Foreign borrowings. Causes of the Celtic and Latin borrowings. Celtic and Latin elements in geographical place-names

from Latin, Scandinavian and French. Though, a lot of other languages (Celtic, Greek, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic) also contributed to the development of the English vocabulary. The history of the vocabulary of a language is closely related to the history of the people speaking the language.

Foreign borrowings

of the English vocabulary as to historical period of their adoption.
Latin borrowings may be divided into 3 groups:
1. ancient borrowings which goes back as far as the 1st century B.C. when the Anglo-Saxon tribes were still on the continent and came into contact with the Romans through trade. The Latin borrowings of this period are: dish, cup, butter, cheese, wine, cherry, plum, hare, spices, pepper and kitchen.
2. Borrowings which came to Britain in the 6th-7th centuries when Christianity was introduced: abbot, alter, angel, bishop, saint, candle, monk, nun, pope, Christ, school.
3. Words borrowed during the revival of Classical learning and art – the Renaissance in the 14th century and since then the invasion of classical terms has never stopped. Many of them are distinctly learned words: senior, major, minor, junior, accept, educate, basis, area, idea, aggravate. Most of them are only partially assimilated but Latin borrowings of the first two periods are completely assimilated borrowings which belong to the basic word stork now.

Latin Borrowings

articles of trade unknown to the Teutons before they came into contact with Rome: OE cēapian 'to trade', cēap 'deal', cēартап 'trader', and man¥ian 'to trade', тап¥ип¥ 'trading', таn¥еrе 'trader' came from the Latin names for 'merchant' – caupo and mango.
Evidently, the words were soon assimilated by the language as they yielded many derivatives.
Units of measurement and containers were adopted with their Latin names: OE pund ‘pound’, OE ynce ‘inch’ < L pondo and uncia, OE mynet 'coin', mynetian 'to coin', OE flasce ‘flask’, ciest ‘chest’.

The layers of Latin borrowings in Old English

components of place-names used by the Celts. L castra in the shape caster, ceaster 'camp' formed OE place-names which survive today as Chester, Dorchester, Lancaster and the like (some of them with the first element coming from Celtic); L colonia ‘settlement for retired soldiers’ is found in Colchester and in the Latin-Celtic hubrid Lincoln; L vicus ‘village’ appears in Norwich, Woolwich, L portus – in Bridport and Devenport. Place-names made of Latin and Germanic components are: Portsmouth, Greenport, Greenwich and many others.
The second layer of Latin borrowings includes words pertaining to religion and education. At the end of the 6th c. and the beginning of the 7th c. a considerable number of notions connected with the spread of Christianity entered everyday life of the British tribes. Many Latin words denoting those notions were borrowed into the English of that period.

The layers of Latin borrowings in Old English

by the Romans: OE wīn ‘wine’ < L vinum, OE butere ‘butter’ < L būtyrum, OE plume ‘plum’ < L prumus, OE ciese ‘cheese’ < L cāseus, OE pipor ‘pepper’ < L piper.
Roman contribution to building can be perceived in words like OE cealc ‘chalk’, coper ‘copper’. A group of words relating to domestic life is exemplified by OE cytel ‘kettle’, disc ‘dish’, cuppe ‘cup’, pyle ‘pillow’, etc.
Borrowings pertaining to military affairs are OE mil ‘mile’ < L millia passuum, which meant ‘a thousand steps made to measure the distance’; OE weall ‘wall’ < L vallum, a wall of fortifications erected in the Roman provinces; OE stræt < Latin strata via, a "paved road" (these "paved roads" were laid to connect Roman military camps and colonies in Britain; the meaning of the word changed when houses began to be built along these roads, hence Mod E street); to this group of words belong also OE pil 'javelin', OE pytt ‘рile, pit’.

