Degree of assimilation

Some borrowed words in English are easily felt as foreign, others are in no way different from words of Anglo-Saxon origin. The degree of assimilation depends on several factors.

It depends firstly on the time of borrowing – the older the borrowing, the more assimilated it is.

Importance for communicative purposes and frequency of usage is another factor determining the degree of assimilation. The principle is this: words widely used in everyday speech and known to a vast number of people are more easily assimilated than words used only occasionally and known to a comparatively small group of people.

One more factor is the way of borrowing. It has been noticed that words borrowed orally are more readily assimilated than words borrowed through written sources.

According to the degree of assimilation, lexicologists divide all borrowed words into three groups.

6.1. Completely assimilated words: here belong all early borrowings – the first two layers of Latin borrowings, Celtic, Scandinavian and Norman French borrowings: street, wall, wine, cradle, candle, husband, fellow, take, die, call, happy, ill, low, face, figure, matter. The long period of their functioning in the English language has made them fully identical with native words, so that a non-specialist native speaker would have been startled to find out that the words cup, pencil, face, table, aunt, river, etc. are words taken from other languages.

6.2. Partially assimilated words. Depending on the aspect which remains unaltered this group of borrowings can be divided into four sub-groups.

6.2.1. Loan words non-assimilated semantically. These words denote some specific realia of the countries from which they come. They may denote foreign clothing (kimono, Japan; sombrero, chiefly countries of Latin America), titles and professions (rajah, India; sheik, some Arab countries; toreador, picador, Spain), vehicles (rickshaw, originally used in Japan, now in countries of South Asia), some historical foreign practices (hara-kiri, Japan),human dwellings (wigwam, American Indians), money (forint, Hungary; dong, Vietnam; yen, Japan; yuan, China), etc.

6.2.2. Words non-assimilated grammatically. Some other examples of nouns of Greek, Latin, or Italian origin that have retained their original plural forms: bacillus – bacilli, formula – formulae, memorandum – memoranda, index – indices, phenomenon – phenomena, Mafioso – Mafiosi, etc.

6.2.3. Words non-assimilated phonetically. They are of different kinds: French borrowings with the stress on the final syllable (cartoon, routine, machine), words which contain sounds or sound combinations which do not occur in native words ([ğ] mirage, prestige, sabotage, pleasure, [ wa: ] memoir, bourgeois). In many cases it is not the sounds but the whole pattern of the word’s phonetic make-up that is different from the rest of the vocabulary. Italian borrowings umbrella, confetti, spaghetti, sonata or Spanish borrowings tomato, potato, tobacco may serve as examples.

6.2.4.Words non-assimilated graphically. Again French borrowings offer us good examples. We have cases of two kinds: words in which final consonants are preserved in spelling but not pronounced in speech (ballet, bouquet, beret, corps)and words which have kept diacritic marks(cliché, café, châlet, début, façade, garcon).

6.3. Completely non-assimilated words or barbarisms. These are foreign words used by English-speaking people in conversation or in writing, but not assimilated in any degree: chaise-longue, corps de ballet, tête-à-tête, vis-à-vis (French), ciao (Italian), ad infinitum, ad libitum, per se (Latin), etc.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-03