Lexical and Semantic Change

Lexical and Semantic Change

New Words The most common type of language change is the appearance of new words. They keep coming up in a language all the time. Some of them can be dated well to a certain period. For example, among 4 G, floppy disk and television, we know that the former showed up most recently in our languages while the latter is the earliest of all. There are many different ways of acquiring new words, some of them very common, others rather unusual.

Borrowing There are, at present, some 6,000 languages spoken on the earth. Most of the speakers of these languages are familiar with and/or communicate in more than one language, especially as a result of contact with their neighbouring languages. Consequently, everybody is in a position to learn some of the words used by their neighbours, and very frequently people take a liking to some of their neighbours’ words and take those words over into their own language. The process in which a word is taken into one language from another is called borrowing. Words that are borrowed are called loan words.

Loanwords Borrowing is one of the most frequent ways of acquiring new words, and speakers of all languages do it. English-speakers have long been globally among the most enthusiastic borrowers of other people’s words and many, many thousands of English words have been acquired in just this way: whisky from Scottish Gaelic, yoghurt from Turkish, mayonnaise from French, algebra from Arabic, sherry from Spanish, ski from Norwegian, waltz from German and kangaroo from the Guugu-Yimidhirr language of Australia. Why should people ever borrow somebody else’s word? English-speakers had never seen skis, yoghurt or kangaroo before they encountered these things overseas.

Loanwords Misunderstandings and adjustments are also very common.
The word cafeteria is borrowed in English from Spanish, but the Spanish word means ‘coffee shop’, while English applies it to a no-frills self-service restaurant. The English phrase happy ending has been borrowed into French, German and Italian, but in the form happy-end, which doesn’t exist in English. English footing has been borrowed into French and Spanish, but only in the sense of ‘jogging’, which is not found in it. It is even possible to ‘borrow’ a word that doesn’t exist at all: English nom de plume ‘pen name’ is ‘borrowed’ from French, but no such phrase exists in French.

Loanwords The case of nom de plume illustrates a further motivation for borrowing words. Why should English-speakers go to the trouble of borrowing a French word for something when English already had a perfectly good word with the same meaning: pen name? The reason is a simple one: prestige. For two or three centuries, before the rise of English in the 20th century, French was the most prestigious language in the European world. French was everywhere the language of diplomacy, of ﬁne arts, of high culture generally - indeed, virtually the language of Western civilization.

Loanwords In fact, English has been borrowing French words in their thousands ever since the 11th century, when, in 1066, the French-speaking Normans conquered England, under William the Conqueror, and for the next 200 years or so Norman French was the language of the ruling elite. Royalty and the aristocracy spoke French; the law spoke French; the upper echelons of the administration and the military spoke French. Consequently, Norman French words such as prince, duke, baron, judge, attorney, court, chancellor, bailiff, ofﬁcial, army, captain and lieutenant inevitably passed into English, displacing their native English equivalents.

Loanwords But it wasn’t only these administrative words that were borrowed. Thanks to the vastly greater prestige of French, English-speakers eagerly borrowed almost any French words they could get their hands on, regardless of the fact that English in many cases already had perfectly good equivalents. Such Norman French words as country, music, jewel, picture, beef, fruit, boil, courage, honour, virtue, pity, sentence, question, language, literature, fool, horrible, mirror, gentle, male, female, even face, all came pouring into English, where they drove the corresponding native words out of the language.

Loanwords One of the chief reasons that Old English texts are so difﬁcult to read is that so many of the native English words used in those texts were later driven out of the language by borrowings from French. More than 60 per cent of the Old English vocabulary has disappeared owing to the Norman Conquest. If William the Conqueror had been William the Defeated, this huge inﬂux of French words might never have occurred and English today might look a lot more like Old English. Although many of the fashionable borrowings in later centuries would probably have been acquired in any event, as they were in, say, German.

Calque New words can be formed in various ways by exploiting the resources of other languages without quite borrowing any words directly. One way of doing this is to construct a calque, or loan translation, is a new word or phrase constructed by taking a foreign word or phrase as a model and translating it morpheme-by-morpheme. The Romans frequently used this technique to expand the vocabulary of Latin by appealing to the then more prestigious Greek.

