CONCLUSION

 

Borrowings words from other languages is characteristic of English 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 also by their grammatical forms. It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

· French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%

· Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%

· Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English: 25%

· Greek: 5.32%

· No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%

· Derived from proper names: 3.28%

· All other languages contributed less than 1%

However, if the frequency of use of words is considered, words from Old and Middle English occupy the vast majority.

English often borrows words from the cultures and languages of the British Colonies. For example there are at least 20 words from Hindi, including syce/sais, dinghy, chutney, pundit, wallah, pajama/pyjamas, bungalow and jodhpur. Other examples include trek, aardvark, laager and veld from Afrikaans, shirang, amok (Malay) and sjambok (Malay via Afrikaans).

In sum, the English language contains a large number of Nahuatl loan words which entered the language through a process of secondary borrowing. I have documented the OED’s attestation of these words along two separate classifications (semantically and chronologically). In the Appendices I discuss some words which will have to be either confirmed or discounted as Nahuatl loans in future research, and I also include comprehensive coverage of an earlier survey by Watson (1938), who documented additional Nahuatl loan words in certain varieties of American English that have not been included in the OED. This primarily descriptive study leaves several important lines of investigation open for future work. First and foremost would be a more detailed study of the actual use (spoken or written) of individual words cited in this collection. It would be quite informative to investigate more thoroughly how individual Nahuatl words got incorporated into different languages (e.g. first Spanish, and then English and other European languages) through different borrowing contexts, and then to see how they may or may not have been maintained in spoken (and/or written) language. I have an impression that the vast majority of these words are not in general circulation among most speakers of English at this point in time, and the ones which are used the most frequently are probably no longer recognized as borrowings, either from Spanish or from Nahuatl (e.g. chocolate, coyote, tomato, etc.). Other terms circulate only in specialized discourses (e.g. Quetzalcoatl, teocalli, etc.). Future questions that should be addressed include: which of these vocabulary items are actually known, and to what group(s) of speakers? Which words are actually used, and by whom, where, when, and why? An additional line of investigation would pertain to the historiography of the Oxford English Dictionary itself, and the processes that led to the “canonization” of this particular set of terms to the exclusion of others. One contribution that I hope that this article will make is to encourage a more in-depth look at the pioneering work of Watson (1938), to see if some subset of his proposals for Nahuatl borrowings into regional variants of American English can be confirmed and possibly incorporated into future editions of the OED. To conclude, the history of the incorporation of these Nahuatl words into the English language is particularly rich, given the complexity of the historical circumstances involving differing geographical, temporal and sociopolitical contexts of colonialism, trade, and other inter-cultural contacts that led to centuries of borrowing a large number of secondary loan words, i.e. “borrowed borrowings

 

 

List of literature.

 

1. Carlson, David. "The Chronology of Lydgate's Chaucer References". TheChaucerReview, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 246-254. Accessed 6 January 2014.

2. The name "tales of Caunterbury" appears within the surviving texts of Chaucer's work.

3. Mabillard, Amanda. "Are Shakespeare's works written in Old English?." ShakespeareOnline. AccessedFebruary 19, 2014.

4. Burchfield, Robert W. (1987). "Ormulum". In Strayer, Joseph R. Dictionary of the Middle Ages 9. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 280, p. 280

5. Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe; chapter 1

6. McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, 2008, pp. 89–136.

7. Ward, AW; Waller, AR (1907–21). "The Cambridge History of English and American Literature". Bartleby. Retrieved Oct 4, 2011.

8. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, ye[2] retrieved February 1, 2009

9. "J", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989)

10. "J" and "jay", Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)

11. Holt, Robert, ed. (1878). The Ormulum: with the notes and glossary of Dr R. M. White. Twovols. Oxford: ClarendonPress. InternetArchive: Volume 1; Volume 2.

12. Utechin, Patricia (1990) [1980]. Epitaphs from Oxfordshire (2nd ed.). Oxford: Robert Dugdale. p. 39.

13. Gleason, Paul (2002). "Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, and the Redemption of America's Atomic Waste Land". Underwords. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin. Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. p. 131.

14. Brodie, Richard (2005). "John Gower's 'ConfessioAmantis' Modern English Version". "Prologue". RetrievedMarch 15, 2012.