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Borrowing Languages: The Origins of Modern English
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Robert P. StockwellDonka Minkova |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 From "cookie" to "virus", many of the words that have passed into everyday English usage are actually borrowed from other languages. The rise of literacy that followed the introduction of printing to England in the fifteenth century is one reason why this has happened. But that is just one of many steps to modern English. In this extract from their book English Words: History and Structure, Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova look at some of the cultural routes through which English as we know it was born. |
 he linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon. |
The end-point of Early Middle English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first was the appearance of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes by Samuel Johnson in 1755. That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicographical research. It was the first dictionary to use quotations extensively, and it contributed more than any other eighteenth-century work to the establishment of spelling standards. Another demarcation point of immense cultural and social significance is the American Revolution of 1776, when along with their political independence Americans began to develop more linguistic autonomy relative to British English. Enclosed within these four dates 1476/1492 at one end, and 1755/1776 at the other, are the three centuries that comprise Early Modern English. |
The Renaissance
The Early Modern linguistic period, roughly 1476-1776, does not overlap completely with the usual chronological boundaries of the Renaissance. Most histories identify the Renaissance with the time prior to the revolutionary events of the middle of the seventeenth century: the English Civil War of the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The broader time-span for Early Modern English is justified for two reasons. First, the cultural aftermath of the Renaissance continued beyond the political events in the seventeenth century. The revival of classical learning had a powerful and permanent effect on the intellectual life of the following century. Second, even at that highly literate stage in the history of the language, recorded "first" entries of new words in the language can be mistaken by one or two generations. Since the focus in this book is on "words," we will ignore the time differences and will use Renaissance and Early Modern English as loosely synonymous terms. |
The main cultural difference between Middle and Early Modern English, stated in the most general terms, is in the number of people who had access to books and could read. Heightened literacy means wider exposure to new texts and new words; the more people read, the smoother the channels for the adoption of new words. Living in highly literate societies, we may find it shocking that reading was not common before the end of the fifteenth century. Medieval peasants were almost all illiterate, and most of the nobility were able to read only with considerable effort, if at all. Although literacy was highly respected and could ensure one a privileged place in society, reading and writing were skills expected only from the clergy and specially trained copyists known as scriveners. After 1476 the reading scene began to change dramatically. More than 20,000 titles, several million individual copies of books or pamphlets, were printed in the fifty-to-sixty years after Caxton set up the first printing press in London (see A.C. Baugh and T. Cable, A History of the English Language, 4th edn, 1993, p. 195). Books became part of everyday middle-class life. Easy access to printed materials brought about reforms of the educational system, and within three generations the inhabitants of England, the lower classes as well as the nobility, went from 2 percent literacy to as high as 50 percent or even 60 percent. Virtually all middle- and upper-class males learned to read. Women of the aristocracy were generally literate also, but it was a skill not taught to most females until the Industrial Revolution about 200 years later. |
The rise of literacy in Early Modern English was accompanied by a rapid expansion of the lexicon. According to one estimate based on counting entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, as many as 4,500 new words were recorded in English during each decade between 1500 and 1700 (see Charles Barber, Early Modern English, 1997, p. 220). Two-thirds of these words were creations based on already existing roots and affixes (roughly, word endings or beginnings), but an impressive one-third were straight borrowings. Eliminating new words of unknown origin, and words not recorded after 1700 (one-third of the entries), English adopted for permanent use over 20,000 borrowings in two centuries. In Middle English the corresponding estimate for double that time is about 7,500 surviving borrowings; the different numbers are due to the availability of books and the popularization of literacy and education in Early Modern English. New intellectual activities, the rediscovery and reappraisal of the ancient philosophical, religious, and literary masterpieces went hand in hand with the realization that like Greek and Latin, English should be capable of expressing the full range of abstract ideas and subtle emotions conveyed in the classical writings. Vocabulary enrichment was one of the consequences of the unparalleled interest in the classical heritage; the Renaissance was not only a time of re-birth, but also a time of growth and expansion. |
