1 Loanwords in British English Anthony P. Grant 1. The language and its speakers English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family, which is part of the Indo-European language family. The Germanic languages contain hundreds of stems with no known cognates in Indo-European, some of which must be loanwords from unrecorded languages and others of which, such as gold, iron, ore, apple, are probably old North European Wanderwörter. They are often regarded as subdividing into East and Northwest Germanic (Ringe 2006: 213). The latter divides into North and West Germanic. However, the evidence for positing a primary division between East Germanic and other Germanic languages is morphological and phonological rather than lexical in nature, since the bulk of our East Germanic material is from what remains of a Bible translation into (Ostro-)Gothic. Even though Gothic lexicon appears to be rather conservative of Indo-European elements when compared with the vocabularies of Old English, Old High German and Old Norse, much of the East Germanic lexicon is unrecorded and is forever lost to us. (Words found in both West and North Germanic but for which no East Germanic cognate is available are listed in the subdatabase as traceable back to Proto-Germanic, as we cannot prove that such words did not occur in East Germanic and are Northwest Germanic innovations.) Dates of the emergence of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European are highly speculative and debated. It is likely that Proto-Germanic began to diversify 2500 years or more before the present day (with Northwest Germanic splitting off soon after that and with West Germanic diversifying less than 2000 years ago) and Indo-European between 4000 and 6000 years ago. English’s closest genetic relatives are the Frisian languages of the southeastern North Sea coast (West Frisian, North Frisian and East Frisian), with which it may constitute an Ingvaeonic or Anglo-Frisian branch. It is somewhat less closely related
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Loanwords in British English
Anthony P. Grant 1. The language and its speakers English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family, which is part of the Indo-European language family. The Germanic languages contain hundreds of stems with no known cognates in Indo-European, some of which must be loanwords from unrecorded languages and others of which, such as gold, iron, ore, apple, are probably old North European Wanderwörter. They are often regarded as subdividing into East and Northwest Germanic (Ringe 2006: 213). The latter divides into North and West Germanic. However, the evidence for positing a primary division between East Germanic and other Germanic languages is morphological and phonological rather than lexical in nature, since the bulk of our East Germanic material is from what remains of a Bible translation into (Ostro-)Gothic. Even though Gothic lexicon appears to be rather conservative of Indo-European elements when compared with the vocabularies of Old English, Old High German and Old Norse, much of the East Germanic lexicon is unrecorded and is forever lost to us. (Words found in both West and North Germanic but for which no East Germanic cognate is available are listed in the subdatabase as traceable back to Proto-Germanic, as we cannot prove that such words did not occur in East Germanic and are Northwest Germanic innovations.) Dates of the emergence of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European are highly speculative and debated. It is likely that Proto-Germanic began to diversify 2500 years or more before the present day (with Northwest Germanic splitting off soon after that and with West Germanic diversifying less than 2000 years ago) and Indo-European between 4000 and 6000 years ago.
English’s closest genetic relatives are the Frisian languages of the southeastern North Sea coast (West Frisian, North Frisian and East Frisian), with which it may constitute an Ingvaeonic or Anglo-Frisian branch. It is somewhat less closely related
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to members of the Dutch-German language continuum, which are the other members of West Germanic. The lexical layer attesting to a history of shared development between Frisian and English is very thin (the phonological layer is more plentiful). Scots, a development from Northumbrian Old English, is often regarded as a separate language from English, and the English dialect of the Baronies of Forth and Bargy in County Wexford, Ireland, which died out in the mid-19th century, derived from the Late Middle English speech of 14th century settlers of southwestern English origin.
The number of speakers of English is hotly disputed and reliable statistics are hard to find; the number of native speakers has been claimed to be between 275 and 450 millions and maybe a billion people are first or second-language speakers of English, with a billion more learning it. Either de jure or de facto English is official or co-official with other languages in over forty countries. In the United Kingdom and the United States English is used for all purposes in all media, and is the major language of print media, broadcasting, education, commerce and everyday interactions. This is true also of Australia and New Zealand (where English’s official status is de facto rather than de jure.) English dominates world media, science and commerce. Most native speakers of English are monolingual.
Present-Day Standard English of England (my dialect) has been taken as the norm for this list, and American English variants account for only a few forms of the entries on the list. 2. Sources of data With a very few exceptions indicated in footnotes in the subdatabase, all etymological data used in the subdatabase have been taken from OED online, the electronic version of the rolling and continually updated edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (accessed at various times from November 2005 to January 2007 and checked in January 2007). This is the largest and most reliable source for English etymologies, but some spellings of language names in some of its rubrics need modernisation, and it does not distinguish in Old Norse entries between Old
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Danish and Old Norwegian. Material from the second edition of the dictionary was used in Hoad (1993).
