a study of language borrowing in english from romance languages

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a study of language borrowing in english from romance languages otaxonov jonibek cspu tourism faculty foreign languages and literature stage 3 student abstract: in this paper we report the results of a study designed to discover how many and at what point in time words were borrowed into english from the classical languages greek and latin, and the romance languages french, italian, spanish and portuguese. keywords: dictionary, 1. introduction our results are based on the immediate donor languages and first citation dates identified by the oxford english dictionary (1989). ours is certainly not the first study to have used dictionary information to determine when particular loanwords have entered the language, though few consider more than one language over a number of centuries (notable exceptions being bliss (1966) and serjeantson (1961)).[footnoteref:1] more importantly, no study to date has taken into consideration more than a small sample of the words available in …

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ons our aim was to categorise loanwords according to the immediate donor language and the date of the first citation within the oed. thus, the word centre would be categorised as a loan from the french centre, in spite of the fact that french had adopted it from latin centrum and that latin in turn had adopted it from greek . the first citation date is 1374 (a text from chaucer). however, identifying the immediate donor language is not always easy. most of the words which ultimately derive from greek have entered english through latin, or been latinised in spelling before being used in english. it is not possible on the basis of form alone to be sure whether a word is a direct greek loan or has come through latin (see bliss (1966: 40- 2) for a discussion of this problem). jesperson (1938: 107) points out that many words …

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r example, the first citation date for the latin loanword progeniture is given in the oed as 1801, a text by h.m. williams. however, the word appears in thomas nashe’s have with you to saffron-waldon, dated 1596. the important issue concerns the general situation: how general are these inaccuracies and what is the general size of the inaccuracy? schäfer (1980) addresses this issue.[footnoteref:2] using the first edition of the oed (the new english dictionary (1884-1928) and its supplement (1933)), he tested first citation dates against a corpus made up of the writings of shakespeare, nashe, malory and wyatt. he predicts a general reliability rate of 60% (1980: 65-6). of the citations which can be antedated (i.e. 40% of the oed's headwords), 70% fall within a fifty year period. overall, nearly 7% of the headwords in the oed are likely to be inaccurate by more than a century (1980: 67). this …

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ability of textual editions for scrutiny. and sometimes organisation of the readers of the oed was less than rigorous, so that certain periods suffered. the graph below (figure 1) displays the number of oed headwords falling into each century.3 the earliest records of english do not go back much before the year 700. the few words given in the oed before this date appear in latin texts. in general, the numbers of words recorded in the old english period are patchy and relatively sparse. this is for the obvious reason that the quantity of texts surviving from early periods is tiny compared with those surviving from later periods. as a consequence, we make no detailed reference or draw any conclusions from data obtained in this period, or, more precisely, prior to 1150. this is a key date for two reasons. firstly, the number of words recorded after this date rises …

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p in the 18th century may be due to a lack of organisation between the oed’s american readers, who were originally responsible for this century, and the chief editor of the first edition of the oed, james murray (murray 1977: 169, 184).[footnoteref:3] schäfer (1980: 53) also notes this as a possible reason for the drop in the 18th century. however, this is probably only a partial explanation, since it is noted in the ‘historical introduction’ to the oed (1989: ix) that the early scheme of asking american readers to cover the 18th ‘was not a fortunate one, and was never seriously taken up’. the predominance of vocabulary recorded in the 19th century is not surprising given that the oed compilers were working within this century. the decrease in vocabulary recorded for the 20th century can be explained by the fact that much of the second edition of the oed was …

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a study of language borrowing in english from romance languages otaxonov jonibek cspu tourism faculty foreign languages and literature stage 3 student abstract: in this paper we report the results of a study designed to discover how many and at what point in time words were borrowed into english from the classical languages greek and latin, and the romance languages french, italian, spanish and portuguese. keywords: dictionary, 1. introduction our results are based on the immediate donor languages and first citation dates identified by the oxford english dictionary (1989). ours is certainly not the first study to have used dictionary information to determine when particular loanwords have entered the language, though few consider more than one language over a number …

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