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The etymology of London remains unclear. The earliest mention of the city's toponym can be attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae. The name is described as originating from King Lud in which he had allegedly taken over the city and named it after himself to Kaerlud. This was then eventually slurred into Kaerludein and finally London. Few modern sources support this theory.
Many other more or less fanciful suggestions have been advanced over the centuries, mostly deriving it from Welsh or British, but occasionally from Anglo-Saxon or even Hebrew. Some of these are listed at History of London#etymology.
The most common explanations that have any degree of linguistic plausibility are from British roots corresponding to Welsh Llyn din, meaning 'city (or fortress) on a lake', or from an unattested personal name 'Londino'
In 1998 Richard Coates, a linguistics professor now at the University of the West of England criticised both these suggestions on linguistic grounds, and proposed his own argument that the name derives from the pre-Celtic *plowonida, which roughly means "a river too wide to ford". He suggested that the part of Thames at London was given this name, and then when a settlement was established, the inhabitants added the suffix -on or -onjon to the name for the settlement. Proto-Indo-European *p was regularly lost in proto-Celtic, and through linguistic change, the name developed from Plowonidonjon to Lundonjon, then contracted to Lundein or Lundyn, latinised to Londinium, and finally borrowed by the Anglo-Saxons as Lundene
9 Why do we mispronounce the sound “e” in the word write?
Diphthongization of the monophthongs under the influence of the preceding palatal consonants or PALATALIZATION of vowels took place when the vowel was preceded by the initial /j/ or /k’/ and /sk’/: g-, c-, sc-. It had two stages /Смирницкий 55, 122/. Originally as a result of the palatalization of the consonants there appeared an ascending diphthong (i.e. a diphthong with the second element stressed), and then, according to the English phonetic norm, the ascending diphthong turns into a usual descending one; e.g.: /e/ > /ie/ > /ie/; /o/ > /eo/ > /eo/. The length of the vowel is denoted by the sign _ above the letter, e.g.: WRITAN ‘to write’; its shortness may be denoted by the sign, e.g.: WRITON ‘(they) wrote’.
10 " Why do we study the Basic Word Stock? Prepare a table of the Basic Word Stock and
give examples to each point
"The English word-stock develops together with the development of human society.
Thus, we may say that the two major changes that take place in the vocabulary of a language are:
1. The disappearance of words. This process is the result of two causes:
a. the obsoleteness of the concept denoted by some words;
b. the victory of some borrowed words which outs their absolute synonyms from the word-stock.
2. The appearance of new words. This process has several aspects:
a. the appearance of new words to express new concept;
b. the victory and the establishment of a borrowed word that has ousted its synonym;
c. the borrowing of words together with concepts from another language.
The English word-stock is an extremely complicated system. The first question that arises when one attempts to describe this system is the question of the amount of words that the English language contains.
This question can’t be answered with precision because of the following reasons.
1. Vocabulary units are not static.
2. New words are formed all the time.
3. Old words tend to disappear from the language.
4. There exist “potential words”. (the absolute productivity of conversion is responsible for many potential words: girl-to girl, think-a think)
The same can be said of suffixation: compoundderivatives are easily formed from stems of adjectives and nouns after the “blue-eyed” pattern.Verbal nouns are formed with the help of the suffix – ing.Some of these words find their way into dictionaries (meeting, being, building); other occur less regularly, while still others remain occasional words.E.D. Reader, writer are words in the proper sense; stander, trier (the person who stands, tries) remain occasional formations and can’t be said actually to exist in the language.
5. It is difficult to distinguish homonymy from polysemy.
6. Language as a whole is never used or known by any one member of the speaking community.
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