Considerable work has been carried out on English etymology and only some items can be mentioned here. Pollington (1993) and Clark-Hall and Merritt (1962) are solid sources for Old English data; the latter provides Modern English cognates where available. Skeat (1882) is an etymological dictionary of modern English which includes a long appendix in which the origins of the myriad entries in the dictionary are classified according to source language, with indications of the routes of transmission of each word. Nothing quite as exhaustive as this list has ever been published since. Serjeantson (1935) is a general study of words of foreign origin (including, for example, Latin loans into Old English) in English, with information on their etyma and their first date of attestation as recorded in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Björkman (1900-1902) is a study of the Norse element in English, while Bense (1939) examined the Middle Dutch and Middle Low German loan elements, but the work is in need of updating. Geipel (1971) provides a useful list of the most frequent borrowings into modern Standard English from Old Norse. Baugh & Cable (1949 and subsequent editions), Williams (1975) and Crystal (2004) are solid histories of English, each with very different approaches to their topic, while Beal (2004) deals expertly with the most modern era of English. Important approaches to the effects of contact-induced change in English on the part of several languages can also be found in Thomason & Kaufman (1988), Tristram (2004), and McWhorter (2002, 2006). Chapters in the Cambridge History of the English Language are useful, notably Burnley (1992) and Nevalainen (1999). 3. Contact situations: A capsule contact history of English English has been spoken in England (and beyond) since c. 450 CE, allegedly ever since the (mythical) brothers Hengist and Horsa landed at Gravesend in Kent in 449. It was brought from the lands east of the North Sea (modern day Ostfriesland and Schleswig-Holstein and parts of ‘Jutland’, now Jylland in Denmark) by Angles, Saxons and Jutes. They were accompanied by a smaller number of Frisians, whose dialectally very diverse language Frisian, is first attested fairly late and in the
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Netherlands (records of Frisian date from after 1100; Old Frisian is contemporaneous with Early Middle English). Major chronological divisions of English are into Old English (up to 1100 or 1150; this is often known as Anglo-Saxon), Middle English (1100/1150-1500) and Modern or New or (latterly) Present Day English (1500-). These periods are often subdivided by specialists, with Early Old English stretching from 449 to c. 900, Late Old English from c. 900 to 1100/1150, Early Middle English from 1100/1150 to 1300 and Late Middle English from 1300 to 1500, while Early Modern English lasted from 1500 to c. 1700 and Late Modern English from 1700 to the present. Map 1: The geographical setting of English
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3.1. The Old English period Although the Caistor rune from Norfolk, an incised deer-bone bearing the single word raihan ‘roe-deer’, may date from the 5th century (Crystal 2004: 22), there is rather little linguistic material preserved in Old English until after 800. The first part of the Early Middle English period (up to c. 1250) is also underrepresented in our materials, since at that time the dominant written languages were Latin and Norman French. The main exception to this is the Peterborough Chronicle, the final continuation of the Old English-language history the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which was written until 1154.
The only languages used in England before Old English for which we have any interpretable linguistic evidence are British Celtic (which in these earlier stages is preserved in names only, no inscriptions survive) and Latin. Both contributed lexical material to Old English which finds its way onto the list. The traditional view has it that the British Celts were mostly driven westwards into less arable territory by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and that their territory was later circumscribed by the Treaty of Chester in 615, but recent DNA research (Capelli et al. 2003) shows that there is strong evidence for language shift by indigenous inhabitants from Celtic to English also having taken place; the two views are not incompatible. Varieties of British Celtic remain in Wales and Brittany as Welsh and Breton respectively, and were formerly also used in Cornwall (as Cornish) and in southern Scotland and Cumbria (Cumbric). Old English can be said to have enjoyed a diglossic relationship of one kind with Latin (which was used in England for much serious writing), while Tristram (2004) suggests that true diglossia also occurred within Old English itself. Certainly dozens of Latin words, mostly to do with religion and scholarship, entered Old English, although Old English was also used for literary and technical prose in addition to being employed in verse of many kinds. (Latin no longer had native speakers in Britain at this time.)
From c. 790 invasions and raids of northern English coastal areas by Norse-speaking Vikings became increasingly frequent until they were brought to an end through the defeat of a Viking army under their king Guthrum (or Guttorm) by an English army under the scholarly King Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, at Ethandun (now Edington in Wiltshire) in 878. After the Treaty of Alfred and
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Guthrum (often misnamed the Treaty of Wedmore), concluded at some date between 878 and 890, the Danelaw, comprising most of northern and part of Eastern England, was set up, and here Danish law was in force and many Vikings, now becalmed, settled here and farmed. Several kings of Danish origin played an important role in 11th century English politics, but autumn 1066 saw England conquered by William of Normandy (the Normans were themselves gallicised and christanised Vikings). Norse-speakers settled especially strongly in coastal and to a lesser degree inland areas of northern England and in East Anglia, also in Scotland and the Isle of Man. Extensive intermarriage of Norse settlers with speakers of Old English is highly likely to have occurred; a Northumbrian form of Old English dominated most of these areas (save Man and most of Scotland). But it was strongly influenced by Old Norse, not least because Old Norse and Old English had a largely common vocabulary even though morphologically they were quite distinct. Loans from Old Norse present in Standard Present Day British English are largely the result of dialect borrowing within Middle English, and some Northern forms of Middle English received even stronger Norse influence than what remains in Modern English.
