Borrowing in the English Language

Eva Maria Nunnemann

Borrowing in the English Language

Where two different languages have contact over a certain period of time they will surely

influence each other. Words might be taken over from one language and are adopted to the

other. This process is called borrowing. Throughout its long history English had contact with

many different languages such as Old Norse, French, and Latin, but also with the colonial

languages. 

The reasons for a language such as English to borrow words from other languages are

manifold. Katamba remarks in this context  that there is no purely linguistic reason for

borrowing. According to him no limit exists to the number of words that can be generated in

any language (Katamba, 1994; 195). But still, whenever the need for a new term arises, due to

the contact between people from different cultures, the formation of a neologism, composed

of elements of the own language, is only rarely done. One reason for borrowing a suitable

word from another language is the need to find a term for an unfamiliar thing, animal, or

cultural device. Then borrowing seems to be the easiest solution to this problem. 

Another reason for just borrowing a term might also be the question of identity. This is

especially the case with bilingual speakers who, by using a foreign element in their speech,

make a statement about their own self-perception (cf. Katamba, 1994; 195). In this context

code-switching also plays an important role. If a word is habitually used in code-switching, it

perhaps might pass over from one language to the other and then eventually even become

fully integrated. In such a way for example the Yiddish word  schmaltz  (‘cloying, banal

sentimentality’) has been introduced to (American) English (Katamba, 1994; 196). 

Moreover, a further, often underestimated reason for borrowing is prestige. Katamba notes

here that people have “always liked to show off” (Katamba, 1994; 194). Gibbon remarks in

this discussion that the prestige question could even be one of the, if not the major reason for

borrowing, because people would only take loan words from other languages if they believed

that either the device/object for which the  denotation is taken over or the language, from

which the term comes, itself is prestigious (cf. class notes).  Gramley holds that such terms

mostly come from those languages he calls “languages of classical learning”, i.e. Latin or

Greek (Gramley, 2001; 24). Not only are whole words borrowed together with their

meanings, but also new words, namely neologisms, are generated on the basis of morphemes

borrowed from those languages.  In English a product of such a process is telephone (from 2

Greek  tēle-  meaning ‘afar, far off’ and  phōnē meaning ‘sound, voice’) (cf. class notes)

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.

Gramley goes on mentioning the  controversial discussion which has been lead about the

words being taken over from those “classical languages” to English. On the one hand they

serve to enrich the language, but on the other hand the words make certain stylistic registers

more inaccessible to the masses. The meaning of some of these highly prestigious words is

often not directly obvious to the average speaker of English, and thus, their meaning has to be

learned. For example the adjective visible, meaning ‘able to be seen’ has no direct association

to the verb to see, and therefore the link between these two has to be established by learning.

Gramley therefore calls such words as visible “hard words” (Gramley, 2001; 25). Those loans,

especially some from Greek and Latin, which are felt to be pretentious or/and obscure by the

average speaker of English are found to be denoted as “ink-horn terms” (Gramley, 2001; 25). 

Amongst the above mentioned reasons for borrowing from foreign languages, the most

obvious and maybe also the most profound one is the introduction of new concepts for which

there are no suitable words in the task language. Concerning this, Katamba writes that that at

various periods in world history different civilisations have been pre-eminent in one field or

another (like for example sciences, trade, military, and medicine). According to him, the

normal course of development was then that the language of this civilisation became the

lingua franca for that specific field during the period of their pre-eminence (Katamba, 1994;

195). This is also reflected by the concentration of borrowings in certain semantic fields from

that language to others

2

. In the Middle Ages the Arabic world was advanced in many sciences

and thus, a lot of words have been passed on during this time to other languages and also to

English. Some of the best known examples are alchemy, alcohol, and algebra

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. Many of those

Arabic terms have not been borrowed directly into English, but were gradually passed on to

English from other languages. Katamba mentions the typical way that many scientific Arabic

words took. English often acquired them from French, which took them over from Spanish

and Spanish finally had borrowed them directly from Arabic (Katamba, 1994; 196).

What gets obvious here is a very basic distinction that can be made between borrowings.

Direct borrowing is when a language takes over a term directly from another language. The

English word omelette is an example for direct borrowing because it has been taken over from

French (French: omelette) directly, without any major phonological or orthographical changes

(Katamba, 1994; 191). In contrast to that, indirect borrowing takes place when a certain word

is passed on from the source language to another (as a direct borrowing), and then from that                                                            

 

1

A more complete word history can be found under: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/telephone

2

For examples see my table on ‚Effects of other Languages on English‘ 

3

Again for nearer information see ‚Effects of other Languages on English’ 3

language is handed over to another and from this one maybe even to another. This process

may go hand in hand with the development that the word, each time it is passed on from one

language to another, is adjusted phonologically/orthographically to make it fit to the

phonological/ orthographical system of the recipient language (cf. Katamba, 1994; 192). The

Turkish word kahveh has been passed on to Arabic as kahva, from there the Dutch borrowed

it as koffie and finally it was taken over by the English in the form coffee (cf. Katamba, 1994;

191). In this context, Katamba reminds us that there is danger of misunderstandings or

alternations in the meaning, the more indirect a term is borrowed. In English there exists the

term howitzer (‘light gun’). It entered the language from Dutch and they had borrowed it from

the Czech original houfnice which means ‘catapult’  (Katamba, 1994; 192). 

To complicate matters even further, there is another distinction between the kinds of

borrowings, i.e. the distinction between loanwords and loanshifts.  Most of the examples

discussed above are loanwords. That means, they have been imported/ adopted from another

language, either directly or indirectly, and might have undergone phonological/

orthographical changes. 

Loanshifts (= loan translations/ calques) on the other side are formed in a quite different way.

Here the borrowing is done by translating the vocabulary item or rather its meaning into the

receiving language. Such a loanshift is the German word  Übermensch  which has been

translated into English as Superman. Moreover, the term loanword itself is a loan translation

from the German Lehnwort (Katamba, 1994; 194). 

Generally, it has to be remarked, as Ball does, that the borrowing of  a word into another

language is always a gradual process which takes quite some time (quoted in Hussey, 1995;

34).  This gradual might even lead to the result that foreign words which are borrowed

become ‘nativised’, in the case of English  then ‘anglicised’. Thus, they then become

indistinguishable from indigenous English terms (cf. Katamba, 1994; 199) or as Jespersen has

put it so nicely, with a quotation full of Norse loan words which a native speaker of English

would not detect as foreign elements: “An Englishman cannot thrive or die or be ill without

Scandinavian words;  they are to the language what  bread and  eggs are to the daily fare” 

[italics my emphasis] (quoted in Geipel, 1971; 69).

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Works cited:

Geipel, John (1971): The Viking Legacy. David & Charles: Newton Abbot. 

Gramley, Stephan (2001): The Vocabulary of World English. Arnold: London. 

Hussey, Stanley (1995): The English Language. Longman: London and NY. 

Katamba, Francis (1994): English Words. Routledge: Londo