Slang and its characteristics

Slang consists either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.Most of slang words are current words whose meanings have been metaphorically shifted and it is often accompanied with a course, jocular, cynical colouring, e.g. saucers (eyes), trap (mouth).

Slang synonyms for ‘head’: attic, brain-pan, nut, hat-peg, upper storey.

Money: beans, brass, dough, etc.

People use slang for a number of reasons:

a) to sound picturesque, striking, different from others;

b) to sound modern, up-to-date;

c) to demonstrate independence;

d) to sound the same as all the rest in a group, to show that you ‘belong’ (especially important for teenagers).

After a slang word has been used in speech for a certain period of time, people get accustomed to it and the most vital words are then accepted into literary vocabulary. This happened to such words as snob, bet, bore, chap, donkey, fun, mob, pinch, teenager, hitch-hiker, etc. But the bulk of slang is formed by short-lived words.

Slang should be differentiated from argot (criminal jargon). Slang words are clearly motivated, e.g. window-shopping, cradle-snatcher. Argot words do not show their motivation, their purpose is to hide the real meaning, to be comprehensible by a limited number of people.

1. Neologisms.

A neologism is a newly created word or a phrase or a new meaning developed for an existing word, or a word borrowed from another language.

New notions constantly come into being and require new words to name them or new meanings of old words, e.g. computer, isotope, tape-recorder, supermarket, black hole, feedback. It does not matter how important a new thing is, compare: nuclear war and roll-neck.

There may be different ways of coining new words:

a) compounding, e.g. brain-drain;

b) shortening, e.g. bionics;

c) affixation, e.g. workaholic, bookaholic, money-mad, movie-mad, speed-mad;

d) conversion (often+composition), e.g. fall-out, teach-in,etc.

As a general rule, neologisms are at first clearly motivated. Sometimes newly borrowed or newly created words very soon begin to function as indivisible signs.

In the course of time the new word is either accepted into the general vocabulary and is no longer considered new or may not be accepted and disappears from the language. So some neologisms are short-lived, others become durable.

1. Archaisms.

Neologisms are contrasted to words that dropped from the language (obsolete words) or survive only in special contexts (archaisms and historisms).

Archaisms are words that were once common but are now replaced by synonyms. Old words become rarely used and are mostly associated with poetic diction and historic novels.

e.g. betwixt – between, damsel – ‘a noble girl’, hark –listen, morn- morning, woe – sorrow.

Thou and thy, aye, nay are certainly archaic and long since rejected by common usage. Dialects are usually more conservative and preserve some archaic words and structures.

Sometimes an archaic word may undergo a sudden revival, e.g. kin is now widely used in American English.

Historisms are words denoting objects and phenomena which are things of the past and no longer exist.

e.g. types of boats: caravel, galleon; carriages: berlin, calash, gig, phaeton, diligence, landeau; clothes: doublets, tabard, bloomers.

A great many historisms occur in historical novels.

LECTURE 8

THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH WORDS. BORROWINGS.

1. The etymological structure of English Vocabulary.

2. Borrowed words and their assimilation.

3. International words, translation loans, etymological doublets.

1. The etymological structure of English Vocabulary.

According to their origin all the units of the English vocabulary can be divided into two big groups: native and borrowed. The native lexical units were not borrowed from other languages but represent the original stock of the language. The native words include the following classes:

1. The Indo-European element: words of roots common to all or most languages of the Indo-European family. These words denote elementary notions without which no communication would be possible. Professor V.D.Arakin singled out the following groups within this class:

1) family relations: father, mother, brother, son, daughter;

2) parts of human body: foot, nose, heart;

3) animals: swine, goose, cow;

4) plants: tree, birch;

5) times of day: day, night;

6) heavenly bodies: sun, star, moon;

7) adjectives: red, new, glad

8) numerals: from 1 to 100;

9) personal pronouns (except they);

10) verbs: be, eat, sit, stand.

1. The Germanic element: words common to all or most Germanic languages. They include the following semantic groups:

1) parts of the human body: head, hand, arm, finger;

2) animals: fox, bear;

3) plants: oak, grass;

4) natural phenomena: rain, frost;

5) seasons of the year: winter, spring, summer;

6) landscape features: sea, land;

7) houses and furniture: house, room, bench;

8) ships: ship, boat;

9) adjectives: colours (green, grey, blue, white), small, high, old, good;

10) verbs: see, hear, speak, tell, say, make, give, drink.

