1. English Language: History and the Process of Borrowing

2. Languages travel with the people who speak them
Languages travel with the people who speak them. No language in the world today uses vocabulary which is entirely free of foreign influence, just as no country’s population can remain completely indigenous.
When new words are formed by adopting words from other languages together with the concepts or ideas they stand for, we are talking about the process of BORROWING. Usually, the pronunciation and morphology of the borrowings (borrowed terms or loanwords) are adapted to the phonology and morphology of the host language (i.e., the language which adopts the terms).

3. The family history of English
. The family of languages to which English belongs is called Indo-European, a name which derives from the geographical range over which these languages were spoken before some of them spread to the New World: roughly from India to Iceland.
The Indo-European family is among the most studied of all language families. Through time, 10 branches of languages were developed out of Indo-European.

5. The closest relatives of English are the languages belonging to the Germanic branch of Indo- European. “Germanic” is not to be confused with “German.” However ,English has changed its vocabulary so dramatically that in terms of word stock it can no longer be considered a Germanic language. Throughout history English went under a process of “hybridization”.

6. The Periods of English Language
The history of the English language is traditionally divided into:
Old English (c. 450–1066)
Middle English (1066–1476)
Early Modern English (1476–1776)
Modern English (1776–present)

7. The indigenous vocabulary of Old English
The pre-Germanic words:moon, tree, brother, mother, do, be, new, long, that, me, two, mine
Early Germanic words
these are words which refer to everyday life, natural phenomena, land and sea: sand, earth, starve, make, fox, find. Other uniquely Germanic items are boat, broad, drink, drive, fowl, hold, house, meat, rain, sail, storm, thief, wife, winter. There are also some suffixes which are not found outside the Germanic linguistic branch: -dom (as in freedom, kingdom, stardom ) and -ship (as in friendship, lordship, kinship, stewardship), are typical examples. Later still, when English was separated from its continental relatives in the fifth century, some words not found elsewhere in Germanic appeared in Old English: bird, woman, lord, lady, sheriff.

8. Earliest loanwords :There are three major sources of “outside” vocabulary in Old English: Celtic, Latin, and Scandinavian.
Celtic:the Celtic languages were not a significant source of new words, except for a few everyday words such as bin, cradle, dun, crag, curse, loch, cross, hermit. As is common in such historical situations, however, the Anglo-Saxons adopted many geographical names: Kent, Dover, York, Thames, Esk, Avon. We also find Celtic– English hybrids: Yorkshire, Devonshire, Canterbury; the first part of these place names is Celtic, while -shire, - bury are Old English.

9. Latin: About 3 percent of the Old English word stock comes from Latin, or in some cases, from Greek through Latin. Based on various philological criteria, we can identify two main groups of Latin words recorded in extant Old English texts: Continental borrowings and Christianity and monastic culture.
1.Continental borrowings:camp, mile, street, cheese, wine, gem, linen, wall.
2.Christianity and monastic culture: A large number of the Latin words borrowed in that period were words related to the Christian religion and religious practices: abbot, candle, congregation, devil, disciple, eternal, martyr, mass, pope, noon, offer, testament.
Other Latin borrowings from that period have become common everyday words: fever, giant, port, mount, pear, plant, polite, radish.

10. The Scandinavian element: One of the major influences on the early vocabulary and grammar of English comes from its North Germanic neighbors
. The first linguistic link between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons is found in the large number of Scandinavian place names in the northern and eastern parts of England, as many as 1,400. These are place names ending in -by (Carnaby, Ellerby, Rugby, Thirtleby), -thorpe (Barleythorpe, Grimsthorpe, Hamthorpe, Hilderthorpe, Low Claythorpe, Fridaythorpe), - thwaite (Hampsthwaite, Hunderthwaite, Husthwaite).
. However, there are more than 750 Scandinavian name-forms in records concerning medieval Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone, the best known of which is the ending -son, as in Henryson, Jackson, Robertson.
Scandinavian borrowings in English from the period between the ninth and the twelfth centuries are common words such as bag, call, cast, die, fellow, hit, knife, root, skin, sky, ill, until, wrong, the prepositions till and fro (as in to and fro), and the pronouns they, them, their. There is probably Scandinavian influence on the pronoun she, the verb form are, and the quantifiers both and same. In some regional varieties of English today Scandinavian words exist side by side with the more familiar word from the standard language: garth vs. yard, kirk vs. church, nay vs. no, trigg vs. true. Since the Vikings spoke a Germanic language, sharing words with Old English, but pronouncing them differently, we find that one and the same word with two pronunciations, Scandinavian and Old English, has evolved into a pair of historically related words which are now two separate lexical items. Such pairs in present-day English are dike vs. ditch, scrub vs. shrub, skirt vs. shirt.

11. English becomes a hybrid
The Norman Conquest
French loanwords in Middle English:The two chronological layers of borrowings discussed below show how the new political and social realities shaped the English lexicon.
1. Early post-Conquest borrowings: air, beast, beauty, color, dangerous, diet, feast, flower, jealous, journey, judge, liquor, oil, part, peace, soil, story, tender. Many of the early borrowings also reflect social class relations: baron, noble, servant, throne.

