Words_about_words_An_introduction_to_Eng

Sources of the English Vocabulary

Italian words started their way into English as early as the sixteenth century, with the adoption of items pertaining to the vocabulary of music, one of the arts particularly representative for the Italians. Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) quote a number of words dating from that period. Their examples include: duo, fugue, madrigal, violin. These were followed, they say, in the seventeenth century by allegro, largo, opera, piano, presto, sonata, solo and, in the eighteenth century, when the interest of the English for Italian music reached its peak, by adagio, andante, aria, cantata,

concerto, crescendo, duet, finale, forte, oratorio, trio, trombone, viola. The process continued in the nineteenth century, with the adoption of alto,

cadenza, legato, piccolo, prima-donna.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Italians immigrated in large numbers to the United States. Many of them went into the food business and popularized Italian cuisine. Consequently, many Italian words connected to food and cooking entered American English and subsequently spread to other dialects of English as well. Some such words

are: pizza, pasta, spaghetti, macaroni, ciabatta, cannelloni, lasagna, zucchini, pesto, tagliatelle, “macaroni”, scampi.

Italian words from areas other than music and cuisine that have been borrowed include: balcony, balloon, carnival, dilettante, fresco,

ghetto, regatta, stiletto, studio, torso, umbrella, vendetta, volcano.

Spanish and Portuguese became suppliers of words to English in the sixteenth century. The former has been a rich direct source of loans, while the latter was less so. In addition, many non-European words from the colonies found their way into English via Spanish and Portuguese. As Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) point out, “many of these loanwords came from the New World: alligator, avocado, barracuda, canoe, chocolate,

cigar, cockroach, domino, embargo, mosquito, peccadillo, potato,

sombrero, tobacco, tomato, tornado, tortilla, vanilla”.

The nineteenth century seems to have been the period when Spanish words penetrated English, especially its American variety, in large numbers. Among the words adopted then, there are: bonanza, canyon, lasso, mustang, patio, ranch, sierra, siesta, stampede. The twentieth century is characterized by loan translations such as moment of truth, a linguistic calque of the Spanish “momento de la verdad”, referring to the moment when the bull is killed by the toreador in the arena.

As far as Portuguese words that were taken over into English are concerned, though the process of borrowing started much earlier, the great majority of them entered English during the modern period. This majority included: albino, copra, flamingo, Madeira, mango, marmalade,

molasses, palaver, teak.

From other European languages, English has borrowed few words. Sable came into English in Middle English times via French, from Slavic languages; polka came via French in the nineteenth century, from Czech, alongside later borrowings such as howitzer, pistol, robot. Mammoth was

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Words about Words

borrowed in the eighteenth century directly from Russian. Other more recent borrowings from Russian have not become completely naturalized: bolshevik, czar, glasnost, intelligentsia (ultimately from Latin), perestroika, tundra, vodka. From Hungarian, English has borrowed directly goulash and paprika; while coach came via French, from the Hungarian kosci. Turkish and Tatar words in English include: bosh, caique,

coffee, cossack, divan, fez, horde, kaftan, kavass, kebab, khan, kumiss, mammoth, pasha, shish, Tartar, turkey, turquoise, yoghurt.

2.3.9. Words from non-European languages in English

With the expansion of the British Empire, which facilitated the spread of English to all continents between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, and with the ascendancy of the United Stated immediately after the Second World War, when the British Empire started its decline, English came in contact with many languages around the world. The result of this contact has been two fold: English has influenced these languages to a lesser or a greater degree and has itself been affected by them.

In North America, English borrowed from the Native American languages common words such as avocado, barbecue, buccaneer, cacao,

cannibal, canoe, wampum, toboggan, iguana, maize, moccasin, papaya, tomahawk, skunk, squash, tobacco, coyote, “caribou”, poncho, tomato, yucca and a number of proper nouns such as mountain names:

Appalachians, Alleghenies, the names of the Great Lakes: Erie, Ontario,

Huron, Michigan, Superior, names of states: Oklahoma, Massachusetts and names of cities: Chicago, Saratoga, Tallahassie.

