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English Language Composition 7

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18 views

English Language Composition 7

Uploaded by

twumasisandra8
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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even as stealing).

English began as a Germanic dialect with Scandinavian contact (so

we have ‘apple’, ‘tree’, ‘sky’, ‘skirt’), in a Celtic landscape (‘tor’, ‘banner’, ‘slogan’),

followed by Norman French influence and French borrowing over 500 years

(‘parliament’, ‘mutton’, ‘administration’), with Italian, Latin and Greek loans through

the Renaissance and continuing with the scientific Enlightenment (‘pasta’, ‘violin’,

‘oxygen’, ‘catalyst’, ‘microcomputer’).

French, Germanic languages and Latin account in almost equal measures for most

common English words, with everyday speech weighted towards Germanic vocabu-

lary and formal or technical language leaning more towards French and Latin

sources. Other borrowings include ‘caravan’ (Persian), ‘juggernaut’ (Sanskrit), ‘sushi-

bar’ (Japanese), ‘lager’ (German), and from Bantu languages ‘safari’, ‘zombie’,

‘jumbo’ and ‘a-go-go’; from Arabic ‘alcohol’, ‘algebra’, ‘zero’, ‘tariff ’, ‘magazine’;

from Portuguese ‘teak’, ‘zebra’, ‘marmalade’, ‘palaver’; and from the native American

languages ‘papoose’, ‘shack’, ‘barbecue’, ‘canoe’ and ‘cocaine’.

When borrowing from other languages, English has tended to anglicise the

pronunciation, which is often reflected in the spelling: ‘vindaloo’ curry from the

Portuguese ‘carne de vinha d’alhos’; ‘cafe’ often appears without the French acute accent

on the final letter (‘café’), and sometimes gets pronounced [kaf] or [kafi], without a

French accent at all (see B1 for further details on how to write in phonetic notation).

There are some exceptions, of course, such as ‘chic’, which retains its French sound

(perhaps both because of its haute couture sense and also because of a clash with ‘chick’).

When words are borrowed into English, they usually tend to become grammatically

fixed for inflections too: so we might order two ‘pizzas’ rather than ‘pizze’, eat two

mint ‘Magnums’ (ice lollies) instead of ‘Magna’, and talk about ‘schemas’ not

‘schemata’. There is even a great deal of debate over whether the plural of the com-

puter ‘mouse’ is the modern inflection ‘mouses’ rather than the medieval ‘mice’.

When words are borrowed, as in some examples above, the source words are often

shortened. Shortening in itself is also a form of word-formation. We have ‘mobs’ not

‘mobiles’, ‘fans’ more usually than ‘fanaticks’, and modern life has the ‘telly’, the ‘phone’,
the ‘flu’, the ‘gym’, the ‘car’, the ‘bus’, the ‘pram’, the ‘fridge’ and many more, all

clipped from longer original words. These are all abbreviations of various forms, and

often the longer and shorter versions coexist for a long time in the language, with

the shorter form being colloquial and the longer form reserved for formal or technical

contexts.

Shortening in the form of acronyms is very common, especially in technological

innovation: the LP was replaced by the CD and DVD, then MP3. Acronyms can be

atomic if each element is pronounced separately (FBI, BBC, EU, RAF) or molecular if

pronounced as a genuine word (‘laser’, ‘radar’, ‘NASA’). Occasionally a combination

of processes of word-formation results in historical oddities. The most famous is

the ‘hamburger’, originally invented in Hamburg, New York and made from beef

with coffee and spices between bread. The ‘ham’ morpheme is wrongly associated with

meat and so is regarded as detachable from the whole word, producing the back-

formation ‘burger’. This free morpheme is then available to be compounded with many

other prefixes: ‘cheeseburger’, ‘veggie-burger’, ‘BBQ-burger’, ‘tofu-burger’, plain ‘burger’

and even the wrongly corrected ‘beefburger’.

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