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

6 Þorsteinn Hjaltason
followed by Greek and Italian (Crystal 60). Viking rule from 787 until 1066, also left a
lasting impact on the vocabulary with its Old Norse vocabulary like landing, score,
beck, fellow, take, give, both, get, skirt and sky (Crystal 25, Jackson and Zé Amvela 43).
Greek, as a classical language, has been the source of numerous technical terms;
regardless of whether they have entered the language directly or through Latin or
French: pathos, telegram, xylophone. Many Greek loans are old and were borrowed into
Old English, e.g. church and priest (Jackson and Zé Amvela 44). Finally, one might
mention Dutch/Low German 10 borrowings (cruise, deck and skipper), Arabic loans
borrowed mainly during the Middle English period (cotton, syrup, alcohol and algebra)
and many others (Jackson and Zé Amvela 47-48). 11
However, when the frequency of words is considered, the situation looks completely
different. Minkova and Stockwell note that the 100 most frequent words taken from the
British National Corpus (BNC) 12 are almost exclusively of Germanic origin. Only three
(very, people and really) of the most frequent words are not Germanic (465).
Furthermore, "up to 83 percent" of the 1,000 most frequent words "are descendants
of Old English words" (Minkova and Stockwell 466). These most frequent words are so
called core words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns,
quantifiers, determiners) which belong to the closed class words, i.e. words which are
normally non-productive in word formation (Jackson and Zé Amvela 21). 13
English is still borrowing, even though the frequency of borrowing has reduced in
recent times (Jackson and Zé Amvela 50). Cannon has presented a study of more than
thousand recent loanwords from 84 languages and not surprisingly, French is the
biggest donor with about 25% share. According to Cannon, 6% are from German and
Greek each, being in 6 th and 7 th place (qtd. in Jackson and Zé Amvela 50). 14
10 th th
Not to be confused with or equated with High German. During the 6 and 7 century the so called
Second Sound Shift divided the German language into High German in the south and Low German in
the north. The border goes approximately after a line passing through Cologne and Berlin. The main
characteristics of this sound shift are for example: t > ss (Old Saxon etan vs. OHG essan 'eat') and p > f
(Old Saxon skip vs. OHG skif 'ship') (Braune and Ebbinghaus 81, 86).
11
See Jackson and Zé Amvela (38-50) for a good overview over loanwords in English. See also Crystal
(2003), van Gelderen (2006) and Hughes (2000).
12
See chapter five for explanation of this corpus.
13
See Márquez's (700) discussion about the difficulty of defining a core vocabulary.
14
See also Best (68) for a discussion about ranking the influence of German on English. According to
him, German is only in place 13 (ibid.).