Custom essays on Language across Time

Development of human society is the development of all its constituent cultures, and, accordingly, all languages. The cultures are influenced by the particular historical development and regardless of other cultures, and (very largely), in conjunction with them. Contacts take place in all spheres – politics, economics, arts, everyday life – and lead to significant changes in lifestyle, outlook, and, of course, in the language. Cultures mutually borrow the phenomena and concepts; languages are their designations. That is how an enrichment of cultures and languages of different nations happens.
The role of borrowings (loan-words) is not the same in different languages and depends on the specific historical conditions of development of each language. In English, the percentage of borrowing is much higher than in many other languages; so due to historical reasons, it happened to be very permeable. English more than any other language had an opportunity to borrow foreign words in a straight direct contact: first in the middle ages from foreign invaders on British Islands, and later in conditions of trade expansion and colonization activity of British themselves. It is known that the number of native words in the English dictionary is only about 30% (Mencken 2010). This fact gave many researchers reason to exaggerate the importance of borrowing and assume English is not Germanic, and Romance-Germanic language, emphasize the mixed nature of the English language as its most important feature, and sometimes even reduce the whole of English lexicology to the problem of borrowing.
Some scientists (eg. Gunnel Tottie) even think that in the developed language the vocabulary is borrowed so easily, that happen to be uncharacteristic for a specific language. In fact, borrowing is one of the important ways to enrich the vocabulary, but is not the only one or the most important (Tottie 2002).
The English language is full of words borrowed from Old French, Latin, Greek, Scandinavian and other languages. Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs are all natively German. Trade and Christianization brought such borrowings from Latin, as the wine, pepper, school, devil, and priest. In the sixteenth century, the language has been enriched with Latin terminology – concept, access, commission, complain, etc.
Scandinavian Viking raids from the end of the eighth century contributed to the fact that the English language has got the Danish vocabulary. These are the words: they, take, cut, get, ugly, husband, shirt, whole, wrong, leg (Bjorkman 2008).
The largest group of borrowings in the English language is from Old French. The year of 1066 is known as the year of the conquest of England by the Normans. It was they who brought the French language to the islands. It is believed that these borrowings in the English language make a quarter of all the most used words. Here are examples of French borrowings in English: entrance, goddess, admirable, flexible, difficult, disappointment, movement, solitude, loneliness, court, government, battle, city and many others.
The English language contains about 820 words of German origin or scientific and technical terms, created in Germany from classical roots.
So, there are a significant number of words in English vocabulary that were borrowed from German. However, the actual German word units included in the English vocabulary are not so many. The fact is that a very large number of words borrowed from the German language and related to the field of science are the formations with Latin and Greek roots, so, in fact, they are international words, even though they were borrowed from German sources.
The borrowings from German are usually the words expressing the concept of socio-political and philosophical nature. Most of them were formed into English in the translated form; in the form of tracing paper. Tracing a number of phrases and compound words of German language was made easier because of the close relationship between German and English.