1. ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Annalisa Federici, Ph.D. Textbook: J. Culpeper, History of English, Routledge 1997. (units 4-5)

2. BORROWINGS One of the major changes in the English language over the centuries has been the expansion of vocabulary. This has mainly been achieved by importing words from other languages. Such words (LOANWORDS) have acquired different associations according to their origin. Another way to enlarge vocabulary has been the transformation of already existing words (NEW WORD FORMATIONS).

3. BORROWINGS The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, whose Germanic dialects gave rise to the English language, had borrowed a few words from LATIN even before they arrived in Britain (e.g. wall, street, cheap, wine). Even so, OE vocabulary was overwhelmingly Germanic: it contained very few LOANWORDS (only 3% vs. 70% of today’s English), as compared to ME and ModE. OE vocabulary: many Germanic Anglo-Saxon words have survived into ModE. with very little change in form and meaning (e.g. god, gold, hand, land, under, winter, word). The majority of the few loanwords were from Latin and relating to the Church (altar, angel, cleric, nun, temple, psalm, city, master, demon), as Latin was the language of religious culture and Christian missionaries were influential in spreading literacy.

4. BORROWINGS Anglo-Saxon English and the Scandinavian languages (Old Norse and Old Danish) brought by the Viking invasions were all Germanic languages to some extent mutually comprehensible. This similarity determined the adoption of words in all areas of vocabulary (e.g. are, die, leg, want, get, both give, same, they, them, their) and not just words with specialised meaning (as with religious terms from Latin). Ca. 1,800 words of Scandinavian origin have survived into present-day English, including are which became part of the most common verb to be.

5. BORROWINGS After the Norman invasion (1066), Norman French became the language of the court, law and administration. The ruling classes spoke French and spread French fashion, cooking and etiquette. Over 10,000 words were adopted from French during the ME period (e.g. parliament, baron, manor, noble, liberty, government, arrest, judge, jury, prison, beef, lettuce, mutton, pork, sausage, dress, jewel, art, beauty, romance, virtue, cloak). Sometimes French words replaced Anglo-Saxon ones (cf wyrd and fortune). Where the original Anglo-Saxon word and the loanword from French coexisted, they differentiated and specialised from a social point of view – less refined vs. more refined (e.g. house vs. mansion, bloody vs. sanguine) Even when English displaced French after two centuries, French language and culture still had a powerful influence.

6. BORROWINGS Revival of Latin borrowings during the ME period, both directly and indirectly (via French words originally imported from Latin), in the areas of religion, science, law and literature (e.g. scripture, client, conviction, library, scribe, dissolve, quadrant, medicine, ulcer). In the Early Modern Period (Renaissance), learning was enhanced by printing and books became widely available. However, they were normally written in Latin (the language of scholarship) and translations became necessary. Latin words were adapted or used as such, together with Italian, French, Spanish words. Ca. 13,000 new loanwords entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and of these 7,000 were from Latin (e.g. absurdity, benefit, exist, exaggerate, external, construction, relevant, vacuum, virus, fact, impersonal, expectation, eradicate, exact).

7. BORROWINGS ADAPTATION of words borrowed from Latin:  Some words (e.g. climax, appendix, exterior, delirium) still have their Latin form.  Other words were adapted by cutting off the Latin ending (e.g. conjectural from conjectural-is, consult from consult-are, exclusion from exclusion-em, exotic from exotic-us).  More often a further change was necessary to bring the word into accord with usual English forms: the Latin ending -us in adjectives was changed into -ous (e.g. conspic-us > conspicuous) or replaced by -al (e.g. extern-us > external); in nouns the ending -tas was changed into -ty (e.g. brevi-tas > brevity); words ending in -antia/-entia changed into -ancy/-ency/-ance/- ence (e.g. const-antia > constancy, frequ-entia > frequency).  Many English verbs borrowed from Latin at that time end in -ate (e.g. create, consolidate, eradicate) and were formed on the basis of the Latin past participle because it was often equivalent to an adjective, and it was common for English to make verbs out of adjectives.