On the other side of the world, the languages spoken in what are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been a source of verbal source to English that cannot be overlooked. Rao (1954), quoted by Katamba (2005) gives a quite comprehensive account of the Indian loans in English.

He points out that the nature of the borrowed words has changed with the centuries, mirroring the developments outside the language. There are a few words designating trade goods which predate the Raj: copra, coir, pepper, sugar, indigo. Most of these words entered English indirectly, via Latin, Greek or French.

Indian became a direct source of loan words starting from the very early years of the British colonization of India. Quite understandably, the words borrowed at this time were a reflection of the commerce between Britain and the newly colonized territory and included terms such as calico,

chintz and dungaree.

As time passed, the range of Indian words borrowed into English widened so that, besides words referring to mundane trade goods which continued their way into English, lexical items in the areas of religion,

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Sources of the English Vocabulary

philology, articles of dress and various other domains have also been imported. Katamba (2005: 161) reproduces Rao’s (1954) table to demonstrate the diversity and wealth of the Indian loan words:

Hinduism: Buddha, Brahmin, karma, pundit, yoga, mantra, nirvana;

Food: chutney, chapatti, curry, poppadom; Clothing: cashmere, pyjamas, khaki, mufti, saree; Philology (19th century): sandhi, bahuvrihi, dvandva;

People and society: Aryan (Sanskrit), pariah, mem-sahib, sahib, coolie; Animals and plants: mongoose, zebu, bhang, paddy, teak;

Buildings and domestic: bungalow, pagoda, cot;

Assorted: catamaran, cash, chit, lilac, tattoo, loot, polo, cushy.

Though a smaller number of words coming from farther east have entered English, at least some of them cannot pass unnoticed since they have come to be used quite frequently. Thus, the AskOxford website mentions the following as loan words from Chinese languages: china, chin-

chin, chopsticks, chopsuey, chow chow, chow mein, dim sum, fan-tan, feng shui, ginseng, gung-ho, kaolin, ketchup / catsup, kowtow, kung fu, lychee,

loquat, mahjong, pekoe, sampan, tai chi, taipan, Tao, tea, yang, yen, yin. According to the same source, aikido, banzai, bonsai, bushido, futon,

geisha, haiku, hara-kiri, judo, jujitsu, Kabuki, kamikaze, kimono, koan,

mikado, sake, samisen, samurai, sayonara, Shinto, shogun, soy(a), sushi, teriyaki, tofu, tycoon, yen, Zen have been taken from Japanese, while lama, Sherpa, yak, yeti, now present in English, originate in Tibetan.

Languages from south and south-east Asia, though less known to non-linguists, have also given words to English. Hindi / Urdu is the source language for bungalow, crore, dacoit, deodar, dinghy, dungaree, ghee,

gymkhana, jodphurs, lakh, loot, paisa, pakora, Raj, samo(o)sa, shampoo,

tandoori, tom-tom, wallah. Bantam, batik, gamelan, junk come from Javanese. Malay has contributed amok, bamboo, caddy, camphor,

cassowary, cockatoo, dugong, durian, gecko, gingham, gong, kampong /

compound, kapok, kris, lory, mangosteen, orangutan, paddy, pangolin, rattan, sago, sarong. From Sanskrit, mainly indirectly, English received

ashram, avatar, banya, banyan, beryl, brahmin, carmine, chakra, cheetah, chintz, chutney, crimson, guru, juggernaut, jungle, jute, karma,

lacquer, mandarin, nirvana, palanquin, pundit, sapphire, sugar, suttee, swastika, yoga, etc. From Sinhala, it enriched with anaconda and

tourmaline.

and from Tagalog with boondock, ylang-ylang. Tamil has given English catamaran, cheroot, curry, mango, mulligatawny, pariah.