Calque For example, the Greek word sympathia ‘sympathy’ consists of two morphemes: a preﬁx syn ‘with’ and a stem pathia ‘suffering’. The Romans rendered this with the Latin preﬁx con- ‘with’ and the stem passio ‘suffering’, obtaining the calque compassio, which therefore became the Latin word for ‘sympathy’. Centuries later, the Germans in turn calqued the Latin word into German by using their preposition mit ‘with’ and the noun Leid ‘grief ’, obtaining Mitleid, the German word for ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’.

Combining forms The vocabularies of foreign languages may also be used to extract morphemes that can then be imported and used as building blocks for constructing words in another language. Such building blocks are called combining forms. English has done this on a massive scale in order to create technical and scientiﬁc terms with combining forms extracted from Greek and Latin. Thus, Greek thermos ‘heat’ and metron ‘measure’ provide the combining forms for thermometer, literally ‘heat-measure’, and most European languages do the same: French thermomètre, Spanish termómetro, German Thermometer, Welsh thermomedr, Basque termometro, Turkish termometre, Russian termometr, Swedish termometer, and so on.

Phonological treatment of loans
Every language has its own phonological system: its own collection of available speech sounds and its own rules for combining these sounds into pronounceable words. But the phonological systems of English, French, German, Italian and Japanese are all rather different, and hence a loan word can be very difﬁcult for speakers to pronounce. Japanese, for example, allows neither the consonant clusters nor the ﬁnal consonant of English grapefruit - yet all these words have been borrowed. How do they get pronounced?

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of dealing with this problem. First, if you have some idea how the word is pronounced in the donor language, you can try your best to reproduce that pronunciation in your own language, producing as a result something that is conspicuously foreign. Second, you can abandon such efforts and just pronounce the loan word as though it were a native word, following the ordinary phonological patterns of your language, and as a result changing the original pronunciation of the word, perhaps greatly. Both these approaches are widely used.

If the loans are few in number, or if they present formidable phonological difﬁculties, or if they quickly come into use as everyday words, we may expect speakers to prefer the second option, nativization. English grapefruit is borrowed into Japanese as gureepufuruutsu, which conforms perfectly to the phonological patterns of Japanese The English word video has been borrowed into Japanese, which has no /v/, and many Japanese pronounce the word as bideo, with the nearest native equivalent, /b/. Mexican Spanish juzgado ‘courthouse’ was borrowed into American English as the famous hoosegow ‘jail’ of Western movies.

If a few speakers of one language pronounce a few loans in a more-or-less foreign manner, then such words are just oddities. However, if a lot of speakers of one language pronounce lots of loans in the same but foreign way, then something may be said to have happened to a language’s phonological. Consider the case of English /v/. Old English had no phoneme /v/, although it did have /f/, which had a voiced allophone [v] between vowels, so that ofer, for example, was pronounced with [v] - as now spelled in over. Word-initially, however, /f/ could only be pronounced as voiceless [f], as it still is today in native words like five, fish, friend, and fire.

French, however, has both /f/ and /v/, both of which can occur in most positions, including word-initially. Many of the words borrowed into English from Norman French had initial /v/, and English-speakers made considerable effort to pronounce this unfamiliar sound, because dozens of French words with initial [v] came into English: very, vine, vinegar, voice, view, vicar, victory, venue, vault, vassal, value, villain, virgin, vowel. As a result, English acquired a contrast between [f] and [v] which had not previously existed: contrasts like few and view, or ﬁne and vine, became possible for the ﬁrst time. /v/ became a phoneme in English, and the phonological system of English was changed.

English has acquired another voiced fricative from French, the /ʒ/ but this time the process was rather complicated. French has a front rounded vowel /y/ which English lacks. When English-speakers began borrowing French words containing this vowel, they could not pronounce it. Instead, they replaced this awkward vowel with a sequence of English sounds: /ju:/; hence the /ju:/ of words like music and puny represents an adaptation of French /y/. In many cases this French vowel followed the fricative /z/, and hence English borrowed a number of French words with the sequence /zju:/ representing French /zy/: measure, pleasure, treasure, leisure, azure, and others.

