Assimilation of borrowings

After being borrowed loan words do not remain the same. Most of them adjust themselves to their new environment and get adapted to the standards of the language that receives them. This process of adaptation of borrowings to phonetic, graphic, morphological and semantic laws of the recipient language is termed assimilation.

In the process of assimilation the loan words undergo three types of changes. 5.1. First, phonetic adaptation – words are modified to the pronunciation norms of the accepting language. Sounds alien to English have to be fitted into its system of sounds. For example, the long [e] in French borrowings is rendered in English with the help of a diphthong [ei] – café, fiancé.

Certain sounds and sound combinations of borrowed words never occur in initial position in English. This is why in English they are replaced by other sounds or sound combinations in pronunciation though the spelling is retained. For example, a word from Greek xylophone is pronounced with [z] at the beginning, not [ks], a word from German spitz is pronounced [spits], not [ſpits] as in German, the Greek word pneumonia and the Latin word psalter lost the sound [p] at the beginning.

Accent is another phonetic factor which is subject to assimilation. For example, in French borrowings the stress is usually transferred to the first syllable, which is a general rule in English. Thus, words like season, reason, honour, etc. are now accented on the same principle as other native words.

The process of assimilation is rather long and usually takes several centuries. If we compare Norman and Parisian borrowings from French, we shall see that the first are phonetically assimilated and do not differ from native words: price, fine, pupil, pencil, dinner, supper, table, plate, chair, etc. Most of Parisian borrowings still retain traces of their French origin: for example the shift of stress to the first syllable has not occurred in such words as police, machine, regime, etc.

5.2. Secondly, borrowings have to adapt themselves to the grammaticalstructure of the receiving language. Grammatical assimilation consists in a complete change of the paradigm of a loan word. Nouns and adjectives adopt a new system of declension, verbs – a new system of conjugation. The verbs to conduct, to disturb, to exaggerate, for instance, are grammatically assimilated Latin borrowings in English (in the Past Simple and Past Participle forms they have the dental suffix - ed). Nouns get s in the plural form – cups, acts (both Latin). Still some borrowings retain their foreign endings and are not completely assimilated from the grammatical point of view: medium – media (L), nucleus – nuclei (L), criterion – criteria (G), basis – bases (G), virtuoso – virtuosi (It.), etc.

5.3. Thirdly, we may speak of semantic adaptation. When a foreign word appears in the language its semantic structure undergoes certain changes.

Polysemantic words are usually taken in one of their meanings, then in the process of historical development borrowed words may acquire new meanings, not found in their former semantic structure. The word move in modern English has more than ten meanings, but in French dictionaries only two meanings of mouvoir are registered.

Furthermore, the borrowed word does not always preserve the meaning with which it was borrowed. A good example is the noun sport. When it was borrowed from French in Middle English period, it meant “amusement, pleasure, entertainment” but then it gradually acquired a new meaning denoting different sorts of outdoor games and exercise. In this new meaning the word sport was borrowed from English by many languages and has become international nowadays.

The adjective large was borrowed from French in the meaning of “wide”. Since in its meaning it fully coincided with the native word and, therefore, was not needed in the language, it entered another synonymic group with the general meaning “big in size”.

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