Assimilation of borrowings. Types of assimilation
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 wordsfollow all morphological, phonetical and orthographic standards. They 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).
Borrowings properare words taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.
Completely assimilated words are found in all the layers of older borrowings, e.g. cheese (the word of the first layer of Latin borrowings), husband (Scand), face (Fr), animal (the Latin word borrowed during the revival of learning).
It is important to mention that a loan word never brings into the receiving language the whole of its semantic structure if it is polysemantic in the original language. And even the borrowed variants may change and become specialized in the new system. For example, the word sport had a much wider scope in Old French denoting pleasures, making merry and entertainments in general. Being borrowed into Middle English in this character it gradually acquired the meaning of outdoor games and exercise.
2.Partially assimilated borrowed wordsmay be subdivided depending on the aspect that remains unaltered into:
a) borrowings not completely assimilated graphically. These are, for instance, words borrowed from French in which the final consonant is not pronounced: ballet, buffet. Some may keep a diacritic mark: cafe, cliche. Specifically French digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.) may be retained in spelling: bouquet, brioche;
b) borrowings not completely assimilated phonetically. For example, some of French borrowings keep the accent on the final syllable: machine, cartoon, police. Others, alongside the peculiarities in stress, contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language and do not occur in the native words, e.g. [3] — bourgeois, prestige, regime;
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c) borrowings not assimilated grammatically. For example, nouns borrowed from Latin or Greek have kept their original plural forms: crisis :: crises, phenomenon :: phenomena. Some of these also have English plural forms, but in that case there may be a difference in lexical meaning, as in indices ('an alphabetical list of names, subjects, etc. at the back of a book, with the numbers of the pages where they can be found') :: indexes ('a standard by which the level of something can be judged or measured');
d) borrowings not assimilated semantically because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come. They may denote foreign clothing (e.g. sari, sombrero); foreign titles and professions (e.g. shah, rajah, toreador); foreign vehicles (e.g. rickshaw (Chinese); foreign food and drinks (e.g. pilau (Persian), sherbet (Arabian)); etc.3.
3. Unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms. The third group is not universally accepted, as it may be argued that words not changed at all cannot form a part of the English vocabulary as they occur in speech only, but do not enter the language. 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'.
The third group is not universally accepted, as it may be argued that words not changed at all cannot form a part of the English vocabulary as they occur in speech only, but do not enter the language.
English word structure.
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