The development of the English vocabulary in the course of time

No vocabulary of any language is ever stable. It’s constantly growing and changing. Some words are dropped out of usage and some words appear in the language. It goes without saying that the vocabulary of any language is depending on the life of speech community. And all changes which happened to the life of people speaking this or that language are reflected in the vocabulary. The reasons for these changes may be linguistic and …..… or they may be combined the extra linguistic changes are closely related to political, economical and cultural development of the society as to..…... causes they are not thoroughly investigated.

Recently a great number of words were made up out of the material available in the language. This material may be of native origin and may be borrowed from other language.

For example medicine took a lot of words from Latin. There are many words which indicate education and learning, government, legislation came from Latin or French.

The peculiarities of these borrowings in the course of time underwent the process of assimilation.

If the word somehow doesn’t get assimilated it’s dropped out of the language. If the frequency of occurrence of this or that word is very low, it means that the language doesn’t need this word.

In any long it is possible to single out poetic words, bookish,

All native words are monomorphemic.

7) Classification of the English vocabulary (by different criterias: etimologically - borrowings and native words; stylistically; grammatically; semantic classification - semantic fields, lexico-grammatical or lexico-semantic groups; synonims)+ examples

Following paradigmatical approach: native words, borrowings.

According to sources they came from according degree of assimilation

According to the sphere of application word: bookish, colloquial, neutral

The etymological structure of the English vocabulary. Etymology– branch of lexicology, which deals with the different possesses of assimilation or adaptation of the English words The English vocabulary is very rich. From the point of view of etymology, English vocabulary can be divided into 2 parts: 70% of borrowings in English language, 30% of native words. Borrowings usually take place under 2 circumstances: 1) when people have a direct contact with another people; 2) when there is a cultural need to borrow a word from another languages.

1. STYLISTIC CLASSIFICATION OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY

2. Neutral, common literary and common colloquial vocabulary

3. Specific literary vocabulary

a) Terms

b) Poetic and highly literary words

c) Archaic words

d) Barbarisms and foreign words

e) literary coinages

4. Special colloquial vocabulary

a) Slang

b) Jargonisms

c) Professionalisms

d) Dialectal words

e) Vulgar words

f) Colloquial coinages

5. FUNCTIONAL STYLES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Introductory remarks

6. The belles-lettres style

a) Language of poetry

b) Emotive prose

c) Language of the drama

7. PUBLICISTIC STYLE

a) Oratory and speeches

b) The essay

c) Articles

8. NEWSPAPER STYLE

a) Brief news items

b) The headline

c) Advertisements and announcements

d) The editorial

e) Scientific prose style

f) The style of official documents

1. Semantic classification: a) prefixes of negative meaning, such as: in- (invaluable), non- (nonformals), un- (unfree) etc, b) prefixes denoting repetition or reversal actions, such as: de- (decolonize), re- (revegetation), dis- (disconnect), c) prefixes denoting time, space, degree relations, such as: inter- (interplanetary), hyper- (hypertension), ex- (ex-student), pre- (pre-election), over- (overdrugging) etc.

8)The ethimological survey of the english vocabulary (native elements, borrowings, their piculiarities)+examples!

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words.

In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language.

In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is practically indistinguishable from a native word without a thorough etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary of the language and the role played by them is determined by the historical development of the nation speaking the language.

The most effective way of borrowing is direct borrowing from another language as the result of the contacts with other nations. Though, a word may be also borrowed indirectly not from the source language but through another language.

When analyzing borrowed words one should distinguish between two terms - source of borrowing and origin of borrowing. The first term is applied to the language from which the word was immediately borrowed and the second - to the language to which the word may be ultimately traced. The closer the two interacting languages are in structure the easier it is for words of one language to penetrate into the other.

There are different approaches to classifying the borrowed stock of words

The borrowed stock of words may be classified according to the nature of the borrowing itself as borrowing proper, loans translation and semantic loans.

Loan translation or calque is a phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word translation.

Semantic loan is the borrowing of the meaning for a word already existing in the English language.

Latin loans are classified into the subgroups.

1. Early Latin loans. Those are the words which came into English language through the languages of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. The tribes had been in contact with Roman civilization and had adopted many Latin words denoting objects belonging to that civilization long before the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Judes into Britain (e.g., cup, kitchen, mill, wine, port).

2. Later Latin borrowings. To this group belong the words which penetrated into English language in the sixth and seventh centuries, when the English people were converted to Christianity (e.g., priest, bishop, nun, and candle).

3. The third period of the Latin borrowings includes words which came into English due to two historical events: the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance. Some came to English language through French but some were borrowed directly from Latin (e.g., major, minor, intelligent, permanent).

4. The latest layer of Latin words. The words of this period are mainly abstract and scientific words (e.g., nylon, molecular, vaccine, phenomenon, and vacuum).

The tendency of the English language to borrow extensively can be traced during the centuries. Thus, one can confidently claim that borrowing is one of the most productive sources of enrichment of the English vocabulary.

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