Read the following extract. What is a citizen of the USA called? Analyse the suggested variants of names from the point of view of word-building.

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It is embarrassing that the citizens of the United States do not have a satisfactory name. In the Declaration of Independence the British colonists called their country the United States ofAmerica, thus creating a difficulty. What should the inhabitant of a country with such a long name be called?

For more than 150 years those living in the country have searched in vain for a suitable name for themselves. In 1803, a prominent American physician, Dr. Samuel Mitchill, suggested that the entire country should be called Fredonia or Fredon. He had taken the English word freedom and the Latin colonia and from them coined Fredonia or Fredon. Dr. Mitchill thought that with this word as the name for the country as a whole, the derivative Fredish would follow naturally, corresponding to British, etc. In the same way, he thought, Frede, would be a good name for the inhabitant of Fredonia. But his fellow-citizens laughed at the doctor's names.

Such citizen names as United Statesian, shortened to Unisian and United Statian were proposed but quickly forgotten. No better success has greeted Usona (United States of North America) as a name for the country and Usonian — for a citizen.

Usage overwhelmingly favours American, as a name for an inhabitant of the USA, though all Americans realize it covers far too much territory.

(FromAmerican Words by M. Mathews)

ETYMOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH WORD-STOCK

Topics for discussion:

1. Words of native origin.

1. Антрушина, Г.Б. Лексикология английского языка: учебник для студ. пед. ин-тов по спец. № 2103 " Иностр. яз." / Г.Б. Антрушина, О.В. Афанасьева, Н.Н. Морозова; под ред. Г.Б. Антрушиной. — М.: Высш. школа, 1985. — С. 34—43.

2. Воробей, А.Н. Глоссарий лингвистических терминов / А.Н. Воробей, Е.Г. Карапетова. — Барановичи: УО " БарГУ", 2004. — 108 с.

3. Дубенец, Э.М. Современный английский язык. Лексикология: пособие для студ. гуманит. вузов / Э.М. Дубенец. — М. / СПб.: ГЛОССА / КАРО, 2004. — С. 98—99.

4. Лексикология английского языка: учебник для ин-тов и фак-тов иностр. яз. / Р.З. Гинзбург [и др.]; под общ. ред. Р.З. Гинзбург. — 2-еизд., испр. и доп. — М.: Высш. школа, 1979. — С. 160—164.

5. Лещева, Л.М. Слова в английском языке. Курс лексикологии современного английского языка: учебник для студ. фак-в и отдел. английского языка (на англ. яз.) / Л.М. Лещева. — Минск: Академия управления при Президенте Республики Беларусь, 2001. — С. 26—28.

2. Borrowings. Causes, criteria, assimilation of borrowings.

2. Дубенец, Э.М. Современный английский язык. Лексикология: пособие для студ. гуманит. вузов / Э.М. Дубенец. — М. / СПб.: ГЛОССА / КАРО, 2004. — С. 99—101.

3. Лексикология английского языка: учебник для ин-тов и фак-тов иностр. яз. / Р.З. Гинзбург [и др.]; под общ. ред. Р.З. Гинзбург. — 2-еизд., испр. и доп. — М.: Высш. школа, 1979. — С. 164—171.

4. Лещева, Л.М. Слова в английском языке. Курс лексикологии современного английского языка: учебник для студ. фак-в и отдел. английского языка (на англ. яз.) / Л.М. Лещева. — Минск: Академия управления при Президенте Республики Беларусь, 2001. — С. 28—31, 32—33.

3. Classifications of borrowings: 1) according to the language from which they were borrowed (Romanic, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Germanic, Scandinavian, German, Dutch, Russian borrowings); 2) according to the borrowed aspect (phonetic borrowings, semantic borrowings, translation loans, morphemic borrowings, hybrids).

1. Дубенец, Э.М. Современный английский язык. Лексикология: пособие для студ. гуманит. вузов / Э.М. Дубенец. — М. / СПб.: ГЛОССА / КАРО, 2004. — С. 101—117.

Interrelation between native and borrowed elements. Influence of borrowings. International words. Etymological doublets.

2. Дубенец, Э.М. Современный английский язык. Лексикология: пособие для студ. гуманит. вузов / Э.М. Дубенец. — М. / СПб.: ГЛОССА / КАРО, 2004. — С. 117—121.

3. Лексикология английского языка: учебник для ин-тов и фак-тов иностр. яз. / Р.З. Гинзбург [и др.]; под общ. ред. Р.З. Гинзбург. — 2-е изд., испр. и доп. — М.: Высш. школа, 1979. — С. 171—175.

Key terms: words of native origin, borrowing, source of borrowing, origin of a word, international word, etymology, etymological doublets (triplets), folk etymology, translation loan, semantic loan.

