THE EARLY 20 CENTURY ENGLISH BORROWABILITY FROM THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article focuses on a lexicographic investigation of foreign words with special focus on the borrowings from the Romance languages other than French in the English language in the early 20 century (E20). Language distribution of the research proved that the Romance languages donated significant vocabulary into English in E20. Historical background was studied for better understanding of the respective cultural standards of the analyzed languages and the effect of their lexical influence. The article proposes the qualitative and quantitative interpretation of Latin, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words: in the language distribution 59,4% % of foreign words were borrowed from these languages. It was proved that words from different semantic domains differ in their borrowability: Latin as the important supplier of vocabulary into English throughout its history (medicine 17,8%, literature 14,2%, law terminology 14,2%, educational terms 7,1%, theology 3,5% etc.); Italian (food and drink 28,6%, art, painting literature terms 18,5%, musical vocabulary 14,8%); Spanish (cultural peculiarities 40%, food items 20%), Portuguese (dance names, clothes items). Differentiation into word classes of borrowed words (other than French) was given and it has been found out that nouns are more borrowable than other parts of speech in all described languages. Morphological characteristics of Italian noun-forming suffixes was given: 59% root nouns, nouns with the most common diminutive suffix -ino/ine/ini – 13,6%, popular diminutive suffix -etto/etta, often used with affectionate overtones – 9%, -ella – 9%, nouns with augmentatives -one/ona – 4,5%, etc. The author hopes that the presented classification of borrowed Italic vocabulary of E20 performed on the basis of lexicographic investigation is undoubtedly a promising field of research. The results of this study are of direct practical relevance.