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Words about Words

2.3.10. Recent loans in English

English is borrowing words on a regular basis. The process of importing lexical items from other languages has never stopped, it has only changed its characteristics lately. The main features that are peculiar to it at present are the fact that the frequency of borrowing is considerably reduced and that English seems to be spreading its tentacles and borrow from less and less known languages. To prove this, Jackson and Amvela (2007) quote Pyles and Algeo (1993: 310) who mention a study by Cannon (1987) of more than a thousand recent loan words from almost one hundred languages, which shows that “about 25% [of these] are from French, 8% each from Japanese and Spanish, 7% each from Italian and Latin, 6% each from African languages, German and Greek, 4% each from Russian and Yiddish, 3% from Chinese, and progressively smaller percentages from Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Malayo-Polynesian, Vietnamese, Amerindian languages, Swedish, Bengali, Danish, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Amharic, Eskimo-Aleut, Irish, Norwegian, and 30 other languages.”

With all this diversity of sources, as the study itself demonstrates, the largest supplier of loan words to English remains, at present, French. This may be because of the geographical proximity of France and England. A reason of the same kind, Mexico’s vicinity with the United States, might lie behind the frequent borrowing from American Spanish by American English. The increase in importance of Japanese as a source of loans might be the consequence of Japan’s having gained more and more power on the global market in general. As far as Latin, a former rich source of loans, is concerned, Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain its decline as a provider of words to English both by the fact that, since English borrowed from it so extensively in previous ages, there is relatively little left to be borrowed and by the fact that, rather than borrowing directly from Latin, English often now creates new Latinate words from English morphemes originally from Latin.

The discussion so far about the sources of the English vocabulary has taken into account the native stock of the language and the various sources of borrowing, in different periods of time. Besides importing words from other languages, the English vocabulary has been continuously enriching by another means – the formation of new lexical items. The next chapter will explore word formation processes in more detail.

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III. WORD FORMATION

Before surveying the techniques of word formation that have given birth to new words in English, the introduction of the main concepts involved in such a presentation - free and bound morphemes, root, affix, and stem – might prove useful.

3.1. Free and bound morphemes

Originally, “morphology” meant the study of biological organisms. But nineteenth century students of linguistics borrowed the term and applied it to the study of word structure, so that, in linguistics, morphology came to mean the study of the formation and internal organization of words.

The basic concept morphology operates with is the morpheme, “the smallest unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built” (Katamba 2005: 29). However, they are just theoretical constructs since, in practice, it is the variants of a morpheme that are used to form new words. These variants are called allomorphs and they are in a relation of mutual exclusiveness, i.e. only one allomorph can occur in a given context. For example, im-, in-, il-, ir- are variants of the same morpheme, employed on phonetic principles, according to the starting sound of the element to which they are added: im-possible, in-cautious, il-literate, ir-responsible; the selection of the morpheme –(e)s, the marker of the regular plural of nouns, is also determined by phonological factors so that it may be realized under the form of one of the following allomorphs: /s/ in hats, /z/ in games and /iz/ in oranges. The morphemes that constitute the core for the formation of new words are less sensitive to the phonetic environment and more so to the grammatical context in which they occur. This is obvious for irregular verbs morphemes, whose allomorphs differ on grammatical grounds: eg. the allomorphs drove and driven correspond, respectively, to the past simple and the past perfect of the morpheme drive.

According to their distribution, morphemes fall into two broad categories, free morphemes and bound morphemes. The former can appear independently in an utterance and have a meaning of their own, while the latter cannot be used independently and do not have a notional or full meaning, but a functional or derivative one. Bound morphemes are always appended to free forms (eg. drive is a free morpheme, while –er is a bound one; if the latter is added to the former, we obtain the word driver which, in its turn, is another free morpheme, according to the above definition).

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Words about Words

3.2. Root

The root is, Tătaru (2002: 22) says, “the necessary and sufficient structural constituent for a word to exist”, the part common to all the words in a word family (“the whole series of words and word-substitutes obtained from one root by all possible word-forming mechanisms” (Tătaru 2002: 38)), which is not further divisible into smaller parts that have a meaning (eg. care in the words careful, careless, carelessness, caring). If roots are equivalent to a word in the language and carry the notional meaning of this word into all the new words they form, they are considered free roots (eg.

civil in civility, region in regional or person in personify). If, on the other hand, they are totally barred from occurring independently, they are considered bound roots (eg. sanct in sanctify, tox in toxic or loc in local).

