Assimilation of borrowings

The term 'assimilation of borrowings' is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the English language and its semantic system.

According to the degree of assimilation all borrowed words can be divided into three groups:

1) completely assimilated borrowings;

2) partially assimilated borrowings;

3) unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms.

1. Completely assimilated borrowed words follow all morpholo­gical, phonetical and orthographic standards, take an active part in word-formation. The morphological structure and motivation of completely assimilated borrowings remain usually transparent, so that they are morphologically analyzable and therefore supply the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in series of borrowed words that contain them (e.g. the French suffixes - age, -ance and -ment).

They are found in all the layers of older borrowings, e. g. cheese (the first layer of Latin borrowings), husband (Scand),face (Fr), animal (Latin, borrowed during the revival of learning).

A loan word never brings into the receiving language the whole of its semantic structure if it is polysemantic in the original language (e.g., ‘sport’in Old French - ‘pleasures, making merry and entertainments in general’, now - outdoor games and exercise).

2. Partially assimilated borrowed words may be subdivided depending on the aspect that remains unaltered into:

a) borrowings not completely assimilated graphically (e.g., Fr. ballet, buffet;some may keep a diacritic mark: café, cliché;retained digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.): bouquet, brioche);

b) borrowings not completely assimilated phonetically (e.g., Fr. machine, cartoon, police(accent is on the final syllable), [3] — bourgeois, prestige, regime(stress + contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language));

c) borrowings not assimilated grammatically (e.g., Latin or Greek borrowings retain original plural forms: crisis - crises, phenomenon - phenomena;

d) borrowings not assimilated semantically because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come (e. g. sari, sombrero, shah, rajah, toreador, rickshaw(Chinese), etc.

3. Unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms. This group includes words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents, e.g. the Italian addio, ciao— 'good-bye'.

Etymological doublets are two or more words originating from the same etymological source, but differing in phonetic shape and meaning (e.g. the words ‘whole’(originally meant ‘healthy’, ‘free from disease’) and ‘hale’both come from OE ‘hal’: one by the normal development of OE ‘a’ into ‘o’, the other from a northern dialect in which this modification did not take place. Only the latter has servived in its original meaning.

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