In these cases, however, there was a further change: the alveolar fricative /z/ merged with the following palatal glide /j/ to produce instances of the fricative [ʒ], instances which were not present in the original French words. As the process is ongoing, so the latest word in this trend is Asia, which may be pronounced with /zjə/ or /ʒə/. Much more recently, English has obtained new instances of /ʒ/ by borrowing French words containing it, as in beige, luge, cortège, gigolo, collage, dressage, genre. When it occurs ﬁnally, there is some variation though, and loans like entourage, camouﬂage, garage, barrage, massage and rouge can be heard both with [ʒ] and [dʒ].

Morphological treatment of loans
Quite like the phonological treatment that they receive, loanwords usually also require morphological treatment. Japanese, for example, borrows foreign verbs in an indirect manner by taking over nouns and combining them with its verb suru ‘do’: hence the Chinese loan benkyoo ‘study’ produces the Japanese verb benkyoo suru ‘study’, and Japanese is full of verbs borrowed indirectly from English, like hitto suru ‘make a hit’, doraibu suru ‘drive a car’, kisu suru ‘kiss’, and pasu suru ‘pass an exam’. Verbs like suru are called light verbs, meaning that they have little or no semantic content of their own and serve only to provide a usable verbal form of an item that carries the semantic content of a verb but which is formally a noun.

Even nouns may produce morphological complications for the borrowing language, however, especially when they have to be inflected for number. Borrowed nouns must be ﬁtted into the morphology of the borrowing language in one way or another. With just a handful of exceptions like feet and children, English nouns form their plural with an invariable sufﬁx -s: books, cars, discos, databases, CDROMs, and so on. Many nouns borrowed from Greek and Latin have been taken over complete with their foreign plurals: hence phenomena, indices, crises, formulae, cacti, bacteria, etc. Such un-English plurals disrupt the ordinary English morphology.

English formerly had singular datum and plural data, but the more frequent plural form just doesn’t look like a plural to English eyes, and most speakers now treat data as a singular. Something similar is perhaps happening with criterion/ criteria, phenomenon/phenomena, and bacterium/bacteria. Few natives seem to be at all sure which form is the singular and which the plural, and frequently use them the wrong way such as: this criteria, these phenomenon, a new bacteria. The Greek word syllabus has a Greek plural syllabontes that is rarely used in English, but the model of Latin nouns like radius/radii has misled some speakers into creating a plural syllabi.

When the borrowing language has a large number of different ways of forming plurals, the problem becomes more acute. German, for example, has a wide variety of plurals patterns: Weg ‘way’, plural Wege; Mann ‘man’, Männer; Mensch ‘person’, Menschen; Uhu ‘eagle-owl’, Uhus; Lehrer ‘teacher’, Lehrer; Bruder ‘brother’, Brüder; Hand ‘hand’, Hände; Blume ‘ﬂower’, Blumen; Buch ‘book’, Bücher.

Loan words have to be given some plural form or other, and German-speakers have made various decisions. Many loan words are stuck into one pattern or another in a seemingly arbitrary manner: Tenor ‘tenor’, Tenöre; Film ‘ﬁlm’, Filme; Ski ‘ski’, Skier; Pilot ‘pilot’, Piloten; Experte ‘expert’, Experten; Boxer ‘boxer’, Boxer; By far the largest number of recent loans, however, take the -s plural, an ending once limited to a few words: Test, Kiwi, Job, Schock ‘shock’, Kamera ‘camera’, Bar, Lady, Party, Story, Ghetto, Kasino ‘casino’, Bungalow, Teenager, etc.