Compulsory tasks and exercises:

1. Provide answers to the following questions:

1. What is the etymological composition of the English lexicon?

2. How can you account for the fact that the English vocabulary contains such an immense number of words of foreign origin?

3. What is meant by the native element of the English vocabulary?

4. What are the main characteristics of the words of native origin?

5. What is the difference between the terms " source of borrowing" and " origin of the word"?

6. What do you understand by " folk etymology"?

7. What are the causes and ways of borrowing?

8. What are the specific features of borrowings?

9. What types of assimilation of borrowings are distinguished?

10. What are the main factors determining the degree of assimilation?

11. What is the influence of borrowings on the English vocabulary?

12. What can you say about the role of native and borrowed words in the English language?

13. In what spheres of communication do international words frequently occur?

14. What do we understand by etymological doublets?

15. What are the characteristic features of translation—loans?

16. How are etymological and stylistic characteristics of words interrelated?

Read the following text and answer the questions after it.

Charles F. Hockett

A Course in modern linguistics

The conditions for borrowing

Whenever two idiolects come into contact, one or both may be modified. In face-to-face communication, either speaker may imitate some feature of the other's speech; when the contact is indirect, as in reading, the influence can of course pass only in one direction. The feature which is imitated is called the model; the idiolect (or language) in which the model occurs, or the speaker of that idiolect, is called the donor; the idiolect (or language) which acquires something new in the process is the borrowing idiolect (or language). The process itself is called " borrowing", but this term requires some caution, thus, that which is " borrowed" does not have to be paid back; the donor makes no sacrifice and does not have to be asked for permission. Indeed, nothing changes hands: the donor goes on speaking as before, and only the borrower's speech is altered.

From our definition, we see that the conditions for borrowing are present constantly, as a natural accompaniment of every use of language except genuine soliloquy. In the contact of idiolects A and B, the chances that borrowing will actually occur depend on several factors, one of which is the degree of similarity of A and B. If the two idiolects are very similar, borrowing is unlikely, since neither speaker is apt to use any form unknown tothe other. If A and В are so divergent that the speakers cannot understand each other, borrowing is equally unlikely.Between the two extremes we find the situations in which borrowing is more probable. In practice, these situations can be classed roughly into two types. In one type, the two idiolects share a common core; under these conditions we speak of dialect borrowing. In the other, there is no common core but rather some degree of bilingualism or semibilingualism; in this case we speak of language borrowing.

Individual and Mass Effect

A single act of borrowing affects, in the first instance, only the borrowing idiolect. [...] If I take a fancy to the French word ivrogne, and start to use it in my English, my idiolect is modified. The future of the language is not affected unless others imitate me, so that the newly imported word passes into more or less general usage and is transmitted to subsequent generations. This would be more probable if a number of speakers of English who knew some French were, at more or less the same time, to start using the French word in their English. Such mass importation from another dialect or language is very common, and in historical linguistics is the kind of borrowing that interests us most.

Consequently, it is customary to speak loosely of a " single" borrowing even in cases where thousands of individual acts of borrowing from one idiolect to another must have been involved. Thus we say that the Latin word vinum has been borrowed into English just twice (not thousands of times); once into pre-English, giving OE [win], NE wine; later, via Norman French, giving ME ['vijnə ], NE vine. Even if the factor mentioned in the preceding paragraph were not operative, this sort of mass-statistical approach would be forced upon us by the limitations of our documentary evidence.

Conditions for Borrowing

The mere contact of idiolects A and В does not guarantee that one will borrow from the other. For a borrowing to occur, say from B to A, two conditions must be met:

(1) The speaker of A must understand, or think he understands, the particular utterance in idiolect В which contains the model.

(2) The speaker of A must have some motive, overt or covert, for the borrowing.

The first condition need not detain us long. Our reference must be to apparent rather than genuine understanding, because in many known instances there is really some measure of misunderstanding. [...]

The second is more difficult. We cannot profit from idle speculation about the psychology of borrowers, but must confine ourselves to such overt evidence as is at hand. This may lead us to miss some motives of importance, but we can be much surer of those which we do discern. These are two in number: prestige and need-filling.

The Prestige Motive

People emulate those whom they admire, in speech-pattern as well as in other respects. [...] Upper- and middle-class Englishmen, in the days after the Norman Conquest, learned French and used French expressions in their English because French was the language of the new rulers of the country. [...]

Sometimes the motive is somewhat different: the imitator does not necessarily admire those whom he imitates, but wishes to be identified with them and thus be treated as they are. The results are not distinguishable, and we can leave to psychologists the sorting out of fine shades of difference. [...]