3.3. Affix

The bound morphemes that are appended to the root are called affixes. Depending on their position to the root, affixes may be prefixes, if they are added before the root, suffixes, if they are added after the root and infixes, if they are added somewhere within the root (modern English has no infixes in its regular vocabulary; however, they may be employed in expressive language such as absobloominglutely used by Alan Jay Lerner in My Fair Lady and quoted by Adams (1973: 8) or cuck-BLOODY-oo, the way the cuckoo sounds for Dylan Thomas (1940)).

Affixes may be derivational or inflectional, also called functional. The former, which will be discussed in more details in what follows, help to form completely new words (eg. –ful in beautiful or un- in unimportant), while the latter, which Jackson and Amvela (2007) call “relational markers”, help to build new grammatical forms of the same basic word, according to the syntactic environment in which this word is used (eg. –s in writes helps to form the present tense form of the verb “to write”, when it is the predicate of a third person singular subject; -ed in - loved is used for the formation of the past and past participle of “to love”, while –er in cleverer is added to change the positive degree of the adjective “clever” into its comparative of superiority; however, in all the previous examples, the notional content of the root words remains unaltered).

Inflectional affixes are characterized by a number of features, the most important of these being the fact that “they lend themselves to paradigms which apply to the language as a whole. The paradigm of a major word class consists of a single stem of that class with the inflectional suffixes which the stem may take. The paradigm may be used as a suitable way of defining the word class in the sense that, if a word belongs to that

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Word Formation

class, it must take at least some of the suffixes characteristic of that set as opposed to suffixes characterizing other paradigms” (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 84). The inflectional affixes of nouns, adjectives and verbs are illustrated in a tabular form by Cook (1969: 122-3) as it is shown below.

Nouns display the following inflectional contrasts:

Monoor disyllabic gradable adjectives show the following inflectional contrasts:

Verbs (except the verb to be and the modals) show the following inflectional contrasts:

For some verbs, including the regular ones, the five-parts paradigm has only four elements, since the past and past participle inflectional affixes have the same form. However, since they confer the stem they are added to different morphological characteristics, they should be considered different morphemes with identical forms (homonyms).

Pronouns are a class of function words which do not add inflectional affixes. Their forms fit the noun inflectional paradigm, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) show:

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Words about Words

The forms listed in each column of the paradigm are in complementary distribution, i.e. they are context dependent (where one occurs the other ones do not). For example, I occurs before the verb, as the grammatical subject in sentences such as I wrote a letter or I shall buy flowers, while me occurs after the verb, as the direct, the indirect or the prepositional object as in My friend gave me the book; He wrote me a letter; My father explained the theory to me. The possessive pronoun mine replaces the whole nominal phrase “my + noun” as in This is my book –

This book is mine.

The auxiliary verbs pertain to the class of function words as well. They constitute a closed sub-class of verbs which can take certain forms in the verbal paradigm, though not all. While most of the verbs have four or five forms, most of the modal auxiliaries have two, the modal must has only one form, while the auxiliary be is the most polymorphic of all verbs, with eight different forms. The paradigm of auxiliaries is presented by Jackson and Amvela (2007: 85) as it is shown below:

Some monoand disyllabic adverbs (with the exception of those formed with the suffix –ly) show the same inflectional contrasts like the gradable monoand disyllabic adjectives:

Finally, Jacskon and Amvela (2007) also distinguish between

regular inflections and irregular inflections. The former are formed following a regular pattern, e.g. –s for the plural of nouns, -ed for the past and past participle of regular verbs, -er for the comparative of gradable monoand disyllabic adjectives, etc. However, even within the class of regular inflectional affixes, variation may be present, in spelling, e.g. the addition of e before the plural suffix –s (masses, classes), and