1. The English Proper element: words which appeared in the English vocabulary in the 5^th century or later, that is after the Germanic tribes migratwed to the British Isles. These are specifically English words: lord, lady, boy, girl, bird, woman, daisy, always, etc.

Native words constitute no more than 35% of the English vocabulary but they are extremely important for everyday communication and are used very often. Out of 5oo most frequently used words there are about 4oo native lexical units.

The borrowed words could be divided into groups depending on the source of borrowing, i.e. the language they were taken from by the English. The source of borrowing may not coincide with the origin of borrowing, i.e. the language to which a word may be traced. A classical example is the word paper, which was taken from French (Fr. papier). But its origin is Latin or Greek (Lat. papyrus, Gr. papyros).

The following classification is based on the source of borrowing and is closely connected with the history of the English people.

1) Celtic borrowings (not very numerous): bin, bard, cradle, druid, Avon (“clear water”), Kent, London (Llyn ‘river’+ dyn ‘fortified hill’, i.e. fortress on the hill near the river);

2) Latin borrowings further subdivided into three groups according to the time of borrowing: a) first contacts and colonization of Britain (1 century B.C.-5 century A.D.): cheese, butter, wine, wall, port, etc.; b) introduction of Christianity (7 century): priest, bishop, candle, school, etc.; c) Renaissance: major, minor, intelligent, permanent, status, fact, etc.(mostly scientific and artistic terms);

3) Greek borrowings (Renaissance period mostly): atom, epoch, cycle, ethics, episode, epilogue, rhythm, metaphor, democracy, etc.;

4) Scandinavian (7-11 centuries): sister, husband, window, die, want, kill, ugly, they, till, though, ski, skate, sky, skin, etc.;

5) French: a) Norman borrowings (11-13 centuries):titles (prince, duke, count, baron), army (officer, general, division), justice (judge, jury), words connected with upper classes(palace, mansion, painter, tailor, etc); b) Parisian borrowings (Renaissance): bourgeois, regime, routine, police, machine, ballet, scene, technique; c)modern borrowings(diplomatic terms and social life): communiqué, attaché, dossier, champagne, menu, corsage, blouse, coquette, etc.

6) Italian (Music, art, military, commercial):piano, opera, balcony, corridor, studio, sonnet, medals, alarm, colonel, million, cartridge;

7) Spanish(colonies, foreign trade): sombrero, tomato, potato, toreador, tobacco, Negro, banana, etc.;

8) German (war and chemistry): blitz, Gestapo, cobalt, zink, nickel, etc.;

9) Dutch (navigation and art): freight, skipper, deck, dock, sketch, landscape, easel, etc.;

10) Indian: curry;

11) Russian: troika, vodka, balalaika, samovar, sarafan, Soviet, Kremlin, czar(tsar), sputrnik, intelligentsia, etc.

1. Borrowed words and their assimilation.

All the borrowed words got mixed with the native stock in the process of historic development, so sometimes it is difficult to tell borrowed words from native, e.g. table, wall, sister, painter. But a lot of words have preserved some peculiarities in pronunciation, spelling, morphology, which help to determine the origin of these words.

According to the degree of assimilation borrowed words are divided into:

1) completely assimilated;

2) partially assimilated;

3) unassimilated, or barbarisms.

Completely assimilated borrowings are usually old: street, husband, table. They follow all morphological, phonetic and spelling standards of English. They are frequently used and stylistically neutral and usually active in word formation.

Partially assimilated borrowings are further subdivided into groups depending on the aspect which the words are not assimilated in:

a) not assimilated semantically: denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they came: clothes(sombrero), titles and professions (shah, bei, toreador), food and drinks (pilaw, borsch, galushky), money (rouble), etc.

b) not assimilated grammatically, e.g. original plural forms of Greek and Latin borrowings: crisis – crises, criterion – criteria, stimulus – stimuli, datum – data, etc.

c) not assimilated phonetically: with the stress on the last syllable (police, routine), sounds and combinations that are not standard in English (bourgeois, prestige, memoir), the whole phonetic pattern is different, e.g. opera, soprano, confetti, etc.

d) not assimilated graphically: with diactric marks (café, cliché), special digraphs (bouquet, brioche), some silent letters (ballet, corps).

Some words may have incomplete assimilation in more than one aspect.

