Sources of English vocabulary Borrowings and adaptations Anglicisms

Sources of English vocabulary Borrowings and adaptations Anglicisms in Serbian

Indo-European family Hellenic Germanic Romance Celtic Slavic Indo-Iranian Russian Ukrainian Serbo-Croat Czech Sanskrit Hindi Punjabi Kurdish Persian (Italic) Ancient Greek (Latin) German French English Italian Dutch Spanish Flemish Afrikaans Danish Norwegian Swedish Icelandic Breton Welsch Scottish Irish Gaelic

The basic vocabulary of Indo. European languages is cognate which means that they developed from the same historical source. Old English heorte sunne German Herz Sonne Gothic hairto sunno Greek Latin Russian kardia cordis serdtse helios solntse And they all seem to stem from the Proto. Indo-European kerd.

Reasons for borrowing in the past: - conquests - history 1. Celtic language + Latin during the Roman conquest 2. Scandinavians 3. French 4. Angles and Saxons from Northern Europe, today’s Germany Changes happened mainly to the language spoken by members of the upper class and the vocabulary that included words referring to governement policies, religious issues, art, music, etc. Examples of different origins: Scandinavian: anger > angr = grief, bag > bagge, club > clubbe, flat > flat, gift > geten, husband > husbondi, leg > legge French: president, territory, minister, counsellor, sovereign, monarch, princess, royal, judge, jurisdiction, prison, admiral, etc. German: schnitzel, sauerkraut, Nazi, Blitzkrieg, Panzer (II-World-War influence)

Borrowing may be direct and indirect. If a word is taken from another language directly without changing it, like omelette, tortilla, pasta, etc. , we are talking about direct borrowing. If, however, the word had to be taken from a language which in turn borrowed it from yet another and so on, meaning that it was passed from one language to another and each time it entered a new language it suffered some changes, then we are talking about indirect borrowing. For example the word coffee originated in the Turkish language as kahveh, then it entered the Arabic as kahva, then the Dutch as koffie and finally the English as coffee.

False etimology is a process by means of which a word when borrowed undergoes a strange mutation, creating thus a completely different history of the word. For example: avocado. The Aztec pronounced it ahuacatl but the Spaniards transformed it into aguacate. In popular speech it was transformed into avigato and then to avocado which is Spanish for advocate because only members of the high society, including advocates, could afford it. In English it is known as avocado but also as alligator pear probably because of the fact that this pear-like fruit came from South America, a land where alligators live!

Loanwords and loanshifts A loanword is a word that belongs to one language and is imported into or adopted by another. catamaran was imported into English from Tamil shopping was imported into French as le shopping A loanshift is a process by means of which the meaning of the word is accepted but not the word itself. Loanshifts are also known as loan translations. superman from the German Übermensch almighty from the Latin omnipotens Holy Ghost from spiritus sanctus Most loanshifts in English come from the French language. It even happened that complete phrases were translated word for word and accepted as such. dialogue de sourds le commencement de la fin d’un certain age dialogue of the deaf the beginning of the end of a certain age

The reasons for borrowing 1. Suitability 2. Identity 3. Fashion 4. Necessity

The process of Nativisation of loanwords is a process of assimilation by means of which the borrowed word becomes undistinguishable from indigenous English words. There are three basic features of foreign words that change as time goes by: 1. Grammar 2. Spelling rules 3. Pronunciation