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Profit and loss






[…]...it was emphasized that all words of foreign ori­gin were to be regarded as loans, no matter how well they might be established in the language, but now that we are considering the question from the point of view of im­provement of the language, and as the question of the type of word will arise, and the difference between native and foreign words, we should bear in mind that the earliest Latin, Scandinavian, and French words have been so well assimilated that they seem to be almost as English as the native words — for the ordinary man there is a great deal of difference between such words as mile, ounce, law, face, and beef on the one hand, and hypochondriac, orthodontics, and schizophrenia on the other — and often the earty, loans are as short, expressive, and convenient as the native, words. There is, then, a difference between the two types of loan-words, and the position of the former group lies perhaps midway between that of the original native word and the easily-recognized loan-word of later times, so that there is perhaps not the wide gulf between native word and loan-word, the hard and fast division into two sharply-differentiated types, that might be expected. We have indeed, in the ultimate analysis, native words and bor­rowed words, but it would seem that, apart from actual ori­gin, there is a good deal in common between some of the loan-words and our native words. This has been recog­nized from the very beginning of the purist reaction against loan-words, for very rarely has there been objection raised to these earlier, well-assimilated loan-words, especially from Scandinavian and French, but only to the later, longer, usually learned borrowings.

Another point must also be borne in mind in discuss­ing the effect of all this borrowing on our language. If we are to base our reasoning on a study of the forms re­corded in the dictionary it is very easy to overestimate the effect of the foreign words. The actual number of native words in any of our large standard dictionaries is extremely small compared with the number of foreign bor­rowings recorded, and even if we were to confine our examination to those words in common use we should still find the native material outnumbered by about four to one. On the other hand, if we were to take a piece of English written on the popular level, or, better still, a pas­sage of familiar conversation, we should find the propor­tions about reversed. It has been estimated that less than fifty words, all of them native words, suffice for more than half our needs, if we count every word used, including repetitions. The proportion of native words to foreign will naturally vary with the subject-matter, and a present-day article on some aspect of scientific knowledge would naturally contain a higher proportion of loan-words than, say, a simple essay on a walk through the countryside, yet even in the scientific article the native words would probably outnumber the borrowings, if each word is counted every time it is used. [...]

Since the general opinion is that English has, in the main, benefited from the adoption of so many foreign loan­words, the advantages which have accrued from the use of these borrowings may be taken first, and the obvious one is the wealth of synonyms which have been created by the adoption of a foreign word — in some cases, words from more than one foreign language — to express an idea for which English already had a word. Some of these are what we may call perfect synonyms, those in which it is very difficult to detect any difference at all in the meaning; others are not quite so exact, and there is some differen­tiation, though perhaps only in usage; a third group shows marked differences within the same basic idea, differ­ences which arise from desynonymization, a process which we might expect to take place in any language which pos­sesses several words fpr the same idea. [...]...there is a tendency for the words to diverge somewhat in meaning, while still retaining the original basic idea, and the result of this is extremely advantageous, for the language is thereby enabled to express subtle differences in the same thought. Sometimes the differentiation may go no further than the use of a particular word in one context and its approximate synonym in another... [...]

 






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