8. BORROWINGS Recent tendency: decline in borrowing from Classical (Latin, from the end of the seventeenth century) and Romance (French, from the ME period) languages. These lost prestige and were displaced by English as the language of administration and culture. Borrowing is no longer the dominant source for vocabulary expansion. Nowadays words are mainly formed by adapting already-existing ones (e.g. by compounding). In present-day vocabulary, the three main sources (Germanic, French and Latin) have acquired a different status and are used in different contexts for different purposes. This is due to the fact that most Latin loanwords date back to the Renaissance, when Latin was the language of the written medium and books (INKHORN CONTROVERSY: debate about the merits of the acquisition of “artificial”, “bookish” terms from Latin in place of “natural”, “common” Germanic vocabulary).

9. BORROWINGS Germanic French Latin Frequent vs. Rare Spoken vs. Written Informal vs. Formal Private vs. Public Simple vs. Complex Concrete vs. Abstract Affective vs. Neutral

10. BORROWINGS Exercise: read the list of words below, rate them according to their formality/informality, rearrange them to form four rows of synonyms and try to guess their origin (Germanic, French or Latin). How does etymology correlate with formality? Fire Fear Holy Ascend Trepidation Flame Rise Sacred Conflagration Terror Mount Consecrated

11. NEW WORD FORMATIONS Ways in which new words were formed from old ones: 1.AFFIXATION: ADDING AFFIXES TO FORM ANOTHER WORD. Affixes are parts of words (not words in their own right) added to a root word in order to form another. When placed at the beginning they are called prefixes, when at the end they are called suffixes. OE had many affixes, some of which still in use (happy, quickly, blackness, foolish, heartless). Other OE affixes are falling out of use (e.g. the prefix for- and the suffix -lock, today only in forgive, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, forswear, wedlock, warlock). Other OE affixes (e.g. -dom and -wise) have undergone a revival. The major change over time has been the acquisition of affixes from other languages: anti-, -ism and micro- from Greek (e.g. anticlimax, communism, microwave); -al, -ex, multi-, non- from Latin (e.g. accidental, exchange, multiracial, non-stop, rebuild); -ette, -esque from French (e.g. etiquette, picturesque).

12. NEW WORD FORMATIONS Exercise: more than one affix can be used to form a word. How many affixes are there in the following word, and from which languages have they been borrowed? antidisestablishmentarianism

13. NEW WORD FORMATIONS 2.BACK FORMATION: SUBTRACTING ELEMENTS (OFTEN AFFIXES) TO FORM ANOTHER WORD. The word editor appeared before the word edit. With the subtraction of the suffix -or, English gained edit, the word describing what an editor does (similarly: burgle from burglar). Pea from pease: the latter was originally both singular and plural. As it sounded as if it had a plural ending, the former was invented as a singular form to avoid confusion.

14. NEW WORD FORMATIONS 3.COMPOUNDING: COMBINING WORDS TO FORM ANOTHER WORD. Three forms of compounds: open (e.g. new born), hyphenated (e.g. new-born), solid (e.g. newborn). Such conventions are arbitrary and there are differences between British and American English (which tends to avoid hyphenation). Older and shorter compounds are more likely to be solid. Some very old compounds are barely recognisable as such: lord started as the compound hlaf-weard (“loaf- keeper”), but even in OE it was contracted as hlaford.

15. NEW WORD FORMATIONS 4.BLENDING: FUSING ELEMENTS OF TWO OTHER WORDS TO OBTAIN A NEW ONE (e.g. smoke + fog = smog; motor + hotel = motel; breakfast + lunch = brunch). 5.FUNCTIONAL CONVERSION: USING ONE PART OF SPEECH AS ANOTHER (e.g. conversions of nouns into verbs such as to head a department, to nose into somebody’s affairs). 6.CLIPPING: SHORTENING A LONGER WORD (USUALLY BY REMOVING SYLLABLES). Clips involve the creation of a new shortened form of a word, which in most cases supplants the original (e.g. bus for omnibus, vest for vestment, bra for brassière, ad/advert for advertisement).

16. NEW WORD FORMATIONS 7.ACRONYMS: COMBINING THE INITIAL LETTERS OF WORDS OR SYLLABLES (e.g. TV for television, TB for tuberculosis, VD for venereal disease). 8.NEOLOGISMS: NEW COINAGES ENTERING THE WORD STOCK (e.g. Shakespeare’s neologisms). N.B. These ways of creating new words can overlap; they are not equally productive in generating vocabulary (compounding > affixation > functional conversion > shortening (back formation, clips, acronyms) > blending).