Motives for word borrowing:
| 1. |
Lack of a native word |
| 2. |
A desire for a euphemistic term |
| 3. |
A desire for a prestigious form |
| 4. |
The wish to exclude the uninitiated |
| 5. |
The wish to avoid homonym clashes |
| 6. |
Other motives? |
Lack of a native word
In a situation where a language lacks a word for a new concept, two possibilities
are typically at hand: the formation of a new word
from native resources, or borrowing from another language. Unlike a language
like Icelandic, which has taken up very few borrowings, English has always
had its doors wide open to words from other languages.
A very early example is church: the Greek word kyriaké
'(house) of the Lord' was borrowed by the various Germanic and Slavic tribes
before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes went across to Britain (cf. German
Kirche, Russian cerkow'). The word was originally used about
a cultural phenomenon of southern Europe; by the time of St. Augustine's
mission to Kent in 597, the Saxons already had the word cyrice and
never borrowed the Latin counterpart ecclesia.
The Renaissance saw the need for a great number of new words to express
various cultural and scientific concepts. This need was chiefly filled
by borrowings from Latin and Greek (or the formation of new words based
on Latin and Greek morphemes): atmosphere, catastrophe, lexicon,
mathematics, politics, theory, thermometer,
etc.
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Euphemism
Euphemism is the use of an expression that is perceived as a less direct
way of expressing a concept that is regarded as painful or embarrassing,
such as death, sex, or bodily excretions.
Death and dying are, of course, concepts that are often expressed euphemistically
in modern society; cf. the following synonyms of die: pass away
(1806), pass on (1820), pass over (1909), be taken
(1920). As these examples show, euphemism can also be achieved without
recourse to borrowing. Leith's suggestion that the borrowing of the verb
die from Old Norse was similarly motivated by a wish for a euphemistic
alternative to Old English sweltan and steorfan seems little
plausible, however: I find it hard to believe that the Anglo-Saxons felt
the need for a less embarrassing way to refer to the process of dying.
It seems more plausible that terms for sex-related matters were replaced
by euphemistic expressions borrowed from Old French in the Middle English
period (especially since the surviving texts from that period were produced
under the auspices of an ascetic Church). At any rate, the Old English
noun hæmed was replaced in its various senses by words of
Old French origin: marriage; adultery, fornication.
Even though a foreign word was originally borrowed with a different
sense, it could later become used as a euphemistic alternative to an offensive
native word. Thus, defecate and expectorate came to be used
as euphemistic alternatives to shit and spit, respectively,
in the nineteenth century.
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Prestigious forms
Borrowing will easily take place from a language or dialect which is regarded
as prestigious, perhaps because it is used by a dominant social group (but
prestige is a complex notion, which we will come back to in lecture 9).
Prestige has traditionally been regarded as the main motive for the large-scale
borrowing from French in the Middle English period.
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Excluding the uninitiated
Powerful groups in society may rely on a borrowed terminology to maintain
their status by excluding the uninitiated masses. Usually quoted examples
are the medical and legal professions.
(In connection with coming changes in British legal terminology, The Guardian
actually made the following comment on 1 February 1999: "The lingua franca of
the law may be baffling to the lay person but that, surely, was
part of its charm and all of its function.")
The medical vocabulary of English is to a very great extent made up
of words of Latin and Greek origin. In this respect English differs from
Norwegian, where in many cases parallel native terms are available: thus
English appendicitis corresponds to blindtarmsbetennelse
in Norwegian, with the learned alternative appendisitt.
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Avoidance of homonymic clash
Homonyms are words (lexemes) with different meaning but identical form
(cf. grammar
lecture 4). If previously different words become homonyms as a result
of sound changes, and this homonymic clash is perceived as causing a communicative
problem, a way out of this situation is to borrow a word from another language
or dialect to replace one of the homonyms.
In late Old English, the pronouns he 'he', heo 'she',
hie 'they' tended to merge as 
or 
. As a way
of maintaining the number distinction among the third person personal
pronouns, the Old Norse pronoun 
eir
'they' was borrowed as 
.
The borrowing took place in the old Danelaw area and is first attested
in the Ormulum (c. 1160-1180).
But this led to a new homonymic clash: the Old English conjunct eah
'though' was in early Middle English pronounced .
The solution was again to borrow the corresponding Old Norse form, which
appears in the Ormulum as ohh
(which has yielded Modern English though). As the pronoun THEY
was borrowed into other Middle English dialects, the conjunct THOUGH
was always borrowed along with it.
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Other motives?
For most cases of borrowing from Old Norse none of the motives quoted above
would seem to apply. The reason for the borrowing in those cases is rather
to be found in the fact the the speakers of Old English and Old Norse lived
in close, everyday contact in the Danelaw, and that the languages were
so similar that words could, as it were, easily slip across the language
boundary without attracting much attention. Once borrowed, they did not
strike the language users as being outlandish in any way. Orm, in his 1160
homilies, claimed that the words brodd 'the shoot of a plant' and
blome 'flower' (both Old Norse borrowings) were "ennglissh".
Words which had the stem vowel /y/ in Old English regularly end up in
modern Standard English with the stem vowel /I/: fill,
hill, kiss, which, wish, and many more; this
is the typical development via an East Midland dialect in Middle English.
In a number of words, however, there has been a different development: instead
of the 'regular' forms *chirch, *critch, *mich, *shit,
*sich, *thrish we find church, crutch, much,
shut, such, thrush. These forms can be explained as
due to borrowing from the West Midland dialect area. It is more difficult
to find a motive for these borrowings.
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