The word Renaissance itself expresses the idea of looking back and looking forward at the same time. Its first element, re- means "again," or "backwards from a certain point," and nais- "be born" is a form that developed in French from the Latin root nasc- still found in words like nascent, native, nation. What may come as a surprise is that Renaissance is not a word that speakers of Early Modern English would have recognized. The word was borrowed from French in the eighteenth century in the strictly religious sense of "re-birth," and it was only later, since about the 1840s, that Renaissance developed its present-day cultural and historical associations. |
Vocabulary enrichment
The great intellectual movement of reinvention and reinterpretation of the classical models began in Italy during the early Middle Ages, spread in Europe, and reached England during the fifteenth century. From that time on, the importance of French loans decreased, while English turned increasingly towards Latin and Greek for new learned words. Scholarly and everyday words continued to be borrowed from French in the sixteenth century: fragrant (1500), elegance (1510), baton (1520), accent, adverb (1530), amplitude (1540), cassock (1550), chamois (1560), demolish (1570), pounce (1580), admire (1590), avenue (1600), yet the Chronological English Dictionary (ed. Finkenstaedt, Leisi and Wolff, 1970), from which these dates are taken, shows that as the century advances, the share of words identified as French goes down at the expense of words from Latin and Greek. |
During the Renaissance proficiency in Latin and Greek became equivalent to being educated. Much of the scholarly work and academic writing was conducted in Latin. To a well-educated Renaissance person Latin was like a second language; it was taught, read, and used for learned discourse. Much energy and enthusiasm went into translating the classics into English. The translators often found it easier to introduce a new word for an unfamiliar notion than to worry about coining an English equivalent and risk being misunderstood. An interesting example of how widespread this practice was comes from a count of the Latin innovations in a c.1485 translation by John Skelton, a prominent poet and writer. In turning The History of the World by Diodorus Siculus into English, Skelton introduced more than 800 Latin words new for the language, many of which are recorded by the OED as later borrowings (see A.C. Baugh and T. Cable, A History of the English Language, 4th edn, 1993, p. 210, fn.1). |
Learned words make up the largest portion of the new Latin vocabulary. From the fields of classical civilization, philosophy, religion, and education, Early Modern English added words such as: alumnus, arena, contend, curriculum, elect, exclusive, imitate, insidious, investigate, relate, sporadic, transcendental. Among the loanwords from the fields of mathematics and geometry, botany, biology, geography, medicine are: abdomen, antenna, calculus, cerebellum, codex, commensurable, compute, evaporate, lacuna, larva, radius, recipe, species. Along with these, a substantial number of everyday words were also adopted; they probably started out as specialized words, but quickly became part of the common vocabulary: frequency, parental, plus, invitation, susceptible, offensive, virus. An important aspect of the process of borrowing during these two centuries was the naturalization of a great many affixes from Latin: -ence, -ancy, -ency < Latin -entia, -antia, -y; Latin -ius, -ia, -ium, -ous, and Latin -os, -us, -ate were borrowed unchanged. Borrowed prefixes such as ante-, post-, sub-, super- became part of the productive morphology of English (i.e. they are still used to make new words). |
Classical Greek was another source of learned words during the Early Modern English period, though the path of entry of Greek words into English is often indirect. The ancient Romans knew and admired the Hellenic heritage; the vocabulary of Latin included many learned Greek words. Similarly, French had adopted many Greek words, either through Latin, or directly. The Greek words we use today are therefore as likely to have come into English through Latin and French, as they are through direct borrowing. Greek words which came through Latin, and possibly through French, are words such as atheism, atmosphere, chaos, dogma, economy, ecstasy, drama, irony, pneumonia, scheme, syllable. Direct borrowings from Greek are asterisk, catastrophe, crypt, criterion, dialysis, lexicon, polyglot, rhythm, syllabus. In some cases such as epicenter, chromatic, the Greek first elements of the words: epi- "on, upon," chromat-, combine with the Latin elements centre < Old French centre, Latin centrum, -ic < Old French -ique, Latin -icus. |
The adoption and assimilation of the hundreds of new words from the classical languages are not easy to trace. The ultimate sources can be obscured by intermediate borrowings and changes: Latin borrowed very freely from Greek, and it is often hard to distinguish between words borrowed directly from Latin, and words borrowed from Latin through French. Nevertheless, it is beyond doubt that during Early Middle English three or four times more words were borrowed from an immediate classical source through reading and translating classical texts than words coming directly from French. |
Other European languages and the New World.
