History of the English Language: Loanwords

by Britt Mize



This is the front page of a hypertext illustration of the lexical borrowing that has so extensively shaped the vocabulary of the English language. This site is under development; it will eventually include interactive pages featuring passages of text from Old, Middle, and Modern English, and within the Modern English period, from several different types of writing. When complete, these pages should be a useful resource for students and teachers of the history of the English language.

At present, one set of text pages is up and running (although the word-links to etymological information are not yet operative): the first 34 lines of the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
 

Click here to visit. 

The Concept of Lexical Borrowing

Lexical borrowing is the process by which one language acquires new words from another language. These new words are called loanwords, and this type of linguistic commerce is likely to occur just about any time speakers of two languages come into intensive and sustained cultural contact, such as occurs through trade, conquest, immigration, or intermarriage.

Vocabulary is borrowed in many different ways, most of which can be understood as falling into three general categories of borrowing processes:

A good example of lexical adoption is the Modern English word salsa, which was taken over from Spanish salsa 'sauce' with no change in form or significant change in pronunciation. Likewise, Modern English sky is an adoption of Old Norse ský 'cloud.'

Modern English candle is an example of an adapted word. It entered Old English as candel, a form that had been adapted from Latin candela 'candle' by dropping the -a ending that was grammatically functional in Latin but would serve no purpose in English. Another adapted word is Modern English whiskey, adapted from a Hiberno-English form usquebaugh 'whiskey,' which is itself an adaptation of Irish Gaelic uisce beatha 'whiskey' (lit. 'water of life').

The process of loan formation can be seen in the Modern English word telegraph. Its elements are tele- 'far' and -graph 'write,' both of which derive from Greek. Tele- was adopted directly from Greek into English. The element -graph has a more complex history: it was adapted from Greek -graphon into Latin as -graphum, and this Latin form developed naturally into French -graphe. From the French form, it is a matter of simple adoption into English to give us the productive element -graph that we find in many words, such as epigraph, monograph, and pictograph. In any case, the elements tele- and -graph never went together in Greek to form any such word as telegraph.

An example of calque, or loan translation, is the Modern English word world-view, which is a piece-by-piece translation of the German compound word Weltanschauung 'world-view' (Welt 'world' + Anschauung 'view, idea').

These types of lexical borrowing sometimes combine to form complex series of changes as words pass from one language into another. The example of -graph in telegraph, as described above, shows how multiple stages of adaptation or adoption can take place; and Irish Gaelic uisce beatha, the source of Modern English whiskey, derives from Old Irish uisce bethad, which is a calque from Latin aqua vitae 'water of life.'
 

The Developmental Path of English

English is an Indo-European (IE) language. This means that it derives (with several identifiable intermediate stages) from an ancient language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This language is no longer spoken and was never written down, but much of its vocabulary and many of its other features can be reconstructed with some confidence by linguists who study the relationships among the various known descendent languages. These descendents of PIE include virtually all known European languages, several languages of western and southern Asia, and one extinct group of languages that was written down in central Asia. It is believed that PIE was spoken in the neighborhood of the Black Sea sometime around 3000 B.C.E.

PIE spawned numerous known descendent language families, such as Italic (which includes Latin and other related languages), Hellenic (which includes Greek), Indo-Iranian (which includes Sanskrit and Avestan), and Celtic (which includes Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton). Another of these IE language families is Germanic, and this is the one to which English belongs. Just as all of the IE languages point back to a single parent language, all Germanic languages point back to a single intermediate language that existed after the division of PIE but before the known Germanic languages began to diverge from one another. This hypothetical language is called Proto-Germanic, and it is thought to have been spoken along the shore of the North Sea by about 300 B.C.E.

Proto-Germanic split into three identifiable dialect groups now referred to as East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. The details of this process are not entirely clear to linguists, but the descendent North and West Germanic languages have some important affinities with each other that East Germanic does not share, so it is thought that East Germanic began to diverge before North and West Germanic had become distinct from one another. The state of the language at the end of the Proto-Germanic period is called Common Germanic, denoting the time during which East Germanic was just beginning to diverge from North and West Germanic such that common changes occuring in those two dialects might show up only incompletely, or not at all, in East Germanic. The Common Germanic period is placed in the first and second centuries C.E., and East Germanic seems to have become distinct from the remaining Common Germanic language stock during the second century.

North and West Germanic became distinct from one another by about 400 C.E. English is the descendent of a West Germanic dialect that arrived in present-day England from the European mainland during the fifth century. As this insular dialect became differentiated from the other West Germanic dialects still being spoken on the Continent, it developed into what we know as Old English. The Old English period is usually identified as extending from about 500 to about 1100.

Old English began to undergo some major phonological and grammatical changes during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and these, in combination with the sociolinguistic influences that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066, transformed the language into Middle English. The Middle English period extended from about 1100 to about 1500. By about 1500, English had, in most of its essentials, reached the state it still has today, and from this time onward, it is considered Modern English. (The language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is referred to as Early Modern English when the distinction between it and later forms of Modern English is important.)
 

Lexical Borrowing as Considered in This Demonstration

This demonstration attempts to illustrate the lexical borrowing that has occurred during the documented existence of English proper, and before that time, for much of the reconstructed developmental path that led to English. In other words, the following pages allow the user not only to identify the words that have been borrowed during the Old, Middle, and Modern English periods, but also during the earlier Proto-Germanic/Common Germanic and North-West/West Germanic periods. In theory, then, the available options for each sample text passage should enable the viewer to see all words that were borrowed into Proto-Germanic from elsewhere after its separation from the other Indo-European language families; words that were borrowed into the Germanic language family sometime after Proto-Germanic began to break down into its divergent dialect groups; words that were borrowed by the West Germanic languages in common but not by the other Germanic dialects; and then, finally, words that were borrowed into English during its historically attested periods of development.

But that is only in theory. Although great care has been taken to ascertain the probable period during which a word was borrowed and the extent of its attestation throughout the Germanic languages, there is considerable danger of the argument from silence: the fact that a given word has known cognates only within the West Germanic dialect group, for instance, may mean that it was borrowed after North Germanic had become a distinct and separate language, but it may also mean nothing. It could be that no attestation survives in North Germanic, even though the word had existed there too. The same caveat applies to claims that a word was borrowed during the Proto-Germanic period: that claim will be made only when there are no known cognates anywhere else among the Indo-European daughter languages, but it is certainly possible that such cognates existed and simply have not survived in the very incomplete linguistic record. Therefore, indications that a word was borrowed into the English language's line of development earlier than the attested Old English period should always be taken as tentative and inherently less reliable than claims concerning loanwords from the Old English period and later.
 

Methodological and Notational Practices in This Demonstration

In the sample text passages, uncounted words are enclosed in square brackets.  In general, place names and personal names have not been counted. At the bottom of each passage, a brief statement in square brackets gives the total number of counted words, the number of those words that meet the condition by which the passage has been sorted for that display, and the percentage of the total counted words this number represents.

In the etymological word-list, evolution of a word within a single language's developmental path (as, for instance, between Old English and Middle English) is indicated with the sign < , "derived from." All instances of borrowing are indicated with the sign -- . No distinction among the three types of borrowing discussed above is made explicit in the etymologies, as they generally provide the information necessary to make such a judgment. Etymological information is drawn from The American Heritage Dictionary (3d ed.), The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology by C. T. Onions, and The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots by Calvert Watkins.
 
 

bmize@email.unc.edu