The major sources of data on Old English represent West Saxon and Northumbrian (and to a lesser extent also the now extinct Kentish) varieties; they do not represent the linear ancestors of the major speech varieties which gave rise to Modern Standard English. (Old English as taught in universities, based though it is on West Saxon, has been provided with a standard spelling and morphology only since Henry Sweet’s work of the 1870s and is therefore something of an artefact.) This means that the East Midlands variety of Middle English which underlies Modern Standard English is all but unrepresented in our documents at the Old English level, since materials in Anglian Old English are not plentiful.
A few loans come into early Old English and its sister West Germanic languages from Continental Celtic (iron), Greek (priest, church) and especially from Commercial Latin (and via Latin, borrowings from other languages, e.g. Hebrew or other Semitic languages: sack). Old English has a few substratal British Celtic loans too (notably the stem which provides the adverb down). Apart from British Celtic loans, most of these forms are also found at least in other Old West Germanic languages. Later loans into Old English mainly come from Ecclesiastical Latin, but with c. 150 items
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in the period before 1100 also coming from Norse (husband) and a trickle of about 20 coming in from Norman French (among them proud).
Some loans from Old Norse into English changed their meaning within English (sky, husband formerly meant ‘cloud’ and ‘landowner’ respectively in Old Norse and earlier English) and some Old English words changed their meanings as a result of influence from loanwords (for example Old English dream had come to mean ‘joy, delight’ rather than ‘vision encountered when sleeping’, and it regained its present meaning from Norse). The earliest loans into English from Norse were (as one might expect) cultural borrowings relating to Danish law, shipbuilding and to some aspects of military matters with which speakers of Old English were previously unfamiliar. These were later joined by hundreds of loans relating to more everyday matters, most of which replaced prior Old English words. Most of the oldest layers of Norse loans in English have since disappeared from English because their referents are no longer in existence. 3.2. The Middle English period The Norman Conquest of 1066 was an event which had massive impact on the history and development of English. Considerable population movements southward occurred after the harrowing of the North in the 1080s. The Old English literary language fell into disuse and its more literary expressions such as poetic compounds were lost; the Norman aristocracy and clergy, many of whom knew no English, supplanted the status of the established English aristocracy and clergy. Norman French and Latin were the dominant written languages in England for over two centuries, although native speakers of Norman French never comprised more than a few percent of the English population, and they shifted increasingly to English over the next few generations. Furthermore Norman French never enjoyed the strong regional speaker base in any area of the kind which Old Norse had enjoyed in parts of northern and eastern England. The reassertion of the role of English in public life came gradually after 1250, by which time Norman French as a native language was very much on the decline in England. Nonetheless it was after this period that the bulk of French loans came into English. One turning point in favour of English was
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in 1362 when Parliament was opened in English for the first time. After this the role of French in England was certainly more as a language of high culture and refinement, for it was no longer a language with a firm speaker base in England, and it was Central French or francien, the dialect of Paris, which had predominated (and which enjoyed prestige) at the expense of Norman French. During this period English began to expand against Gaelic varieties in Scotland and Ireland.
Many loans came into Middle English from Norse (see below); French (borrowed from Norman French till c. 1250, thereafter borrowed more probably from Central French; these comprise maybe 10,000 elements), and borrowing from Latin increases massively. There is also some borrowing from Provençal and Italian, though these items are mostly mediated through French cultural contact. Words of Greek origin come in via Latin (sometimes also via French); words of French origin are themselves not all of Latin origin but include some French neologisms (regret) and also many items which are of ultimate Germanic (Frankish) or Celtic (Gaulish) origin. In addition French acts as a conduit for words from non-European languages such as Arabic and Persian. Given that most French lexicon is of Latin origin, and that not all sounds changed in the period between the documentation of Latin and the rise of Old and Middle French, it is often simply impossible to distinguish many borrowings from French from those taken from Latin, or to determine that a word was taken from Norman French rather than from Central French.