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Word Formation

pronunciation, e.g. compare the pronunciation of the plural –(e)s in rats, cows, houses and that of the past tense inflection –ed in talked, clogged, glided. Irregular inflections do not follow a regular pattern and usually apply to only some of the members of a morphological class. For example, the following nouns form their plural irregularly: child – children, man –

men, woman – women, ox – oxen, mouse – mice, louse – lice, tooth – teeth, deer – deer, salmon – salmon, etc. The number of verbs that form their past tense and their past participle irregularly is even greater: run – ran – run, see – saw – seen, lie – lay – lain, write – wrote – written, etc.

3.4. Stem

When affixes are stripped away from the word, what we obtain is the stem or, conversely, the stem is the part of the word to which an affix is added in order to form a new word (eg. in the word carelessness, care is the root, -less and –ness are affixes, and careless is the stem).

A stem may coincide with the root of the new word (eg. small in smaller). In this case, it is called a simple stem. If it contains other elements as well, affixes or other simple stems in combination with which a compound word is formed, it is considered a derived stem (eg. im-

probable in improbability or air-condition in air-conditioning).

3.5. Main means of word-formation

The most productive means by which new words are brought into being in a language are derivation, compounding and conversion. Separate sections are dedicated to each.

3.5.1. Derivation

Derivation is the process of forming new words in a language by means of adding prefixes and / or suffixes to roots or stems.

3.5.1.1. Prefixation

By prefixation, prefixes are added in front of roots or stems so that new words are created. Prefixes do not usually carry functional meaning, i.e. they do not change the morphological class of the roots or stems to which they are appended, though they change their meaning. The classification of prefixes should, therefore, be made on semantic grounds primarily. Thus, according to the meaning they convey, English prefixes fall into the following main categories:

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• negative prefixes, by far the largest group of prefixes in English, express various shades of negative meaning:

- de- / dis- (“not”, “the contrary of”): depress, disapprove,

dishonour;

- in- / il- / ir- / il- (allomorphs of the same bound morpheme that are employed according to the initial sound of the root or stem to which they are added – “not”, “the contrary of”): insane,

impossible, irrelevant, illiterate;

-non- (“not”): non-stop, non-resident, nonsense, nonconformist. The basic word stock of English includes a number of quite old words built with the prefix non-, in which the prefix is not identifiable in full: nowhere, nothing, never, nobody, neither, nor, etc.

-mis – (“bad(ly)”, “wrong(ly)”): mislead, mistrust, misfortune,

misunderstanding;

-un- (“the opposite of”, “not”): unfair, unwise, unexpected, unbalanced;

-mal- (“bad(ly)”, “wrong(ly)”): malfunctioning, malformation,

malpractice.

• reversative and privative prefixes:

- un- (“to deprive of”, “to reverse the action”, “to release from”):

unveil, unlock, unleash;

- de- / dis- (“to reverse the action”, “to get rid of”, “to deprive of”): defrost, decentralize, deforestation, disconnect, discoloured.

• prefixes of degree and size:

-arch- (“supreme”, ‘chief”, “most important”): archenemy, archbishop;

-hyper- (“extra”): hypersensitive, hypertension, hyperinflation;

-mini- (“little”, “small”): miniskirt, minicomputer, mini-

vacation;

-over- (“too much”): overreact, overdone, overdressed,

overconfident;

-out- (“more”, “better”, “faster”, “longer”): outnumber,

outstanding, outrun, outlive;

-super- (“above”, “more than”, “better”, “bigger”): supernatural, superhuman, superman, supermarket;

-sub- (“less than”): subhuman, substandard, subnormal;

-under- (“too little”): underdeveloped, underestimate,

undercharge;

- ultra- (“beyond”, “extremely”): ultrasonic, ultraviolet, ultrarevolutionary.

• prefixes of attitude:

- co- (“accompanying”, “with”, “together”): cooperation, coordination, co-author, co-produce;

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