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114PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES
BORROWING IN LANGUAGES AS AN IMPORTANT WAY OF DEVELOPING MODERN
LANGUAGE
Mitrofanova I.
Candidate of Sociological Sciences, Associate professor, Peoples Friendship University of Russia
ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЕ В ЯЗЫКАХ КАК ВАЖНЕЙШИЙ СПОСОБ РАЗВИТИЯ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ЯЗЫКА
Митрофанова И.И.
Кандидат социологических наук, доцент, Российский университет дружбы народов
Abstract
The article discusses the fact that borrowing becomes the result of contacts, relations between peoples and states. Borrowing increases the lexical richness of the language, serves as a source of new roots, word-building elements, terms, and is a consequence of the conditions of mankind's social life. Sound and formal uniformity seen within the limits of a particular language or dialect are due to the process of constant reciprocal borrowing by individuals from others.
Аннотация
В статье рассматривается вопрос о том, что заимствование становится результатом контактов, взаимоотношений народов, государств. Заимствование увеличивает лексическое богатство языка, служит источником новых корней, словообразовательных элементов, терминов и представляет собой следствие условий социальной жизни человечества. Звуковое и формальное однообразие, замеченное в пределах того или иного языка или говора, объясняется процессом постоянного взаимного заимствования одними индивидуумами у других.
Keywords: "borrowed words", "speech team", "language skills", "linguistic borrowing", "higher language", "low language", "language activities".
Ключевые слова: заимствованные слова, языковой коллектив, речевые навыки, языковое заимствование, «высший язык», «низший язык», языковая деятельность.
Borrowing is copying words or phrases from one language to another. The borrowed word itself is also called a borrowing. Borrowing in languages is one of the most important ways of the development of modern language. Language always responds flexibly to the needs of society. Borrowing becomes the result of contacts, relations between peoples and states.
A child learning to speak can acquire most of the language skills from some other person, from mother, from other speakers and learn some skills from them. It is at this time that the child learns the main elements of vocabulary and grammatical phenomena. Throughout the life, the speaker never stops adopting language skills of others, and these borrowings are very numerous and drawn them all sorts of sources. Some of them are parts of a wide chain of alignments that affect the entire language community as a whole. All the semantic changes on the analogy, phonetic matching will be violated as a result of transfer of linguistic forms from person to person or from one group to another. In fact, various phenomena in the language of any speaker date back to completely different people and communities. Borrowing increases the lexical richness of the language, serves as a source of new roots, word-building elements, terms, and is a consequence of the conditions of mankind's social life. The borrowing process lies at the heart of linguistic activity. Sound and formal uniformity seen within the limits of a particular language
or dialect are due to the process of constant reciprocal borrowing by individuals from others.
The assimilation of various phenomena that are different from the phenomena existing due to the main tradition is called linguistic borrowing. In the area of borrowings, we distinguish between dialect borrowings when the borrowed phenomena come from the same language area, and borrowings from the field of culture, when the borrowed phenomena come from another language. It is not always possible to establish a clear distinction between them, since there is no absolute distinction between the boundaries and borders of the dialects spoken. Each language community learns something from their neighbors. The objects created both by nature and industry, move from one team to another. Together with the objects and practices, it is also the linguistic forms that represent them which are often passed from nation to nation. In most cases, we are not able to accurately set the time of the actual introduction of innovations - the speaker himself can not be sure whether he had heard or used this or that foreign form in his own language before. If the borrowers are more or less familiar with the language from which the word was borrowed or if the borrowed words are plentiful, then the strange sounds acoustically not related to any of the borrowing language's phonemes, can survive in a more accurate transfer in violation of the phonetic system of the language.