The prestige motive is constantly operative in dialect borrowing; it becomes important in language borrowing only under special conditions. When speakers of two different languages live intermingled in a single region, usually one of the languages is that spoken by those in power: this is the upper or dominant language, and the other is the lower. Such a state of affairs has most often been brought about by invasion and conquest, more rarely by peaceful migration. The prestige factor leads to extensive borrowing from the dominant language into the lower. Borrowing in the other direction is much more limited andlargely ascribable to the other principal motive.

The Need-Filling Motive

The most obvious other motive for borrowing is to fill a gap in the borrowing idiolect. [...]

...new experiences, new objects and practices, bring new words into a language. […] Tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocoa, chocolate, tomato have spread all over the world in recent times, along with the objects to which the words refer. Typhoons and monsoons have not spread, but direct or indirect experience with them has. […]

Immigrants to the United States in the last seventy-five years have drawn heavily on English for new words, partly on the prestige basis and partly for need-filling purposes: the two motives must often be mingled, and we cannot always say which was more important in a given instance. In exchange, however, American English has acquired only a sparse scattering of need-filling loans from the various languages of the immigrants: delicatessen, hamburger […]from immigrant German, chile concarne, tortilla from Mexican Spanish, spaghetti from Italian — to stick to the sphere of humble foodstuffs. [...]

If a local dialect gains ascendancy for political and economic reasons, then one expects extensive borrowing from that dialect for prestige reasons, but forms borrowed into the ascendant dialect have to be explained — and usually, if the records are not too scanty, explanation on the need-filling basis is possible.

Kinds of loans

48.1. The examples of borrowing given in § 47 involve in most cases the development of an idiom — be it word or phrase — in one language or dialect on the basis of one already current in another. There are several different ways in which this can come about, and there are also known or suspected cases of borrowing of other than lexical items. In this section we shall sort these out, and also specify the kinds of phylogenetic change that can be brought about, directly or indirectly, by the different kinds of borrowing.

Whenever the need-filling motive plays a part, the borrower is being confronted with some new object or practice for which he needs words. Under these conditions [...] three rather distinct things may happen, giving rise respectively to loanwords, loanshifts, and loanblends.

Loanwords

The borrower may adopt the donor's word along with the object or practice; the new form in the borrower's speech is then a loanword.

The acquisition of a loanword constitutes in itself a lexical change, and probably we should say that it constitutes or entails a semantic change. A shape change is sometimes involved. [...] English acquisition of wiener ['wijnə r] involved no such change, since the language already had a morpheme represented by the shape [wijn] and several morphemes represented by suffixed l-ə r]. Our acquisition of allegro [ə 'legrow], on the other hand, entailed a shape change of the type just described.

Other kinds of phylogenetic change are not directly implied by a single new importation, but they may come about as the result of a whole wave of loanwords from some single source, along the following lines:

1. Grammatical change

ME acquired a large number of Norman-French adjectives containing the derivational suffix which is now -able /-ible: agreeable, excusable, variable, and others. At first, each of these whole words must have functioned in English as a single morpheme. But English has also borrowed some of the verbs which in French underlay the adjectives, and in due time there came to be a large enough number of pairs of borrowed words for the recurrent termination to take on the function of a derivational affix in English. This is shown by the subsequent use of the suffix with native English stems: bearable, eatable, drinkable (the stems tracing back to OE /beran/, /etan/, /drinkan/). [....]

...It is to be noted that the derivational affix was not borrowed as such: it occurred as an integral part of various whole words, and only the latter were actually borrowed. Apparently we can generalize on this point: loanwords are almost always free forms (words or phrases); bound forms are borrowed as such only with extreme rarity. [....]

2. Alternation change

Our learned vocabulary, borrowed directly or indirectly from Latin and Greek, includes a good number of words like datum: data, phenomenon: phenomena, matrix: matrices. What has happened here is that we have borrowed both the singular and the plural forms of the word. [...] Since English already had the inflectional category of number, these importations do not imply any grammatical change, only additional patterns of alternation. In such cases there is usually competition between the imported and native patterns. Most of us tend to use data as a singular " mass-noun", like milk, saying this data is rather than these data are. Doublet plurals in competition are even commoner: matrixes ['mejtriksə z] and matrices ['mejtrə `sijz], automata and automatons, gladioluses and gladioli. One cannot safely predict which alternative in such a case will in the end win out; currently, in English, the imported plural has a more learned connotation than the native one. […]

3. Phonemic and phonetic change

The first few members of a community to use a word from another language, or from a highly divergent dialect of their own, may imitate the pronunciation of the model accurately. Any isolated borrowing which spreads into general usage, however, is unlikely to retain its foreign pronunciation if that in any way goes against the pronunciation habits of the borrowers. […] Some of us pronounce initial [ts] in tsetse fly, tsar; most, however, begin the words with [z]. Even French words like rouge, garage, mirage, probably end more commonly in English with [j] than with [z].

