Influence of Borrowings

The role of borrowings was so great that they exerted much influence on the development of English and brought about different changes or innovations practically on all the levels of the language system. The influence of borrowings on the phonetic structure resulted in:

1.the appearance of words of new phonetic structure with strange sounds or familiar sounds in unusual positions, psychology. 2.the appearance of a new diphthong |oi| which came with such French words as point, joint. 3.the reappearance of the initial |sk| mostly due to Scandinavian borrowings.4. the appearance of the affricate дж at the beginning of words jungle, journey, gesture.

The influence on the word-structure and the system of word-building resulted in:

1.the appearance of a number of new structural types in w hich some highly-productive borrowed affixes (e.g. re-, inter-, -er, -ism) can combine with native and borrowed bases. 2.the ousting of native affixes by borrowed ones, e.g. the prefix pre- has replaced the native prefix fore.3 the appearance of a great number of words with bound mor­phemes.

The influence on the semantic structure resulted in: 1. the differentiation of borrowed words and synonymous native words in meaning and use: feed (native) — nourish (L); 2. the narrowing of meaning of native words due to the differentiation of synonyms. stool of native origin in Old English denoted ‘any article of furniture designed for sitting on. Under the influence of the French came to be used as chair.

The influence on the lexical territorial divergence resulted in:

1.the intensification of the difference between the word-stock of the literary national language and dialects owing to the borrowing of words into the literary national language which are not found in the dialects, and vice versa; 2. the enlargement of the word-stock of different dialects and national variants of English. Irish English has the following words of Celtic origin: shamrock — трилистник, dun — холм, colleen — девушка.