The Renaissance spirit of intellectual renewal and discovery manifested itself in adventurous travel and heightened political, economic, and cultural interest in other countries and peoples. The conditions for the adoption of words from languages other than French and the classical tongues were good. For the first time in the history of the language, very many speakers of English were exposed to the customs and achievements of other Europeans. More and more members of the rising English merchant class maintained active ties with their European partners in travel and navigation, manufacture and commerce. Compared to classical borrowings, the volume of Early Modern English borrowings from other European or non-European languages is not overwhelming, but they set a trend that has been steady and increasing to this day: the trend to welcome words not just from the highly prestigious languages of the past, but from any other contemporary language. |
Along with French, Italian was the source of many borrowed words. During the first two centuries of the period the words borrowed from Italian were distributed evenly between words having to do with everyday life, military activities, architecture, and the arts. From that period we have inherited artichoke (1531), gondola (1549), squadron (1562), stanza (1588), fresco (1598), bazaar (1599), balcony (1619), opera (1644), vermicelli (1669), rotunda (1687). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Italian music and especially Italian opera became very fashionable in England, and with that came a new wave of Italian loanwords. Indeed, there was a real explosion of new musical words in English. Here is a small selection of some of these words with their dates of entry (all dates from the Chronological English Dictionary): |
The addition of the Italian musical terms to English illustrates well the importance of innovation, leadership, and prestige to the composition of the vocabulary. During the eighteenth century it became impossible to speak about western music in English without using an Italian word. At the end of the twentieth century it is probably impossible to speak about computers in any language without using some English words.
During the Renaissance and after there were strong commercial and cultural ties between Britain and the Low Countries. Early loans from Dutch into English are words like foist, v. (1545), pickle, v. (1552), yacht (1557), rant, v. (1598), knapsack (1603), trigger (1621), drill, v. (1622), smuggle, v. (1687). These are not learned or specialized words; the same tendency for borrowing popular words from Dutch continued in the eighteenth century: |
There is an interesting difference between Dutch and the Italian borrowings. The Italian words, in addition to being more specialized, are all nouns, while the words borrowed from a related Germanic language, Dutch, are a fair blend of verbs and nouns. Clearly, Dutch words were adopted through direct contacts between people speaking English and Dutch, while the Italian terms must have been transmitted mostly on paper. The structural closeness between Dutch and English probably allowed English speakers to produce sentences mixing the two languages, where the foreign item could either point to new objects (nouns), or also describe new types of action (verbs).
Spanish and Portuguese borrowings also reflect the cultural traditions and accomplishments and the naval and military exploits of the countries of origin. Spain and Portugal led Europe in the colonization of the New World, and some of the words borrowed from Spanish had been borrowed into Spanish from American Indian languages. Early borrowings from Spanish include guava (1555), hammock (1555), negro (1555), potato (1565), mestizo (1588), buoy (1596), cargo (1602), masquerade (1654), siesta (1655). Some eighteenth-century loans from these languages are: |
Compiling statistics about the exact sources of the new words in Early Modern English is hard because of uncertainties surrounding their etymologies. Nevertheless, an approximate picture of how the vocabulary changed is useful. A count of the new loanwords between 1500 and 1700 in a sample of 1848 words of "reasonably certain etymology" in the OED shows that the sources break up as follows (from Barber, Early Modern English, p. 221). |
Latin was by far the most important donor of new words during the first two centuries of Early Modern English. Closer to the end of the eighteenth century, the balance changed in favor of the living languages of travel and commerce. Modern English continues to coin new terms using Latin and Greek roots. The trend which started with the Renaissance, and which was so prominent during the eighteenth century, is also with us: for genuinely new words covering unfamiliar geographical areas, customs, and civilizations, English turns to the living modern languages. |
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