A language with grammatical gender, like French, German or Russian, has the additional problem of assigning loan words to a gender. French, which has only two genders, traditionally called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, solves the problem in the simplest way possible: virtually all loan words are simply assigned to the masculine gender. Hence English loans like look (in the fashion sense), western (as in ﬁlm genre), zip (zip fastener, zipper), kiwi (both the bird and the fruit), week-end, cocktail, gin, bridge (the card game), best-seller, football, jazz, heavy-metal, and hundreds of others are all masculine in French.

Formation of new words Languages can use also their own resources to create new words, without appealing to other languages. One very frequent technique is compounding: combining two (or more) existing words into a new word. Compounding is very common in English: at various times, English-speakers have created such compounds as girlfriend, gingerbread, major-general, ice cream, table tennis, close-up, overturn, jetlag, hatchback, lipstick, soundproof etc. German is something of a European champion in this respect. The English word lift (as in ‘Can you give me a lift home?’) is rendered in German by the imposing compound Mitfahrgelegenheit, literally ‘with-travelopportunity’).

Formation of new words From um ‘around’ and Welt ‘world’, German forms Umwelt ‘environment’; to this is added Schutz ‘protection’ to obtain Umweltschutz ‘protection of the environment’; to this is added Maβnahmen ‘measures’ (itself a compound) to derive the formidable Umweltschutzmaβnahmen ‘measures for the protection of the environment’. Some other languages form compounds only with difﬁculty. French is one such. While English easily forms country house, French campagne ‘country’ and maison ‘house’ cannot be combined into *campagne-maison, but only into maison de campagne, literally ‘house of country’; similarly, English table wine is equivalent to French vin de table.

Formation of new words It will already have been noticed that English forms many different types of compounds, but the majority of English compounds conform to certain rules. The chief rule is that the head of a compound is usually its ﬁnal element. Thus, a house cat is a type of cat, and not a type of house, while a cathouse is a type of house and not a type of cat. Similarly, an eyeliner is a type of liner, not a type of eye, and olive green is a type of green, not a type of olive. English compounds are therefore called head-ﬁnal.

Formation of new words Welsh, on the other hand, forms word-initial compounds. Welsh has compounds like brws danedd ‘toothbrush’ (from brws ‘brush’ and danedd ‘teeth’) and jwg laeth ‘milk jug’ (from jwg ‘jug’ and llaeth ‘milk’. One type of exception to heads are copulative compounds in which both members are equally heads: Alsace-Lorraine, tragicomic; these are somewhat rare in English. Another type of exception are the exocentric compounds, in which there is no head: a skinhead is a type of person, and not a type of skin or head, and so is a highbrow or a redneck; a forget-me-not is a type of ﬂower, and a hit-and-run is a type of offensive play in baseball.

Formation of new words The single most important mechanism the obtaining new words from native resources is derivation, the process of creating words by adding affixes to existing words. Like many other languages, English has a large number of prefixes and suffixes used in this way: prefixes like un-, pre-, dis-, re-, anti-, non-, con-, mini-, ex-, de-, etc; suffixes like -ness, -ful, -ity, -less, -ly, -al, -er, -ese and -ize. To the adjective happy we can add the prefix un- to obtain a new adjective unhappy; to this we can add the suffix -ness to obtain the noun unhappiness. The productivity of an affix is the degree of freedom with which it can be used to derive new words.

Formation of new words The ancient English suffix -th is now totally unproductive: it occurs in a few old formations like warmth and depth, but it can no longer be extended to other cases: things like *happyth and *bigth are impossible. The suffix -dom is chiefly found in a few old formations like freedom and kingdom, but it has not died out entirely: stardom is a recent formation, and we occasionally come across new instances of its use, like gangsterdom, tigerdom. The old suffix -wise was formerly unproductive and confined to a few cases like clockwise and otherwise, but it has recently become productive again, and such novelties as moneywise, healthwise, profitwise, fitnesswise.

Semantic Change Change in meaning is called semantic change, and it is just as common as other types of change. Not so long ago, there was a clear difference in meaning between uninterested and disinterested: the ﬁrst meant ‘apathetic’, while the second meant ‘having nothing to gain or lose from any outcome’. Hence a judge presiding over a civil case was expected to be disinterested, but he certainly wasn’t supposed to be uninterested. Today, however, many people use disinterested to mean exactly the same as uninterested: ‘I’m disinterested in opera.’

