulary of a language is closely
related to the history of the people speaking the language.

Latin
Borrowings

Latin borrowings are
numerous in English. They constitute about ¼ of the English
vocabulary as to historical period of their adoption. Latin
borrowings may be divided into 3 groups:

1. ancient
   borrowings which goes back as far as the 1^st
   century B.C. when the Anglo-Saxon tribes were still on the continent
   and came into contact with the Romans through trade. The Latin
   borrowings of this period are: dish, cup, butter, cheese, wine,
   cherry, plum, hare, spices, pepper and kitchen.

2. Borrowings
   which came to Britain in the 6^th-7^th
   centuries when Christianity was introduced: abbot, alter, angel,
   bishop, saint, candle, monk, nun, pope, Christ, school.

3. Words
   borrowed during the revival of Classical learning and art – the
   Renaissance in the 14^th
   century and since then the invasion of classical terms has never
   stopped. Many of them are distinctly learned words: senior, major,
   minor, junior, accept, educate, basis, area, idea, aggravate. Most
   of them are only partially assimilated but Latin borrowings of the
   first two periods are completely assimilated borrowings which belong
   to the basic word stork now.

Scandinavian
Borrowings

Scandinavian borrowings in English amount to
over650 words which denote most common objects, properties and
actions and belong to the basic word stock of Modern English. Britain
devastated by the inroads of different Scandinavian tribes (the
Danes) for about 3 centuries from the 8^th
to the 11^th
century. The Danish invasion resulted in the occupation of a great
part of the country by Scandinavian settlers, who spoke Old Norse –
the Germanic language very close to Old English. The effect of the
Danish conquest was the contribution of many Scandinavian words to
the English vocabulary: law, husband, fellow, sky, skin, wing, root,
skill, anger, finger, gate, to die, to cast, to hit, to take, to
call, to want, loose, wrong, low, ill, ugly, rotten, happy, they. A
characteristic feature of Scandinavian borrowings is the preservation
of the initial sounds [sk]=sk=sc: skirt, skill, scatter; or [g]
before front vowels: get, give, forget, anger…

French
Borrowings

French borrowings are
especially numerous in English. They may be roughly divided into old,
or Norman borrowings, and new, or Parisian, borrowings.

After the Norman conquest in 1066 French or rather
Northern-French became the official language in England. The first
French borrowings were terms connected with war, fare, court, law,
soldiers, army, crown, country, piece, justice, office, government,
parliament and state. There was almost no end to the French words
that continued to pour into English up to the 16^th
century: chair, table, furniture, dinner, supper, soup, jelly,
sausage, to fry, to boil, joy, pleasure, delight, comfort, dress,
colour, flower, fruit, desire, castle, mention (особняк),
beauty. These early Norman borrowings are usually fully assimilated
words. In the 17^th
century there was a change in the character of French borrowings. New
borrowings mainly from the Parisian dialect preserved their French
forms as a rule: campaign, garage, ballet, rouge, bucket, and
matinee, machine. Besides Latin, Scandinavian, French borrowings the
English language contains words borrowed from almost every language
on the globe.

Celtic
Borrowings

Celtic borrowings are of primary historical
importance for English. When the Anglo-Saxons came to the British
Isles in the 5^th
century A.D. they met with the Celts or Britains – the native
inhabitants of the British Isles whom they pushed away to the North
and the West. The whole number of Celtic words in English whether
borrowed directly or indirectly is 165 according to Walter Skeat’s
counts: banner (булка
домашнего
хлеба),
bard, glad, clad, cradle, loch/lock (lake).

Celtic elements are mostly found in place names,
e.g. aber (the mouth of the river) – Aberdeen; avon (a river) –
Stratford-on-Avon; inch (an island) – Inchcape.

Greek
Borrowings

Greek borrowings were
usually adopted through Latin and French. Many Latin Christian terms
were of Greek origin: abbot, bishop, school, Christ, monk; chair,
police, policy, chronicle came to English from Greek through Latin
and French.

The direct borrowing
of the Greek words into English started only in the period of the
Renaissance: literature owes the following terms – tragedy, comedy,
drama… Greek elements, affixes and roots are widely used in English
to create new terms: telephone, photography, telegramme etc.

Italian
Borrowings

Italian borrowings are
mostly musical terms: allegro, aria, finale, piano, opera, solo,
sonata, soprano, trill, violin, macaroni, spaghetti, influenza,
umbrella, manifest etc.

Spanish
Borrowings

The Spanish element in
English like the Italian is mainly modern, e.g. cigar, embargo,
junta, mosquito etc. The following words were introduced through
Spanish to Europe from America: coco, chilly, chocolate, tomato,
potato, tobacco, canoeing, yucca etc.

Russian
Borrowings

Russian borrowings may
be subdivided into 2 principle groups:

• Borrowings that took place before 1917 such
  as: izba, ruble, kopeck, tsar, borzoi, Cossack etc.

• And borrowings after 1917. The so-called
  sovietisms: Bolshevik, soviet, Komsomol, udarnik; later – sputnik,
  lunnik; recent – perestroika, glasnost, Gorbotchov etc.

Translation
Loans

Translation loans are
words and expressions formed from the material already existing in
the English language but according to patterns taken from another
language by way of literal (буквальный)
morpheme or word-for-word translation, e.g.: world outlook
(мировоззрение) – from
German Weltanschauung; class struggle – Klassenkampf; wall
newspaper – stennaya gazeta (Russian), a slip of the tongue –
lapsus lingua (Latin); pale-faced, pipe of piece, fire-water – from
Indian. Some other translation loans from Russians are: old believer,
cult of personality, candidate/doctor of science, white night, Red
square, Winter Palace etc.

Semantic
Borrowings

Semantic borrowings
are the expansion of the semantic structure of a word under the
influence of correlated foreign one. It’s the borrowing of a
meaning from the semantic structure of the correlated foreign word,
e.g.: the English word pioneer (explorer) under the influence of the
new meaning of the correlated Russian word (пионер)
developed one more meaning: a member of a young pioneer organization;
brigade (an army unit) under the influence of the new meaning
developed one more meaning – active social workers; norm=standard –
norm developed one more meaning – “an amount of work”.