When examining the history of English it is important to recognise that for much of the history of English there was no variety of written (let alone spoken) English which was accepted de facto as standard throughout England (although West Saxon Old English, much of whose textual material consists of translations from Latin, did enjoy something of this role in Anglo-Saxon England after c. 900). This proviso especially applies to Middle English, although in the later Middle English period (especially in the 14th century) the so-called chancery standard, based on the English of the royal court in London and on the varieties neighbouring counties such as Hertfordshire (in fact roughly the area covered by the Bishopric of Lincoln, a region which had been made prosperous through the wool trade with Flanders and Scandinavia and which saw many Flemings settle in Britain), and therefore incorporating thousands of loanwords from French which had very often been taken over as prestige items (and which had supplanted perfectly good Old English
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equivalents), was used as a written language in official documents over an increasingly wide area, especially of southern England. Had the chancery standard been based on the language of the Bishopric of York to the north, the Norse impact on Standard English would have been far greater.
Much of the borrowing from other languages into English came via borrowings from English dialects which were then incorporated into the East Midlands variety of Middle English which gave rise to Standard English. This is especially the case with many of the Norse loans which came through from Northern Middle English dialects, and with many loans from Norman French which largely came in via Southern Middle English dialects, since the Normans were more populous in the South (though never numerically dominant), although they had a presence in larger towns too. Some forms of Middle English in parts of the East Midlands may have been open to loans from both directions.
The 1000 or so Norse loans which came into Standard English entered standard varieties through their prior incorporation into northern Middle English dialects. The direct influence of Norse on most forms of English palls after the 12th century, since Norse no longer has speakers in England, and little native French is spoken by Normans or their descendants in England after 1300; both Vikings and Normans shift to English within a few centuries. Some Middle English loans from Norse can be shown to come from Danish rather from Norwegian varieties of Old Norse (wing versus dialectal weng, from Old Norwegian).
It is not often recognised that in later Middle English, especially in more easterly dialects (including Scots) an increasing number of borrowings from the three very closely related languages Dutch, Flemish, and Low German also enter English, through widespread settlement of speakers of these languages in coastal towns, and many of these find their way into the standard language, such as reef, brackish, smile, trade. 3.3. The Modern English period English’s future as a written language was secured in 1476 when William Caxton brought the art of printing with movable type to England from Flanders and began
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to print books in English as well as in Latin, which nonetheless remained an important language for scientific and formal writing in England (and an important source of loanwords) until the late 17th century. English as a written language was given an enormous fillip by the production of complete and widely-available Bibles from the 1530s onwards, most notably the Authorised Version or King James Version of the Bible, completed in 1611, and by the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), some of whose works, especially the play Love’s Labours Lost, examine (and derive verbal comedy from) the inkhorn debate, the great linguistic debate of the late 16th century. This was the struggle for linguistic supremacy in formal writing between the supporters of English as a written language capable of use for all purposes (including purists such as Sir John Cheke, who wished to exclude loanwords from English as far as possible) and the supporters of the continued role of Latin as the vehicle of scholarship. (Lofty and redundant words of Latin origin are referred to at this time as inkhorn words.)
At this time English continued to borrow from French and Latin (and not all these borrowings survive in modern English) but was increasingly open to loanwords from other languages, especially Greek (through learning) and Dutch, Italian, and Spanish (through trade). Many of these (especially the Spanish loans) were themselves loans from other languages with which speakers of English did not come into direct contact. Spanish was the direct source of loans from a number of Latin American languages. The early 17th century saw the permanent implantation of speakers of English on the east coast of North America; the majority of native speakers of English now speak a variety of American English. Anglophone power grew throughout the Americas, the Caribbean and West Africa (all in the 17th century), India and Australia (from the 18th century) and in the other Pacific islands, south-east Asia and eastern and southern Africa (from the 19th century). The English vocabulary absorbed thousands of words directly from the languages of these regions rather than through intermediate languages, though most of these were cultural borrowings which gave names to items previously unfamiliar to speakers of English. It is salutary to remember that the source languages of some of these words, such as Virginia Algonquian and Dharuk (erstwhile language of Sydney), are long since extinct, their speakers either obliterated or else turned into monoglot speakers of English. Often these words are taken into English indirectly via
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borrowing into Dutch, French, or Spanish or Portuguese (the last two transmission routes being the case with words from Native Latin American languages; most words from Spanish and Portuguese in the subdatabase for English are indeed of Native American origin).