The most reliable example in determining a borrowed word is its phonetic structure. The contradiction of sounds of speech to the known phonetic laws specific for a given language, usually shows the alien origin of the word. For example, the Russian word "boroda" ("beard")is borrowed from Old Slavonic (through the church-Slavic language), because the syllable "ra" (instead of the expected "oro", available in the original Russian word "beard") is contrary to the strict law of the so-called pleophony (same with the words "grad" -"gorod" ("city), "strazh" - "storozh" ("guard") etc.) Other criteria - semasiological (difference in meaning), morphological (difference in the formal sense) - are less reliable and may be used only when it is impossible to know the origin of the word in its phonetic composition. Thus, the sublime meaning in the sense of homo mulier close to the natural meaning of husband and wife, is perhaps borrowed from Latin by Church Slavonic, although the phonetic composition of these words is no different from natural. The foreign sounds borrowed in this way can fully gain a foothold in the language. After the phonetic substitution is realized, a deeper familiarity with a foreign language can lead to a new, more correct way of transferring foreign forms. In the cases when the factor of adaptation can be taken into account, the analysis of phonetic development of the borrowed forms often determines their phonetic form in the era of borrowing, and thereby determine the approximate date of different sound changes. The borrowing can be bookish (which is already at a higher degree of cultural development). With the help of the latter, borrowing of the elements that belong to the older stages of the same language is possible (the resurrection of archaisms, for example, in the poetic language: Richard Wagner in his music dramas, A. Tolstoi, and others.). In the vast majority of cases, the borrowing of foreign words is explained by cultural borrowing.
Lexical borrowings from the field of culture show what one people have learned from another. Recent borrowing from the French relate primarily to the field of women's clothing, cosmetics and luxury goods. Names of simpler foods "sausage", "chop", "chopped steak", "sauerkraut", "bagel" and some philosophical and scientific terms "spirit of the times", "wanderlust" came from German. Musical terms "piano", "Sonata", "virtuoso" were borrowed from Italian. From "Brahmin, pundit," "murderer, thief" came from Indian. Such borrowings may be distributed over a vast area, moving from one language to another with objects of trade. Such words as "sugar", "pepper", "coffee", "tea", "tobacco" have spread throughout the world.
Borrowings of language forms from the field of culture is a mutual process; it is only one-sided in the sense that one people can be more numerous than another. Thus, the Scandinavian languages contain a variety of commercial and naval terms from Low German, dating back to the period of the trading supremacy of Hanseatic cities in the late Middle Ages. Similarly, in the Russian language, there are many naval terms from Low German and Dutch. There is no doubt that the borrowing occurred on a large scale and in the prehistoric era. It may well be that some words taken for Indo-European, were taken from other languages. No matter
how weak the cultural development of Indo-Europeans can be, they still had to have trade and other relations with other nations, this fact can mean borrowing. Science is not yet able to determine such earliest borrowing, though something is likely to be disclosed in further joint work of archaeologists and linguists.
Despite such cases, it is possible to distinguish between normal borrowing and borrowing in bilingual conditions, which is observed in the cases when two languages are spoken in a geographically and politically unified team. This situation arises as a result of conquest, but sometimes, more rarely, as a result of a peaceful resettlement. These borrowings are one-sided: we distinguish the "high" or the ruling language, which is spoken by the conquerors, or any privileged group of people, and the "lower" language, which is spoken by the defeated people or ordinary immigrants. Words are mainly borrowed from the dominant language and often extend to the linguistic forms, not related to innovations in the field of culture. As for immigrants, they borrow a lot more words from the field of culture. The "top" language is spoken by the dominant and privileged groups, and a variety of means of pressure encourage the "lower" language speakers to use the language of the group. In most cases of close contact, the "lower" language is the language of the indigenous population, and the "higher" one - the language of the conquerors. The process of borrowing over time depends on several factors. Thus, if speakers of the "lower" language are in contact with the speakers of the same language on the unconquered territory, their language will change less rapidly. The less numerous the conquerors, the slower the pace of borrowing. Another replacing factor is the cultural superiority of the conquered people, real or defended by tradition. For example, in families of educated immigrants, the native language may be preserved for many generations, and only with a small admixture of a foreign language. In the immigrants of America, the withering away of the native language, as well as borrowing, proceeds at a rapid pace. If an immigrant is linguistically isolated, if his or her cultural level is low, if he or she enters into a marriage with a person who speaks another language, he or she may completely stop using his or her own language or even lose the ability to speak it intelligibly. The foreign language becomes his or her only language, though he or she may speak it very imperfectly; and it becomes the native language of his or her children.
