A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

DISCOURSE AND VARLATION 133
Today, in addition to questionnaire techniques, fieldwork, and the
compilation of linguistic atlases, dialectologists have at their disposal a wide
array of tools, including computer programs that allow them to analyze large
amounts of data quickly and to produce linguistic maps with a great degree of
accuracy.
BORROWING
To conclude the discussion on variation, a few comments on the notion
borrowing are in order. Simply put, this is the adoption of words from another
language. On almost every page of a dictionary of the English language one
can find evidence of borrowing. Indeed, if one were to remove all the words
borrowed from Latin and its descendants (Italian, French, Spanish, etc.) from
the English lexicon everyday speech would become rather impoverished. One
cannot handle an object, talk about some abstract concept, or praise the
personality of another person without recourse to some Latin word or
expression: e.g., compact discs trace their etymological origin to the Latin
word discus (itself derived from the Greek diskos); abstract ideas expressed
by nouns ending in -tion (attention, education, nation, etc.) have their roots in
the Latin lexicon, as do most of the nouns ending in -ty (mordity, sobriety,
triviality, etc.), and the list could go on and on. How did this come about? And
why did it?
About 1,500 years ago three closely related tribes (the Angles, the Saxons,
and the Jutes) lived beside each other on the north shore of what is now
northern Germany and southern Denmark. They spoke a language that was
similar to the West German dialects. Known as “Old English,” it allowed the
tribes to establish cultural autonomy from their Germanic ancestry. Old English
had inflections that resemble those of modern German, and it formed the new
words it needed largely by rearranging and recombining those present in its
lexical stock. It borrowed infrequently from other languages.
However, the situation changed drastically after the invasion and conquest
of England by the Normans from northwestern France in 1066. Although they
were originally of Viking extraction, by the middle of the eleventh century the
Normans had adopted French as their language. Naturally they imposed their
French-speaking ways upon the Anglo-Saxons. As a consequence, English
vocabulary usage became saturated with Latin-based words, which have
survived in common speech to this day. Their French origin is no longer