The Late Modern English period also sees an increase in the use of items of Latin and Greek origin (sometimes with both languages being used within the same compound) in the construction of neologisms for previously unknown items, such as the Greek-based neologism telephone and the Greek-Latin blend television. Many terms of Greek or Latin origin (for example the names of some of the newer chemical elements) first came into English as ‘eye-borrowings’ taken bodily and anglicised along well-established patterns from scientific texts written in German, which was the leading scientific language in the 19th century, but which was to be supplanted by English. For its part, English has probably been more important as a donor of increasing amounts of mostly non-basic and technical vocabulary to the thousands of languages of the world than as a borrowing language since the early 19th century. 3.4. Other considerations English has a smallish number of lexical roots which are not even found in Frisian and which are therefore distinctively English; their ultimate origin is unknown. Some 65 such roots are first attested in Old English (including the Old English antecedent of bird) and others are first recorded in Middle English (wrap) and Early Modern English (jump). The total number of such forms in English according to Liberman (1994)’s analysis of the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology is over 1900. Some 40 or so of these «incognita» find their way into the items in the subdatabase. But given that our corpus of Modern English is bigger than that for Middle English, that our corpus of Middle English is bigger than that for Old English, and that practically no new textual material written in Old English has been found since the mid-1970s, we must contend with the fact that many English words which are probably or certainly of (West) Germanic origin are not available to us in our Old English records but are only first recorded in Middle English or
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even Modern English. This is especially the case with taboo terms. A few terms in the English subdatabase were originally developments of proper names, e.g. gun, maybe also jug.
Many borrowings into English came in indirectly via a third (or fourth, or even fifth) language. For instance, many items of Greek origin came in via Latin (idea) or Latin via French (blame), as did early borrowings from Arabic (cotton, via French) and from other languages, for instance silk, which came into English from Latin but which originated in Mongolian. Items on the list accompanying this chapter are shown under their immediate source language, which very often is French no matter what their ultimate origins are. On the list the record-holder for circuitous arrival into English may be rice, which came into English via French, Italian, Latin and Greek but which came into Greek from Tamil arici, a form which may itself be an ancient Indo-Aryan loan into Dravidian.
In this regard, almost 1% of the items in the subdatabase consists of English borrowings from French, such as dance, which themselves originated in Germanic languages such as Frankish. Similarly, the ‘Latin’ element in English includes words which came into English through Latin or French but which originate in Oscan (buffalo, into English via Italian), Etruscan (probably family), possibly Punic (cross, mat) and certainly Greek (numerous examples, including a word such as person which entered Latin from Greek prosōpon ‘face’ via Etruscan phersu ‘mask’ and was filtered through a Latin folk etymology, namely the Latin per-sonāre ‘to sound through’).
It is nearly impossible for us to decide for some words whether they came in from French or Latin, not least since French borrowed heavily in the realm of items of cultural vocabulary from its ancestral language Latin in the Middle Ages, and it is often even more difficult for us to decide which variety of French (Central French or Norman French) may have provided a particular loan to English. However, sometimes evidence from historical phonology helps out, as some French words underwent sound changes from their Latin counterparts. But even then, the later Central French borrowings into English (and for that matter borrowings from modern French) stand out from the earlier Norman French borrowings in regard to certain formal phonological features, as Central French underwent certain
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phonological changes from Latin (such as palatalisation of Latin ca-) which words taken into English from Norman French did not.
Some words on the list whose elements derive from other languages are English-born compounds in origin: telephone, a word comprising two Greek elements but which did not exist until the 19th century, is one example. Other words on the list consist of elements from two sources (television, motor-cycle, bicycle, fishing-line, and also the kinship terms formed with the borrowed items grand- or with –in-law, in which the second part is Norse but is not used in a Norse fashion and is not a calque from Norse). These are distinguished from compounds on the list whose elements are of one origin, such as forgive, in which both elements go back to Old English. There are also a few borrowed items which enter into compounds or phrasal verbs on the list, and which may occur twice or more, such as post in doorpost. All these must be mentioned for a full picture on the effects of contact on English. 4. Number and kinds of loanwords 4.1. General remarks Loanwords in the subdatabase belong to most form-classes, including pronouns and conjunctions, and can be found (usually in profusion) in all 24 fields of the Loanword Typology meaning list. This much is clear from Table 1; note that unless otherwise indicated, figures in the table are percentages. Almost half the nouns, 39% of the verbs and 30% of the adjectives on the list are loans; function words including non-derived adverbs are the category most impervious to borrowing. The impact of borrowing on the English vocabulary is also apparent from an examination of the Loanword Typology results presented in §7, and from the statistics for the general English vocabulary from three sizeable lexical sources in §8.
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Table 1: Loanwords in English by semantic word class (percentages)
Many of these borrowed items are examples of what Bloomfield (1933) would
call cultural borrowing, but quite a few are examples of Bloomfield’s intimate borrowing insofar as the borrowed words replace former Old English words. This is especially so for the Norse element, which (at least on this list) consists almost entirely of replacements for labels for pre-existing concepts.
