A language sandwich
Where does our vocabulary come from? How do word meanings change? How is our language really being used? Damp Squid: the English language laid bare , written by Jeremy Butterfield, is an entertaining book which explores all the key questions about the English language. Here are some short extracts from the book which discuss where words come from and how they are formed.
English has three main layers: at the bottom, chronologically,
Anglo-Saxon or Old English; in the middle, varieties of French;
as the top layer, Latin and Greek. These three ingredients are
still apparent in just about any stretch of text you care to look
at, as can be seen in the following extract from the first page
of The Lord of the Rings:
The Lord of the Rings: words from Old English, French, Latin
(Bilbo) was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years,
ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had
brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly
believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels
stuffed with treasure.
Roman type = Old English origin; bold = French origin; italic = Latin origin
As a result of these three key influences, English has hundreds of 'triplets': groups of three words, one from each ancestral strand, which describe related actions and concepts, but with rather different nuances. Three words in the Lord of the Rings passage illustrate this perfectly:
Old English |
Old French, Norman French |
Latin |
| to come back |
to return |
to regress |
| folk |
people |
population |
| weird |
strange |
peculiar |
Though very visible, these three strands do not explain where all the words of English came from. First, there is a Scandinavian ingredient, from the Vikings.
Slaughterous wolves:
Though the period of Viking incursions into Britain lasted only a little over two centuries, the mark of the feared Norsemen -
'slaughterous wolves' as they were called in a poem of the time - is still very evident today. Some of the words they brought were incorporated into late Old English: call, and fellow, for example; others, such as awkward and beaker, into Middle English. Some, such as freckle and gormless, bubbled under in dialects, sometimes for centuries, before entering mainstream English. There are estimated to be up to 900 words of Viking origin, and many of them are ones we would sorely miss.
Common Viking words in English
The body: ankle, calf, fang, freckle, gill, leg, scab, skin, wing, die
Eating and drinking: beaker, cake, egg, knife, steak, tang
Names for people: fellow, husband, lass, sister, swain, tyke
Fish and animals: bull, crake, filly, fry (fish), gelding, gosling, kid, reindeer, skate
Basic words: both, get, give, same, take, they, their, them, till, though, until, want
The figures below show the relative proportions of words from
the strands that we have been looking at, as reflected by the
words in a desk-size Oxford dictionary.
Old French 21%
Norse 2%
Latin 46%
Greek 18%
Old English 13%
The final element in the lexical make-up of English consists of
the thousands of 'loanwords' imported from over 350 languages.
New Words
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
As the rhyme has it, there are four things a bride needs to wear on her wedding day. They are also useful shorthands to describe how new words come about.
Something old
Existing words:
come together to create new ones
change meaning
are pruned back
Something new
New words:
cannibalize existing words
are named after people and places
use the first letters and syllables of other words
join up existing word parts in novel ways
Something borrowed
English absorbs words from other languages.
'Something blue' is also part of the story. Some words become 'blue' and taboo for social, political, or ethical reasons, and
alternatives have to be found, usually from the existing word-stock.
Damp Squid: the English language laid bare reveals many more fascinating facts about the English language. For more details and information on how to order, please click here.
18/11/08
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