Words of native Origin and Borrowings

Native words
A native word is a word which belongs to the original English stock as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. Native words are further subdivided into the words of the Indo-European stock and those of the Common Germanic origin.

Characteristic Features of the Native Vocabulary:
1. The words are monosyllabic: sun, wood, break.
2. They are polysemantic.
3. They are characterized by high frequency.
4. Native words are usually found in set-expressions.
5. Verbs with post-positions are usually native: to look for, to look after.
6. They are characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency.
7. If words begin with wh, wr, tw, dw, sw, sh. th; if at the end they have dge, tch,nd, ld; if the roots have ng, aw, ew, ee, oo they are native.

Borrowing words
Borrowing 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 characterisitic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

Borrowings can be classified according to different criteria:
a) according to the aspect which is borrowed,
b) according to the degree of assimilation,
c) according to the language from which the word was borrowed.

There are two causes of borrowing into English:
-historical
-social

Historically, on the one hand, English shares with West Germanic languages many common words and similar grammatical structures; on the other hand, more than half of the English vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been direct, but a great many came through French, some through other Romance languages, such as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Socially, as the world develops so does the English language. Especially in the twentieth century, owing to the rapid development of the modern mass media, the international and cultural exchange and information, a great number of borrowed words have come into English. They have become a component part of the English vocabulary to satisfy needs of society.

Borrowings enter the language into ways:
- through oral speech
- and through written speech.

Phonetic assimilation comprising changes in sound-form and stress is perhaps the most conspicuous.
Grammatical Assimilation. Usually as soon as words from other languages were introduced into English they lost their former grammatical categories and paradigms and acquired new grammatical categories and paradigms by analogy with other English words.
Lexical Assimilation. When a word is taken over into another language, its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great changes.