Speakers of British English have a generally relaxed attitude to loans in English, because the history of English is rarely taught in British schools, so that they do not usually know that a particular word is a loanword unless their attention is drawn to the fact. Words of Latinate origin are often given high status by speakers or are typical of higher spoken language registers (and of formal written language), but this is at least partly because they tend to be polysyllabic. The story about variation between Middle English eyren and Scandinavian egges from the preface to William Caxton’s (1490) translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (republished in Baugh & Cable 1949), and Scott’s dilation in Ivanhoe (1819) on how livestock with Old English names become Norman French when served to the nobility at table as meat, are stock narratives concerning loanwords in the English linguistic literature.
One of the most striking examples of terminological reorganisation in English is that of the kinship system. The kin-term taxonomy in the semantic field Kinship is flexible but does not fit modern English very well. The Modern English kinship system has changed from the Old English Sudanese-style system, in which most relationships have separate names (such as one’s sister’s husband having a different
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designation, āþum, from one’s husband’s brother, tācor). It has become a system similar to that of French kinship, with which it is largely isomorphic as a result of lexical loss and much borrowing of French, Latin and Norse vocabulary, and in some cases also the creation, contraction or absorption of new categories.
Even including those words coming indirectly into English via prior incorporation in Germanic, Late Latin and French (the latter taking words from Gaulish), less than 1% of the items in the English subdatabase is of Celtic origin (British Celtic is English’s substrate language).
Over 40% of the non-compound lexical items on the list are not of Old or Middle English origin, and these are preponderantly from Romance or Italic languages, namely French and Latin (and a few other words derive from Italian or Spanish, such as Spanish-derived lasso). 2% of the list items derive ultimately from Greek, but very largely by way of their previous incorporation in the Latin lexicon. 6-8% of the Present-Day English non-compound words in the subdatabase derive from Germanic languages other than English (they come from Old Norse, Dutch or Low German, or are back-borrowings from Frankish via French, or in the case of rug, reindeer, gun are later borrowings from Germanic languages). These words represent instances of indirect inheritance of Germanic lexicon. On the other hand, almost 3% of the items for English are words (such as prawn, shark, smell, pour, probably bad) whose etymologies are unknown and which cannot be traced any further than English.
3.5% of the items listed derive ultimately or (less often) immediately from non-classical or Western European languages: they come from Slavic languages (slave, via French and Latin), Sanskrit (sugar, pepper, both via Greek and Latin and the former via French, banyan via Gujarati and Portuguese), Arabic (coffee, zero, both via Italian, alcohol via Latin and French), Syriac (mosque, via Arabic), Coptic (adobe, via Latin, Italian and Spanish), Wolof (banana, via Spanish), Tamil (rice, which may ultimately be of Indic origin), Mongolian (silk, via Latin), Chinese (tea, via Dutch but ultimately from a Tibeto-Burman language), Malay (paddy), Tahitian (tattoo), Tongan (taboo), Guugu Yimidhirr of Northern Queensland (kangaroo), Dharuk, late of Sydney (boomerang), Mapudungun of Chile (poncho, via Spanish), Tupí of Brazil (manioc, tapir, toucan, via Portuguese), Taíno, extinct, of the Antilles (hammock, canoe, potato, tobacco, all via Spanish) and Nahuatl (coyote, chili, via Spanish), and
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various Algonquian languages of the eastern United States: Massachusett (moose, squash) and Virginia Algonquian (opossum), both of which languages are extinct, and caribou from Mikmaq of Nova Scotia.
This diversity of etymological origins contrasts with what is found in the English edition of the 100-, 200- and 215-item Swadesh lists, where only forms which derive from Old English (the majority of forms) or Middle English, Norse, French, Latin, Dutch, Low German, and some words of unknown or disputed origin are listed. These borrowed items on the combined 100- and 215-item lists include 16 items of Norse origin, 15 from French, 1 each from Dutch (split) and Low German (rub), and 1 from Latin via French (animal), plus at least 9 items of uncertain origin without satisfactory extra-English cognates (bad, big, bird, blunt, child, dog, pull, smell, smooth).
The semantic fields with the highest proportion of forms of Old English origin in Present-Day British English are the categories Quantity, Time, and Miscellaneous function words (see Table 2). The fields with the lowest proportions of forms that are of Old English origin are Social and political relations, Law, and Modern world. Only about 60% of the items relating to the human body have uncompounded names of Old or Middle English origin, though here most of the loans relate to internal organs or afflictions.
