Capturing the Zeitgeist Native German Loanwords in ... - Skemman

5 Þorsteinn Hjaltason
were more common, and the origin of many of them remains obscure to most speakers.
This goes for Old English godspell ‘gospel’ (literally ‘good news’) which was a direct
translation from Latin evangelium. Sometimes, the calques did not survive and the
Fremdwort, from which the calque derived, became the customary word. An example is
Latin unicornis 'unicorn' (literally 'having a single horn') which was translated in Old
English as anhorn which was replaced later with the Latin word (Jackson and Zé
Amvela 29). But sometimes there are double forms: the loanword accepted by the
speakers (doppelgänger) and the loan translation which shows the full integration of the
word (double-ganger) (Stanforth 34).
Cannon suggests the term loanblend for partial adaptations or translations which
include words like alpenglow 'a reddish glow observable near sunset or sunrise on an
Alpine summit' where Alpen- is German and glow is English (GLIE 121).
3.2 The origin of English vocabulary
The terms vocabulary, lexis and lexicon are often used synonymous, and I will
follow that convention in this paper. Whatever term is used, it refers “to the total stock
of words in a language” (Jackson and Zé Amvela 14).
What characterises the English language compared to many other languages of the
world, is its rich vocabulary. According to Minkova and Stockwell, the number of
lemmata (entries) in the "unabridged" dictionaries range between 300,000 and 450,000
(462). The most comprehensive English dictionary, the online edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary for example counts some 600,000 words (OED). Jackson and Zé
Amvela point out that the combined lexicon of both dictionaries might be more than
750,000 (54).
The descendants of the Anglo Saxon words build the native English vocabulary.
These include many common nouns (hill, land, sheep), adjectives (black, dark, good)
and verbs (become, do, eat) (Jackson and Zé Amvela 37).
The English vocabulary has changed dramatically since the Anglo-Saxon period.
Jackson and Zé Amvela observe that the nature of English vocabulary is "very
cosmopolitan" (54). Even though the most common words are genuine Anglo-Saxon
(descendants of old English), the English language has borrowed words from over 350
different languages (Crystal 126). The most influential languages are Latin and French 9 ,
9 According to van Gelderen, about the half comes from French and Latin (3), which is the reason,
English is sometimes labelled a Germanic-Romanic fusion language (Stanforth 36).