The layers of Latin borrowings in Old English

denote most common objects, properties and actions and belong to the basic word stock of Modern English. Britain devastated by the inroads of different Scandinavian tribes (the Danes) for about 3 centuries from the 8th to the 11th century. The Danish invasion resulted in the occupation of a great part of the country by Scandinavian settlers, who spoke Old Norse – the Germanic language very close to Old English. The effect of the Danish conquest was the contribution of many Scandinavian words to the English vocabulary: law, husband, fellow, sky, skin, wing, root, skill, anger, finger, gate, to die, to cast, to hit, to take, to call, to want, loose, wrong, low, ill, ugly, rotten, happy, they. A characteristic feature of Scandinavian borrowings is the preservation of the initial sounds [sk]=sk=sc: skirt, skill, scatter; or [g] before front vowels: get, give, forget, anger…

Scandinavian Borrowings

roughly divided into old, or Norman borrowings, and new, or Parisian, borrowings.
After the Norman conquest in 1066 French or rather Northern-French became the official language in England. The first French borrowings were terms connected with war, fare, court, law, soldiers, army, crown, country, piece, justice, office, government, parliament and state. There was almost no end to the French words that continued to pour into English up to the 16th century: chair, table, furniture, dinner, supper, soup, jelly, sausage, to fry, to boil, joy, pleasure, delight, comfort, dress, colour, flower, fruit, desire, castle, mention (особняк), beauty. These early Norman borrowings are usually fully assimilated words. In the 17th century there was a change in the character of French borrowings. New borrowings mainly from the Parisian dialect preserved their French forms as a rule: campaign, garage, ballet, rouge, bucket, and matinee, machine. Besides Latin, Scandinavian, French borrowings the English language contains words borrowed from almost every language on the globe.

French Borrowings

Anglo-Saxons came to the British Isles in the 5th century A.D. they met with the Celts or Britains – the native inhabitants of the British Isles whom they pushed away to the North and the West. The whole number of Celtic words in English whether borrowed directly or indirectly is 165 according to Walter Skeat’s counts: banner (булка домашнего хлеба), bard, glad, clad, cradle, loch/lock (lake).
Celtic elements are mostly found in place names, e.g. aber (the mouth of the river) – Aberdeen; avon (a river) – Stratford-on-Avon; inch (an island) – Inchcape.

Celtic Borrowings

Latin Christian terms were of Greek origin: abbot, bishop, school, Christ, monk; chair, police, policy, chronicle came to English from Greek through Latin and French.
The direct borrowing of the Greek words into English started only in the period of the Renaissance: literature owes the following terms – tragedy, comedy, drama… Greek elements, affixes and roots are widely used in English to create new terms: telephone, photography, telegramme etc.

solo, sonata, soprano, trill, violin, macaroni, spaghetti, influenza, umbrella, manifest etc.
The Spanish element in English like the Italian is mainly modern, e.g. cigar, embargo, junta, mosquito etc. The following words were introduced through Spanish to Europe from America: coco, chilly, chocolate, tomato, potato, tobacco, canoeing, yucca etc.

Italian and Spanish Borrowings

took place before 1917 such as: izba, ruble, kopeck, tsar, borzoi, Cossack etc.
· And borrowings after 1917. The so-called sovietisms: Bolshevik, soviet, Komsomol, udarnik; later – sputnik, lunnik; recent – perestroika, glasnost, Gorbotchov etc.

Russian Borrowings

British settlements
· Names denoting ownership of land by individual Britons
· British place-names adopted by the English
The first two groups generally tend to be Old English formations and they are accordingly discussed in the section relating to English place-names. With regard to the final category, Gelling (1988) adds that, in relation to Celtic and pre-Celtic place-names, two general principles can be said to exist:
· That such names can be expected to relate to the principal rivers, the larger hills and to the more sizeable forests.
· That, with specific exceptions, there are more Celtic place-names still extant in England as one travels further to the north and west.

Celtic place-names

only the larger geographical features bear Celtic names. Conversely, in locations where such names are frequent even minor sites and features bear British designations.
This phenomena is explained by drawing attention to the correlation between the progress of the Anglo-Saxons from east to west and the survival of Celtic river-names. She cites Jackson (1953) who has demonstrated that the frequency of such names shows a marked correspondence to the westward movements of the invaders.

Celtic place-names