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Table 2: Loanwords in English by semantic field and donor language
4.2. The Thomason-Kaufman scale for English The strata of the lexicon and their impact on English can be compared with the overall impact of some languages upon English, as evidenced by the borrowing scale
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presented in Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 74-76), a cumulative scale in which 1 is the lowest degree of borrowing (involving only lexicon) and 5 is the highest. Old English, as the source of most basic vocabulary and morphology in modern English, has been excluded from this list. Table 3 DONOR LANGUAGE DEGREE OF
BORROWING CHARACTERIZATION
Pre-Celtic (substrate language/s)
1 only place-name elements
British Celtic (substrate language)
1? only lexicon and place-name elements, but the impact of British Celtic syntax on earlier English is undergoing re-examination at the present time
Latin (adstrate language)
3 lexicon including some relexification of OE lexicon, many bound derivational morphological elements, some spreading through the lexicon
French (adstrate language)
3-4 lexicon including much relexification of OE lexicon, much cultural lexicon, some new phonemes created through introduction of minimal pairs in borrowed lexical items, many bound derivational morphological elements and some free grammatical elements
Norse (adstrate language)
4-5 lexicon, mostly relexification of items of OE lexicon, some free grammatical words including some prepositions and the they-paradigm
Dutch/Low German (adstrate languages)
1-2 lexicon, –kin diminutive
all other languages (all of them adstrate languages)
1 pre-eminently items of lexicon, and specifically items which hardly ever replace earlier lexical items
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5. Integration of loanwords Most loanwords coming from any language into English are accommodated into the major open noun class (with –s/-es as plural marker if they are count nouns) and the major (weak) open verb class, thus forming both their simple past tense and their past participle with –d/-ed. As such they behave like thousands of English nouns and verbs. A few verbs of Norse origin preserve their irregularities as ‘strong’ verbs, using Ablaut to distinguish simple present, simple past and past participle: take, took, taken, or get, got, gotten, or give, gave, given. Adjectives are no longer inflected for case, gender or number in modern English and borrowed adjectives behave like inherited ones in regard to the formation of the comparative and superlative, requiring the use of periphrastic more, most for adjectives of more than two syllables. The borrowed third person plural personal pronoun, of Norse origin, has preserved its inherited irregularities: subject they, object them, possessive their.
The only sounds which have been generally borrowed into English in order to accommodate loanwords are the voiced post-alveolar fricative (as in leisure, rouge, genre) and the diphthong /oi/, as in boy, coin, soil. Both of these have gradually entered English via loans from French and other languages, and both of which now have phonemic status in English (though some speakers also have /x/ as a loan-phoneme of very low functional yield). Many words of non-Old English origin have (ante)penultimate or final stress, whereas Old English words tended to be stressed on the first syllable of the root. Voiced fricatives have moved from having allophonic status in Old English to fully phonemic status in Middle and Modern English largely because of their frequency in loans from French and because minimal pairs involving such borrowings can be set up to attest to their phonemic status, such as fine versus vine, or seal versus zeal (though thy and thigh, the only minimal pair in English for interdental fricatives, are both inherited words; original voiceless interdental fricatives which occurred word-initially in some grammatical items were voiced when unstressed).
There has been less effect on the relaxation of phonotactic constraints. Some onsets, such as /sk-/, /skr-/, are characteristic of (mainly Norse and Latin) loans in English. But others, such as initial Greek /ps-/, were simplified in English, in this case to /s-/, though some new sound sequences have been borrowed, such as /šm-/
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in words taken from Yiddish such as shmuck. French palatalised /l/ and /n/ were realised as normal English /l/ and /n/ as in scale and line from earlier French escaille and ligne, and nasalized vowels came into English as sequences of vowel plus nasal consonant: compare French and English pronunciations of prison. Borrowing of loans cannot be said to have added any new syllabic canons to English, which already had a rich range of canons.
6. Grammatical borrowing English shows the strong impact of other languages in its grammatical structure, in addition to the evidence to be found in its lexicon. The effects of contact-induced language change upon English involve cases both of morphemic transfer (or fabric transfer) and pattern transfer (Heath 1984), sometimes simultaneously. The amount of grammatical borrowing which English can be said to have undergone depends upon what one’s definition of grammatical borrowing involves, and whether it is restricted to the transfer of morphemes.
Borrowing has happened at all levels of English structure, involving both inflectional and derivational morphology, function words, and calquing of a range of constructions, while some constructions which were only weakly attested in earlier English and which were not the dominant modes of expression of these concepts became increasingly frequent through parallels in highly-used structures of prestige languages influencing English.
