s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Kamila Biniek
In the ensuing sections, the descriptive terms, material data and investigative
methods will be briefly explained and presented. Finally, the entries which
have been considered as disputable in origin will be analyzed with respect to
their etymology on the basis of selected dictionaries.
2. Terminology
The term borrowing can be understood as Tadeusz Piotrowski (2008: 1) has
noticed in various ways, both as a process of transferring certain features from
one language to another, as well as products of these processes. In the following
study, reference is made mainly to borrowings, which are understood as products.
The language which acquires the transferred feature is referred to as the
recipient language, whereas the language, from which the lexical item is taken,
is called the source language. A word that serves as a model for the loanword is
a source word. If the transfer concerns a word, then it is referred to, for example
by Martin Haspelmath (2003: 4), as a loanword, synonymously with a borrowing.
In this paper, loanwords have been specified in a broad sense, as a general
term for both loanwords, which are in some way assimilated in the recipient
language, as well as these which are used in their original, non-assimilated
form. Borrowings from English are called Anglicisms. The qualification of
a word to the class of Anglicisms is done on the basis of qualifications used by
the authors of analyzed dictionaries. These were their arbitrary decisions based
on their knowledge of the origin of words, accepted methodology and etymological
work.
The definition of the field of etymology contained in the contemporary
Handbook of Linguistics reads that:
The field of etymology studies the origin and the earliest meaning of semantic units, i.e.,
morphemes, words, and phrases. The source (or to use the Greek term, etymon) is the word
at the time and in the language in which it emerged, i.e., when and where we can break it
down into its constituent parts, understand its formation and the reasons that led to the
emergence of its earliest meaning, as well as understand its semantic motivation (Strazny
2005: 305).
In practical lexicographical work, etymology is often understood as the
source language of a given loanword, included as a specific label in the entry.
Lexicographers creating general dictionaries of Polish language or, popular in
Poland, dictionaries of foreign words and phrases, face the fact that words are
often borrowed through other languages. A lexicographer has to decide which
source language, if not any, he wants to show in the entry, on the basis of the
available linguistic information. Most authors take the lexical approach towards
the etymology of borrowings. According to this approach, discussed among the