Barbarisms are not assimilated in any way foreign words which are used by Englishmen in communication though they have native equivalents, e.g. ciao, Anno Domini, etc.

1. International words, translation loans, etymological doublets.

Borrowing is seldom limited to one language. Words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowings from the same source are called international. They play an important role in scientific terminology, industry, art. E.g., Italian borrowings in music, Latin borrowings in science, etc. There exist false translator’s friends, e.g. magazine, champion, general, capital, etc.

Translation loans are formed from the material already existing in the English language but according to the pattern taken from another language by literal translation, e.g. wall newspaper (from Russian), chain-smoker (from German), swan song (German), etc.

Etymological doublets are two or more words of the same language which were derived from the same basic word but by different routes. They now differ in form, meaning and usage. Doublets appear when:

1) words came through different dialects in O.E.: raid and road, drag and draw;

2) words were borrowed twice in different periods: castle – chateau; catch- chase;

3) words which developed from different grammatical forms of the same borrowed word: super-superior-supreme (degrees of comparison of the same Latin adjective).

LECTURE 9

REGIONAL VARIETIES AND DIALECTS

1. The national literary language. Local dialects and variants. Dialects on the territory of the British Isles.

2. Variants of the English language.

3. American English.

1. The concept of norm is one of the main in linguistics since the norm embraces all language levels: phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. It is determined socially, historically and linguistically. It is stable and compulsory for all the speakers of a certain language as well as internationally recognized as standard.

The norm is abstract. It is realized through national, generally received variants: Br E, Can E, Am E, Au E, etc.

The national literary language in Britain was formed on the basis of the South-Eastern dialect (London dialect) which developed from a territorial dialect into socio-regional. Modern English orphoepic norm – Received Pronunciation developed from that dialect. BRP embraces only a small portion of population of Britain – about 3-5%. It enjoys a high social status, being characteristic of public school graduates. All the rest of the population uses one of the regional standards.

Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called variants (the Scottish Tongue, Irish English). Varieties of the language peculiar to some districts and having no normalized literary form are called dialects. There are 5 main groups of dialects in Britain.: Northern, Midland, Eastern, Western, and Southern. They differ in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

e.g. Northerners pronounce ‘come, love, bus’ as ‘coom, loov, boos’; they pronounce ‘ dance, chance, France’ like Americans but the word can’t is pronounced with a long a. Sometimes Northerners leave out the article ‘the’ and possessive pronouns ’my, his, your’, etc.

One of the best known and most picturesque is the dialect of Cockney whose home is East End of London. Cockneys pronounce ‘wait, late, tray’ like ‘white, light, try’, etc. ‘h’s’at the beginning of the words are often dropped; ‘ouse, ‘ere, ‘ave. Intradental sounds are replaced with labio-dental: farver (father), fing (thing).

A characteristic feature of Cockney is the so-called rhyming slang. A phrase is used instead of a word with which it is rhymed: frog and toad – road, apples and pears – stairs, pot of honey – money, strike me dead – bread, loaf of bread – head, trouble and strife – wife.

Due to people’s migration and to teaching Standard English at schools all over the country dialect differences have been slowly dying. Nowadays in Britain there are two opposite tendencies: 1) prejudices against substandard forms are still strong, British are most particular as to pronunciation norms; 2) a growing number of people, especially the young, reject BRP as associated with the Establishment and are proud of their roots. Mass culture, folk songs sung by popular singers have also contributed to lowering of standards, more regional deviations have become accepted.

2. The status of Am e, Au E, Can E, etc. has been a disputable question for a certain periods of time. The prevailing point of view now is that they cannot be called dialects having their own literary norms. They cannot be called separate languages either since the bulk of phonemes, words and grammar forms used in them are the same. So the term ‘national variants’ is preferably used.

There are certain factors, which predetermined common features and differences in the national variants of the English Language. Common features are connected with the following:

a) one and the same language source (English of Britain of the 17-18^th cent.);

b) common dialectal basis (immigrants brought local dialects with them);

c) orientation to British literary norm due to its high social status;

d) analogous stages passed by all national variants in their development (transplantation, adaptation to functioning in new conditions, formation of national variants and functioning as separate variants).

Factors which caused differences are as follows:

a) local geographic, ethnic, social conditions;

b) great distances between the colonies and the metropoly;

c) regularity of contacts;

d) other languages influence.

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