In other cases the immigrant continues to speak his or her native language at home, this language remains the native language of his or her children, but at school age or earlier, the children stop using it and the foreign language becomes their only one. And although the foreign language spoken by immigrants' children preserves its well-known foreign flavor, they badly speak the language of parents or do not know it at all; bilin-gualism is rare. In the context of conquest, the process of withering away of language can take a long time. It can embrace two or more bilingual generations. Then, at some time, you may fund a generation that in adulthood no longer uses the "lower" language and sends the children one language - the "higher" one. However, it may also happen that the "lower" language stays, and
the language of the dominant group dies out. If the conquerors are few or especially if there are no women among them, such an outcome is quite likely. In cases where the conquerors continue speaking their own language for many generations, but are increasingly faced with the need to use the language of the conquered people, they simply turn into a bilingual ruling class. The loss of the less necessary "higher" language can happen very easily; that was the end of the Norman-French language in England. A clash of languages can occur in many different forms. All people can, after all, start speaking the "higher" language: for example Latin brought to Gaul at about the beginning of a new era the Roman conquerors, several centuries later ousted the Celtic language of Gauls. All the population can speak the "lower" language -the Norman French language that, penetrated to England as a result of the Norman Conquest (1066), was three hundred years later completely supplanted by the English language. In all cases, it is the "lower" language that mostly borrows from the "higher" one. If the "higher" language survives, it remains the way it used to be with the exception of some borrowings from the fields of culture, which it could borrow from any neighbor. For example, Roman languages contain only a few borrowings related to the field of culture, the languages that previously, before the Roman conquest, had dominated the area of their distribution. The presence of borrowed words in a wider semantic field than the sphere of innovations in the field of culture, allows us to discover the preserved "lower" language and it sheds light not only on the historical situation of that time, but also thanks to the testimony of the borrowed words and linguistic phenomena of a more ancient era . A lot of information dating back to more ancient periods of Germanic languages are drawn from the borrowed words in the languages of the peoples who once were under the domination of Germanic tribes. Repeated conquest can literally flood the borrowing language. It is said that in the basic vocabulary of the Albanian language includes only a few hundred search terms; all the other words are borrowed from the dominant languages - Latin, Greek, Roman, Slavic and Turkish. Gypsies in Europe speak the language of the Indo-Aryan family. It may seem that in different places of their stay they were sufficiently isolated to preserve their language, but the Romani language has always acted as a "lower" language, which has been powered by borrowings from other languages. All Romani dialects contain, in particular, borrowings from the Greek language. With the changing political and cultural conditions, those speaking a "lower" language can make an attempt to stop or even to eliminate borrowing. Thus, the Germans introduced a long and largely successful campaign against Latin-French bor-
rowing, and the Slavic peoples - against German borrowing. One should distinguished borrowings and foreign words. Borrowings (words, less often syntax and phraseological units) are adapted in the Russian language, the necessary semantic and phonetic changes take place. Adaptation under the influence of the Russian language is the main feature distinguishing borrowings from foreign languages. Foreign words retain traces of their foreign origin. Phonetic, spelling, grammar and semantic features may be such traces.
Thus, borrowing increases the lexical richness of the language, is a source of new roots, word-forming elements and terms, and is a consequence of social conditions of human life. The process of borrowing is already at the heart of linguistic activity. The main flow of borrowings in the narrow sense (i.e., foreign words) goes through spoken words of professional spheres and jargons of different social groups. By the nature and volume of borrowings in the language, one can track the path of the historical development of language, i.e., the ways of international travel, communications, scientific development and, as a consequence, crossing of the phraseology of one language with that of other. Monitoring the transition of phrases of a foreign language into another language helps to understand the history of the language, both literary and dialects.
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