General information

It is well-known that a language is a living and a dynamic body, with a continuous development, and permanently subject to innovation. This phenomenon of development in a language is linked with the fact that any language has to change (phonetically, graphically, lexically, semantically, morphologically) in order to reflect and respond to the needs of native speakers. Consequently, the pace of change in the structure of a language is dictated by the evolution of society, by social, economic and historical factors. Theories have emerged trying to explain this concept of innovation: a) naturalist theories explain the linguistic change by means of climate and geographical background; b) the theory of tendencies - promoted by the French linguist Antoine Meillet – state that languages which belong to the same family of languages are characterized by identical tendencies which can bring about identical linguistic changes even when the relationships between these families of languages cease to exist. Language renewal differs from country to country; for instance, in countries with a powerful industry and economy, new words are obtained internally:

1. Using the already existing sources;

2. Modifying the existing resources by

a) a narrowing of meaning,

b) an extension of meaning;

3. Change in the morphological value rather than external borrowings.

Language serves as a means of communication, not only within society, but also with societies outside of the language community, and consequently some of them transgress the borders of a country, as it now happens with English which has become the new lingua franca in business, IT, and media. As far as Romanian vocabulary is concerned, it has lately been enriched mainly by external means: by borrowings of fashionable and technical neologisms, mostly from English. The areas most subject to lexical innovations are specialized languages, such as media, IT, and economics. The neologisms, that have been introduced in Romanian at certain points in its evolution, account for these needs of development; not only has it been enriched by means of borrowing neologisms but it has also borrowed so-called "international" terms, words which gained international use. Each country has to adopt (or not) these terms, if it wants to globalize and internationalize its economy, being aware (or not) of the fact that the pressures of competition force companies and economies to internationalize, otherwise they begin to wither.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-27