Borrowings

Borrowing words from other languages has been characteristic throughout its history. More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and by their grammatical forms. It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

English history is very rich in different types of contact with other countries, that is why it is very rich in borrowings. The Roman invasion, the adoption of Christianity, Scandinavian and Norman conquests of the British Isles, the development of British colonialism and trade and cultural relations served to increase immensely the English vocabulary. The majority of these borrowings are fully assimilated in English in their pronunciation, grammar, spelling and can be hardly distinguished from native words.

The term source of borrowing should be distinguished from the term origin of borrowing. The first should be applied to the language from which the borrowing was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language which the word may be traced. Thus the word paper < Fr papier < Lat papyrus < Gr. papyros has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin.

English continues to take in foreign words, but now the quantity of borrowings is not so abundant as it was before.