Semantic Change Another case is the verb transpire.
This used to mean ‘come to light’, ‘become known’. Thus, a sentence such as ‘It transpired that the councillors had been ﬁddling their expenses’ meant ‘It came to light that . . .’. But such sentences were easily misunderstood, and many people, on encountering them, took them to mean rather ‘It happened that . . .’. Consequently, transpire is now commonly used to mean ‘happen, occur’, and now one often hears ‘We don’t know what transpired’, meaning ‘We don’t know what happened’, which would have been impossible not so long ago.

Semantic Change ‘Time and tide waits for no man’ is a common phrase, which all native English-speakers recognize and understand. It is interesting that the two words have changed meaning, but the phrase still means essentially the same thing. Nowadays, time means the great ﬂow of time from the past, through the present, and into the future. It also has sense of a measurement of time passing and of a particular time of day. Tide, on the other hand, refers to the twice daily lunar inﬂuenced rises and falls that most seas experience. In almost all other Germanic languages, the equivalent of tide (German Zeit, Dutch tijd, Norwegian tid, Icelandic tið) shares most of the meanings of English time.

Semantic Change Even without historical evidence, it would not be impossible to suggest that tide originally meant ‘time’, but became associated with the sea through those cycles of rising and falling being particularly marked times. Indeed, elements of this remain in the English compounds ebb-tide ‘the time when seawater ebbs away from its highest point’ and ﬂow-tide ‘the time when seawater is rising to its highest point’. If we consult the Oxford English Dictionary, in its earliest attestations, tide means ‘time’, although even then it had a sense of a portion of time or even a speciﬁc point in time; while time originally had the primary meaning of a particular period of time, often that of an hour’s duration.

Semantic Change For centuries, the word tennis denoted a racquet-and-ball game played on an enclosed court embellished with various types of obstacles through which the players hit the ball. In the late nineteenth century, another racquet-and-ball game was invented that was played on an open grass court, and this was dubbed lawn tennis. Within a few years, the new game had become vastly more popular than the old, and the name lawn tennis was quickly shortened to tennis; the original game being no longer played. Much the same has happened to the word car. This ancient word long denoted a cart or wagon pulled by animals.

Semantic Change When self-propelled vehicles with their own engines were invented in the late nineteenth century, the obvious compound motor car was coined to denote one of these new-fangled devices. Such was the success of the new invention, however, that the compound was soon shortened to car. Such examples represent one variety of what we call a shift in markedness: originally, the unmarked form of tennis was the variety played on an enclosed court, and the unmarked type of car was an oxcart, but the earlier marked varieties on grass and with a motor have now become the unmarked forms.

Semantic Change An area in which semantic change is particularly rapid is that involving subjects that are taboo (that is, subjects on which complete frankness is socially unacceptable). English bear (the animal) is related to the colour term brown and originally meant ‘the brown one’, the Russian word for ‘bear’, mëdvedev, means literally ‘honey-eater’; this practice arose out of taboo as its original name was avoided. Since taboos prohibit the use of plain language, speakers are constantly forced to resort to euphemisms (roundabout expressions that are socially acceptable). For the purposes of excretion, one usually refers to ‘using the restroom’ by way of euphemism.

Semantic Change Certain types of semantic change, while not always easy to understand, are so frequent that they are given speciﬁc names; among these are generalization (or broadening) and specialization (or narrowing). The word arrive, a loan from French, formerly meant ‘come to shore’, but now means more generally ‘come (to a place)’. The word deer once meant ‘animal (in general)’, but can now be applied only in a narrowed sense to a cervine animal. Two other named types of semantic change are melioration (‘improvement’ in meaning) as seen in the word queen which once meant only ‘woman’, and pejoration (being demoted from a positive connotation) as seen in mistress, which was once used as the feminine equivalent of ‘mister’.

Lexical and Semantic Change

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