Vocabulary Change

Vocabulary Change Borrowing Borrowing is a way of adding new vocabulary items to a language. Speakers of a language often have contact with speakers of other language. If a speaker of one of these languages does not have a readily available word for something in the world and a speaker of the other language does, the first speaker often borrows the word from the second speaker. The first settlers in North America had contact with the Indians who had already developed names for places and things peculiar to the North American continent. Consequently, the settlers borrowed such words as Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Chicago, and Mississippi, to mention a few place-names only. Another large group of words came into English as a result of contact through invasion, in this case the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Various kinds of words were borrowed into English: for matters of government like crown, country, duke, court, and prince; for matters of law like judge, jury, crime, accuse, marry, and prove; for matters of war like battle, arms, soldier, siege, danger, and march; and for matters of religion like angel, saint, pray, save, blame, virtue, and vice. Then, too, today we find interesting pairs of words such as cow and beef, sheep and mutton, calf and veal, and pig and pork in which the first item, the name of the animal, is Germanic in origin and the second item, the meat of the animal, is a borrowing from French. Perhaps the occurrence of such pairs reflects a society in which the conquered Englishman raised the animals for the table of the conquering Norman. Several points can be made about the Norman Conquest. First, the borrowings from French do not show much, if any, cultural superiority in the invaders. Secondly, although the Normans were conquerors, they eventually gave up their French to become speakers of English, just as their ancestors had eventually given up their Germanic language when they invaded France. Thirdly, the borrowings do not show the same intimate relationships between conquered and conqueror as the borrowings that resulted from the earlier Danish invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, when ''everyday''words such as egg, sky, gate, skin, skirt, skill, skull, scatter, sister, law, weak, give, take, call, and hit, and particularly the pronouns they, them, and their, and the verb are were borrowed from the Danish invaders. The kinds of contact speakers have with each other may often be judged from the particular items that are borrowed. For example, English has borrowed numerous words from French having to do with clothing, cosmetics, and luxury goods, like ensemble, lingerie, suede, perfume, rouge, champagne, and deluxe. From German have come words associated with food like hamburger and delicatessen. From Italian have come musical words like piano, opera, solo, sonata, soprano, trombone, and serenade. From various Indian languages have come words for once exotic dress items like bandanna, sari, bangle, and pajamas. And from Arabic have come some interesting words beginning with al- (the Arabic determiner): alcohol, alchemy, almanac, and algebra. Of course, Latin and Greek have provided English with the richest resource for borrowing more formal learned items. Large numbers of words have been borrowed into English from both languages, particularly learned polysyllabic words. Numerous doublets also exist in English, that is, words that have been borrowed twice, once directly from Latin, and the second time through another language, most often French: Latin English French English magister magistrate maitre master securus secure sur sure North American English shows a wide contact with other languages in its borrowings: French (levee, prairie); Spanish (mesa, patio); German (fatcakes, smearcase); Dutch (coleslaw, cooky, stoop); American Indian (squash, moccasin, squaw, wigwam); and various African languages (banjo, gumbo, voodoo). At different times speakers of certain languages have shown noticeable resistance to borrowing words, and they have preferred either to exploit native resources or to resort to loan translations instead. Such an English word as superman is a loan translation of the Ubermensch just as marriage of convenience is a loan translation of the French mariage de convenance and it goes without saying of the French ca va sans dire. Borrowings are also assimilated to different degrees. Sometimes a borrowing is pronounced in a decidedly foreign way for a while, but it is usually soon treated according to native sound patterns if it occurs frequently. In English, words such as garage, salon, masseur, ghoul, and hickory, borrowed from a variety of foreign languages, are pronounced according to the sound system of English and not according to the phonological rules of the source language. Narrowing and widening One process involves narrowing the meaning of a word so that the word achieves a more restricted meaning over the course of time. Meat now means a particular kind of food, not food in general, as it does in the following quotation from the King James version of ''enesis'':"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.?Likewise, deer now refers to a particular kind of animal, not animal in general, as it did in Shakespeare's words "But mice and rats and such small deer have been Tom's food for seven long year."Worm now refers to a particular kind of crawling creature, not any crawling creature, although some of the original more general meaning is contained still in slowworm, blindworm, and glowworm. Fowl and hound refer to particular kinds of bird and dog and wife, to a particular kind of woman. However, in the case of the last word we can note a more general meaning in midwife, wife of Bath, and perhaps housewife. Finally, North Americans use the word corn in a narrow meaning to refer to maize, whereas the British use it to refer to grain in general. Keats' Ruth standing ''amid the alien corn''is not standing in a field of maize. The opposite process is widening of meaning. In this process a word achieves a more general meaning. The words bird and dog once referred to specific types of birds and dogs, not to the species in general. The word virtue described a characteristic associated with men, but not with women, just as only women could be said to be hysterical, since men were not possessed of wombs (hystera being the Greek word for ''uterus''. The word sensible once meant ''sensitive'',as it still does in French, and alibi referred to the fact that a person was elsewhere when something happened, not that he had some kind of excuse for something.