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 PART 1 – Chapter 3 – The English Language (p. 71)

 

 

READING

Read the text and answer the questions below.
1. What does the writer mean by ‘borrowings’?
2. Are there many borrowings in the English language?
3. Where did English mainly borrow from?
4. Why have so many new words entered the English vocabulary since the middle of the 20th century?
5. What main areas are they from? Can you give some examples?
 
Foreign borrowings
When one language takes lexemes from another, the new items are usually called loan words or borrowings – though neither term is really appropriate, as the receiving language does not give them back.
English, perhaps more than any other language, is an insatiable borrower. Whereas the speakers of some languages take pains to exclude foreign words from their lexicons, English seems always to have welcomed them. Over 120 languages are on record as sources of its present-day vocabulary, and the location of contacts are found all over the world.
The borrowing began even before the Anglo-Saxons arrived. There were few Celtic loans during that period, but the influence of Latin is strong, especially after the arrival of Christianity (e.g. bishop, church, priest, school, giant, lobster, purple, plant). The Viking invasions alone resulted in about 2,000 Scandinavian words coming into English (e.g. dirt, egg, kid, leg, skin, sky, window). After the Norman Conquest, the influx of words from the continent of Europe, especially French, doubled the size of the lexicon to over 100,000 items. By the end of the Renaissance, the growth in classically-derived vocabulary, especially from Latin, had doubled the size of the lexicon again. While these periods represent the peaks of borrowing activity in the history of English, there was no reduction in the underlying trend during later centuries.
Since the 1950s, a fresh wave of borrowing has been taking place, which eventually may exceed the totals encountered in the Middle English period. The emergence of English as a world language has promoted regular contact with an unprecedented number of languages and cultures and the borrowings have shown an immediate and dramatic upturn. New fauna and flora, political groups and institutions, landscape features, industrial products, foodstuffs, inventions, leisure activities, and other forms of behaviour have all generated thousands of lexemes – and continue to do so. The growth of local nationalism has had its effect, too, with people seeking fresh lexical ways of showing their local identity within the undifferentiated domain of international Standard English.
 
(From David Chrystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, CUP 1995)
 

 

 
 
 
Questo file è un’estensione online del corso M. G. Dandini, NEW SURFING THE WORLD.
Copyright © 2010 Zanichelli Editore S.p.A., Bologna [1056]