Both a borrower and a lender be

I have written an article on word formation processes in the past and the topic has been always close to my heart. I recently tried to do a little research on borrowings and particularly English borrowings in the Polish language. Although I haven’t yet finished, here’s a few points I made so far.

Borrowings assimilate in new languages on phonological, graphic, morphological and semantic levels. The first question that came to mind was: Why is it that borrowings are mainly nouns, verbs to a lesser extent and relatively few adjectives, prepositions and other parts of speech? Is it because there are more nouns than other parts of speech in total? Or is it because we only borrow words we can't do without - the ones that are therefore essential and often arbitrary? We didn’t have, for instance, a word anywhere close to joystick in Polish so we borrowed the term from English. As I am wondering about it on Twitter, @talkclouds suggests:

The book I'm reading on vocabulary learning also says that nouns are easier to remember, too. Plus we import STUFF more. We don't import actions and ideas as much.

Manfred Gorlach asserts in A Dictionary of European Anglicisms: A Usage Dictionary of Anglicisms in Sixteen European Languages that modern borrowings from English aren’t assimilated into European languages on the morphological level. That certainly isn't true, not in Polish anyway. Practically all the nouns in Polish borrowed from English are assigned the grammatical gender and are declinated AND take Polish marker of plurality so... what on Earth do I get confused here? Take the aforementioned joystick. We have in Polish plural form from masculine joystick -  joysticki  and appropriate declinated forms: joysticka, joystickowi, joystickiem, joysticku. Gorlach’s book is available on Amazon for £33. Money well spent… I think not!

How baby words are made.

Modern English vocabulary is the result of the mixture of five major linguistic influences: 

1. Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

2. French (after 1066)

3. Norse (Vikings)

4. Latin and Greek (mostly from the late Middle Ages onwards)

5. Miscellaneous words borrowed from over 350 languages around the world

Additionally, nobody knows for sure how many new words appear in English each year. The only concrete figures are the words that dictionary makers add to the new editions of their dictionaries. (For example the 2007 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary added about 2,500 new words to the edition published five years previously). However, we must remember that there are words not recorded anywhere or those invented on the spur of the moment, never used again and simply forgotten. Some areas of human activity such as computing are rich sources of new words. Here I would like to share with you a rather witty term, one of my favourites in this field, 'cobwebsite' which describes a website that hasn't been updated for a long time. Other ones include 'data smog' - the overwhelming amount and excess of the information on the Internet and 'linkrot' - situation when links on a given website don't work or lead you nowhere. One of the least common processes of word formation in English is coinage.

These days we are all stressed and we often go into a rage over anything. While driving we are irritated by other motorists who deliberately slow us down, triggering road rage. Don't feel bad about yourself though - if you think motorists are bad this means you never walk anywhere - pavement rage is probably worse... We all hate trolley rage when we just can't get through to the shelf we need in a supermarket because everybody else seems to need exactly what we need too. Not to mention spam rage, phone rage or tube rage. The movie 'Falling down' springs to mind.

Contrastingly, borrowing is probably one of the most common sources of new words in English, that is the adoption of words from other languages - 'piano' is Italian, 'robot' is Czech and ''yoghurt' is Turkish. Me and my fellow Poles talk about 'sport', 'klub', 'pub' and many others. A special type of borrowing is calque - direct translation of the elements of a word. Here, the English word 'superman' is a loan translation of the German 'Uebermensch' - I hope you speak German and if you do please compare words 'Woklenkratzer' or 'Lehnwort' with their English versions...

The most common word - formation process is derivation. Affixes such as '-ful', '-less', '-ish', 'un-'. 'in-', 'mis-' etc are added to the end (suffixes) or beggining of words (prefixes) and change their meaning. Infixes are not normally to be found in English and as a name suggests it's an affix likely to be located in the middle of the word. The witty but rather vulgar 'Absofuckinglutely' might ring a bell. 'Fucking' in that case isn't strictly speaking an affix, I only just gave this example because I thought it was funny.

If you are to take only the beginning of one word and the ending of the other, then connect them and use as a word with a new meaning - this is called blending. Motor + Hotel = Motel. Breakfast + Lunch = Brunch. (By the way, not many of you might know that word brekfast means to break the fast... again - word formation. Crazy, isn't it?) If you feel like shortening a word and instead of saying 'advertisement' you go for 'ad' this means you are clipping words. This is exactly why we talk about 'bra', 'cab', 'flu', 'gym' and many others, not to mention names such as Sam, Al, Liz etc.

Now, 'donate' comes from 'donation' and is an effect of backformation, the slightly different type of reduction process. Other examples include: 'babysit' from 'babysitter' and 'opt' from 'option'.

Hypocorisms are those words with '-y' or '-ie' in the end such as 'barbie' for 'barbeque' and 'telly' for 'television' (I dislike that one as it sounds rather pretentious). This is especially typical for British and Australian English.

Some words are known as acronyms and consist of the initial letters from a sequence of words. CD is a 'compact disc'. We also have VCR, NASA, NATO, FBI, CIA and many others. I'm ashamed to admit but I tend to follow the crowd and overuse the word 'LOL'. If a noun comes to be used as a verb we talk about conversion.

'Paper', 'butter', 'bottle' and many others are nouns which can be used as verbs. "Have you buttered your toast yet?'.