However, it would seem that a great flood of loanwords from some single source, involving many bilinguals as the channel for the borrowings and with a major prestige factor, can have some striking consequences in articulatory habits. The stock example, once again, is the influence of Norman French on English: it was through this influence that English acquired initial [v z j], and, consequently, the phonemic contrast between [v] and [f], [z] and [s]. [...]

Loanshifts

When confronted with a new object or practice for which words are needed, the borrower may somehow adapt material already in his own language....a new idiom arises, and since it arises under the impact of another linguistic system, it is a loanshift.

The spread of Christianity into England in the 7th century carried many Latin words into OE as cultural loanwords: abbot, altar, pope, cap, sock, cook, to cite but a few. [...] But for some of the fundamental notions of the religion, old Germanic words were used: God, heaven, hell were merely stripped of their heathen connotations and invested with the meanings described by the missionaries. The influence on the borrowing language is minimal in cases of this kind: the only change directly entailed is semantic. […]

If the model in the donor language is a composite form, then the borrower may build a parallel composite form out of native raw material; the result is a loan-translation. English marriage of convenience and that goes without saying are loan-translations from French; [...] loanword is a loan-translation from German Lehnwort. […]

Loanshifts involve lexical- and semantic change, and in some cases may lead to minor grammatical change. The latter is effected if the literal following of a foreign model in the creation of a new idiom gives rise to some type of construction previously alien to the borrowing language. The English pattern of two nouns in succession, the second attributive to the first, as in operation Coronet, seems to have come in from French in this way. [...]

Loanblends

A loanblend is a new idiom developed in the borrowing situation, in which both the loanword and the loanshift mechanisms are involved: the borrower imports part of the model and replaces part of it by something already in his own language. [...]

An interesting case is the common substandard English chaise lounge, where the first word of the French model chaise longue 'long upholstered chair of a certain kind' is imported, but the second part is mistranslated so as to seem to make sense.

Records of earlier borrowings often do not permit us to determine whether a hybrid word is the result of loan-blending at the time of borrowing or a later coinage of native and well-assimilated foreign elements. In most of the above examples we have reason to believe that loanblending was involved. In the case of English talkative and bearable we have documentary evidence to show that they were later hybrid formations. But in many other instances we cannot be sure.

Pronunciation Borrowing

If a speaker imitates someone else's pronunciation of a word which is already familiar to the borrower, we may speak of pronunciation borrowing. Usually the donor and borrowing idiolects are mutually intelligible and the motive is prestige. [...]

ME [giv] 'give', from Scandinavian, supplanted the inherited form [jiv].

Grammatical Borrowing

We have seen that grammatical change can be brought about indirectly by borrowing — via sets of related loanwords. There is some doubt that grammatical change can result from borrowing from another language in any other way, but the issue is not settled.

Adaptation and impact

Once a borrowed word has been thoroughly " naturalized", its subsequent history is like that of any form already in the language. French state, navy, danger came into ME with stressed [a^v], also found at the time in such inherited words as [na^vmə ] 'name', [sа^vkə ] 'shake', [ba^vdə ] 'bathe'; we now have [ej] in all these words. [...]

...during the period of importation, the shape of an incoming word is subject to more haphazard variation. Different borrowers will imitate a foreign word in slightly different ways. Monolinguals to whom the word is passed on will alter its shape even more. This modification of the shape of the incoming word is called adaptation: usually it leads to a shape more in keeping with the inherited pronunciation habits of the borrowers.

The buffeting-about of the incoming word often results, in the end, in a single surviving and fixed shape, but sometimes two or more shapes become more or less equally naturalized and survive, side by side, in competition. Thus garage has three current pronunciations: [gə 'raz], [gə 'raj], and ['gæ rij], the last primarily British. In the future, one of these may spread at the expense of the other two until finally only one survives.

If a language or dialect takes only scattered loans from a single donor, one is not apt to find any great consistency in the adaptation. The few English words from Chinese, such as chop suey, chow mein, typhoon, entered English at various periods and from different Chinese dialects, and show no regularity of correspondence with the shapes of the Chinese models.

On the other hand, if many loanwords come from a single source over a relatively short period, there may develop a fashionof adaptation, which then makes for greater consistency in the treatment of further loans from the same source. The Normans, later the North French, had such a fashion for the importation of learned loans from book or clerical Latin. English borrowed many of the words which had come into French from Latin in this way, and in time developed its own fashion of adaptation for words taken directly from Latin. Procrastination came into English directly from Latin; it does not occur in older French, yet has just the shape it would have had if it had been borrowed via French. Indeed, we are now able to make up new English words from Latin (or Latinized Greek) raw materials, even when Latin or Greek did not have the word, and the shapes taken by the coinages depend ultimately on the fashions of adaptation just mentioned: eventual, immoral, fragmentary, telegraph, telephone.

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