Native words, their classification

Native Words- Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary. The native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

A native word is a word (or more precisely, lexeme) that was not borrowed from another language, but was inherited from an earlier stage of the language, i.e. a word that is not a loanword.

Strictly speaking, the term native word can only be relative to some earlier stage of the language. So English hand can be said to be a native word (as opposed to the semantically related manual, a loanword), but only with respect to Old English or Proto-Germanic. At a still earlier time, hand may have been borrowed from some other language, i.e. it may be a loanword after all (we have no way of knowing).

Native words, their classification.

By the Native Element we understand words that are not borrowed from other languages. A native word is a word that belongs to the Old English word-stock. The Native element is the basic element, though it constitutes only up to 20-25% of the English vocabulary.

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language. It was spoken from about A.D. 600 untill about A.D. 1100, and most of its words had been part of a still earlier form of the language. Many of the common words of modern English, like home, stone, and meat are native, or Old English words. Most of irregular verbs in English derive from Old English(speak, swim, drive, ride, sing), as do most of the English shorter numerals (two, three, six, ten) and most of the pronouns (I, you, we, who).

Many old English words can be traced back to Indo-European, a prehistoric language that was the common ancestor of Greek and Latin as well. Others came into Old English as it was becoming a separate language.

(a) Indo-European Element: since English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European group of languages, the oldest words in English are of Indo-European origin. They form part of the basic word stock of all Indo-European languages. There are several semantic groups:

· -words expressing family relations: brother, daughter, father, mother, son;

· -names of parts of the human body: foot, eye, ear, nose, tongue;

· -names of trees, birds, animals: tree, birch, cow, wolf, cat;

· -names expressing basic actions: to come, to know, to sit, to work;

· -words expressing qualities: red, quick, right, glad, sad;

· -numerals: one, two, three, ten, hundred, etc.

There are many more words of Indo-European origin in the basic stock of the English vocabulary.

(b) Common Germanic words are not to be found in other Indo-European languages but the Germanic. They constitute a very large layer of the vocabulary, e.g.:

· -Nouns: hand, life, sea, ship, meal, winter, ground, coal, goat;

· -Adjectives: heavy, deep, free, broad, sharp, grey;

· -Verbs: to buy, to drink, to find, to forget, to go, to have, to live, to make;

· -Pronouns: all, each, he, self, such;

· -Adverbs: again, forward, near;

· -Prepositions: after, at, by, over, under, from, for.

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