12. 2. Central French:Many Old English words in these areas were either duplicated or replaced by Romance borrowings: army, assembly, council, defense, empire, mayor, navy, parliament, record, soldier, state, statute, tax. Predictably, words from the fields of literature, art, science, medicine came into the language in large numbers, including the words literature, art, science, medicine, and number themselves: figure, grammar, image, logic, music, pain, physician, poet, remedy, romance, study, surgeon, tragedy. Many of these loanwords can be traced back to classical Greek and Latin.The rapid and far-reaching vocabulary growth of Middle English permanently changed our lexicon, making it an etymological hybrid. Already contemporaries of Chaucer (d. 1400) would not have considered originally French words like very, river, city, mountain, anchor, close, glue, haste, ease, and so on as “foreign”; such words had become an inseparable part of English. French borrowings could now combine with English words to produce new compounds: breast-plate, freemason, knight errant (English+French), commonweal, cornerstone, gentleman (French+English). The language was now ready to produce mixed origin formations such as talkative, unknowable, wizard (English roots +Romance suffixes), and colorless, cheerful,(Romance roots+English suffixes). English had turned an adverse political situation to its own benefit.

13. The early Modern English cultural scene
Scholarly and everyday words continued to be borrowed from French in the sixteenth century: fragrant (1500), elegance (1510), baton (1520), accent, adverb (1530), amplitude (1540), cassock (1550), chamois (1560), demolish (1570), pounce (1580), admire (1590), avenue (1600).
Learned words make up the largest portion of the new Latin vocabulary. From the fields of classical civilization, philosophy, religion, and education, Early Modern English added words such as: alumnus, arena, contend, curriculum, elect, exclusive, imitate, insidious, investigate, relate, sporadic, transcendental. Among the loanwords from the fields of mathematics and geometry, botany, biology, geography, medicine are: abdomen, antenna, calculus, cerebellum, codex, commensurable, compute, evaporate, lacuna, larva, radius, recipe, species. Along with these, a substantial number of everyday words were also adopted; they probably started out as specialized words, but quickly became part of the common vocabulary: frequency, parental, plus, invitation, susceptible, offensive, virus. An important aspect of the process of borrowing during these two centuries was the naturalization of a great many affixes from Latin: - ence, -ancy, -ency -entia, -antia, -y -ius, -ia, -ium, -ous -os, -us, -ate were borrowed unchanged. Borrowed prefixes such as ante-, post-, sub-, super- became part of the productive morphology of English.

14. Classical Greek was another source of learned words during the Early Modern English period, though the path of entry of Greek words into English is often indirect.Greek words which came through Latin, and possibly through French, are words such as atheism, atmosphere, chaos, dogma, economy, ecstasy, drama, irony, pneumonia, scheme, syllable. Direct borrowings from Greek are asterisk, catastrophe, crypt, criterion, dialysis, lexicon, polyglot, rhythm, syllabus. In some cases such as epicenter, chromatic, the Greek first elements of the words: epi- “on, upon,” chromat-, combine with the Latin elements centre, -ic .

15. Other European Languages. The New World:
Along with French, Italian was the source of many borrowed words.
. From that period we have inherited artichoke (1531), gondola (1549), squadron (1562), stanza (1588), fresco (1598), bazaar (1599), balcony (1619), opera (1644), vermicelli (1669), rotunda (1687). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Italian music and especially Italian opera became very fashionable in England, and with that came a new wave of Italian loanwords.

16. During the Renaissance and after there were strong commercial and cultural ties between Britain and the Low Countries. Early loans from Dutch into English are words like foist, v. (1545), pickle, v. (1552), yacht (1557), rant, v. (1598), knapsack (1603), trigger (1621), drill, v. (1622), smuggle, v. (1687). These are not learned or specialized words; the same tendency for borrowing popular words from Dutch continued in the eighteenth century:

17. Spain and Portugal led Europe in the colonization of the New World, and some of the words borrowed from Spanish had been borrowed into Spanish from American Indian languages. Early borrowings from Spanish include: guava (1555), hammock (1555), negro (1555), potato (1565), mestizo (1588), buoy (1596), cargo (1602), masquerade (1654), siesta (1655). Some eighteenth-century loans from these languages are:

18. Compiling statistics about the exact sources of the new words in Early Modern English is hard because of uncertainties surrounding their etymologies. Nevertheless, an approximate picture of how the vocabulary changed is useful. A count of the new loanwords between 1500 and 1700 in a sample of 1848 words of “reasonably certain etymology” in the OED shows that the sources break up as follows:
Latin was by far the most important donor of new words during the first two centuries of Early Modern English.
Modern English continues to coin new terms using Latin and Greek roots. The trend which started with the Renaissance, and which was so prominent during the eighteenth century, is also with us: for genuinely new words covering unfamiliar geographical areas, customs, and civilizations, English turns to the living modern languages.