Borrowings in NE

In addition to the three main sources — Greek, Latin and French, English speakers of the NE period borrowed freely from many other Ls. It has been estimated that even in the 17th c. the English vocabulary contained words derived from no less than fifty foreign tongues. The main contributors to the vocabulary were Italian, Dutch, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Russian. A number of words were adopted from Ls of other countries and continents, which came into contact with English: Persian, Chinese, Hungarian, Turkish, Malayan, Polynesian, the native Ls of India and America.

Borrowings from Germanic Ls are of special interest as English is a Germanic L too. The influence of Scandinavian in Early ME has certainly remained unsurpassed and the unique conditions of close L contacts were never repeated. By the 15th— 16th c. the Germanic Ls had driven far apart;

Dutch made abundant contribution to English, particularly in the 15th and 16th c, when commercial relations between England and the Netherlands were at their peak. They specialised in wool weaving and brewing, which is reflected in the Dutch loan-words: pack, scour, spool, stripe (terms of weaving); hops, tub, scum. Extensive borrowing is found in nautical terminology: bowline, buoy, cruise, deck, dock, freight, keel, skipper. The flourishing of art in the Netherlands accounts for some Dutch loan-words relating to art: easel, landscape, sketch.

The earliest Russian loan-words entered the English L as far back as the I6th c, when the English trade company (the Moskovy Company) established the first trade relations with Russia. English borrowings adopted from the 16th till the 19th c. indicate articles of trade and specific features of life in Russia, observed by the English:, beluga, intelligentsia, muzhik, rouble, samovar, troika, tsar, vodka.

The loan-words adopted after 1917 reflect the new social relations and political institutions in the USSR: bolshevik, Komsomol, Soviet. Some of the new words are translation-loans: collective farm, Five-Year-Plan, wall newspaper.