English has absorbed dozens of derivational morphemes from French and especially Latin (examples of the latter are dis-, pre-, post-, -al, -ation, -able, the originally Greek –ise and pre-Greek -ess), and a number of derivational morphemes have been taken from Greek too (anti-, para-, -etic). Most of these endings are productive; some, such as –able, can be used with stems of any origin, including Germanic-derived forms and even phrasal verbs (in jocular forms such as un-get-at-able). Both Norse and French have provided English with function words of various kinds (very, just, despite from the former and though, both, against from the latter). The pronouns they, them, their and the verb form are certainly are. That Old Norse structure was not fully comprehended by Old English speakers can be seen in the
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materials in the subdatabase by the incorporation of some unrecognized Norse affixes on Norse loans (as in anger, want from Norse ang-r ‘anger’, van-t, the neuter form of van ‘lacking’). Keller (1925) suggests that perhaps the third person singular present indicative in –s, long a form whose origin is mysterious (though its status as an originally northern element replacing –eth in Early Modern English is assured), may have Norse origins. He also points out the spread of a single plural form –s (of Indo-European heritage) throughout English count nouns, simplifying the nominal declensional system by spreading one suffix analogically. A similar affix is of course used to pluralise nouns in French and many nouns in Dutch. One can only surmise at the extent of the effects of analogical levelling in the second-language English of speakers of British Celtic, Norse and Norman French.
The role of of in forming a possessive genitive construction within a noun phrase, which was available in Old English but which massively expanded in use in Middle English as the result of French influence, and constructions such as the making of relative clauses using which (a structure copied from Norse), the rise of phrasal verbs such as go out, and the Norse-inspired use of be-passives (rather than Old English-style become-passives: McWhorter 2002) are examples of transfer of pattern. Other innate tendencies which Old English already possessed have probably been lent support by the effects of contact-induced change with languages which also shared these features, such as the preference for Subject-Verb-Object constituent order in sentences in later periods of English, and the partial disruption of the V2 order in Middle English (Kroch et al. 2000). The articles collected in Filppula et al. (ed. 2002) are useful if often speculative sources of information on the under-reported syntactic influence of Celtic languages upon (firstly regional, later standard) English; one may also note Tristram (2004). 7. Other statistical studies of borrowing in English: Cassidy on borrowed and non-borrowed types and tokens, work by Leech, Rayson and Wilson, and Scheler’s work Tables 4 and 5 indicate the number of loanwords which can be found in some earlier studies of the English vocabulary.
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Cassidy (1999) includes figures for borrowed and non-borrowed lexicon from the Frequency Analysis of English Usage (referred to as the Brown Corpus because research for it was conducted at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA). This is a corpus of written American English containing about 1014000 tokens, which was taken from textual material written in 1961 and which was collected by W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera. In this source a bare 2% of the 100 commonest words in the corpus are non-Germanic (use at #85 and people at #92), but non-Germanic terms comprise 11.5% of the 200 commonest English words (i.e. 23 items). Non-Germanic words predominate in the overall vocabulary after the 400 commonest words in written English are listed and they never yield that dominance. 538 of the 1000 commonest words in written English were Germanic, 462 were not. Yet further down in the English vocabulary, among the 6th 1000 of English words (from the 5001st commonest item to the 6000th commonest item), only 342 were of Germanic origin. In Cassidy’s work ‘Germanic’ refers to items which cannot be shown to be non-Germanic in origin, so that items of uncertain origin such as ever, and words which have been borrowed into English from Old Norse, such as get, would both be counted as Germanic although neither form has cognates elsewhere in West Germanic. If such items were removed the dominance of ‘Germanic’ forms in the commonest 1000 items would be yielded.
The above figures relate to types, which are different and separate words. When we look at the number of tokens, the words used in running texts (including words which are used twice or more often), the picture is rather different. The importance and indeed overwhelming dominance of elements of Germanic origin in English running text cannot be underestimated. Cassidy (1999: 78) breaks down the figures relating to the occurrence in the corpus of the 1000 commonest words in the corpus; his data are reproduced in Table 4.
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Table 4: The commonest thousand words of written American English in terms of their frequency in running text
These scores can be compared with those in Leech et al. (2001), a study based
on the 100,000,000-word British National Corpus, in which the commonest word in written texts, namely the, occurs 14 times as often in their written English corpus (the has 64420 occurrences per million words in their written text corpus) as does the most frequent loanword, namely Norse-derived are (are ranks 22nd in text frequency of the words in the corpus, with 4713 occurrences per million words).
In Table 5 I provide figures for the etymology of the items of the everyday English vocabulary which are taken from Scheler (1977), a work which itself derived its figures from the chronological analysis of English vocabulary carried out by Finkenstaedt et al. (1970) using the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as a point of departure. The titles of the three works, all published by Oxford University Press, are abbreviated: ALD refers to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Hornby, ed. 1974; this is a dictionary designed for advanced learners of English, which contains most words in general use in English), GSL to M. P. West’s General Service List of English Words (West 1969; this is a list of high-frequency and basic words used for designing curricula for English as a foreign language), and COED refers to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Fowler, ed. 1964), which is designed as a lexical reference work for use by native and highly competent speakers of English. What these statistics show when placed side by side is that the less frequent in text
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occurrence a word is in English, the likelier it is to be a loanword than an inherited word. (The tricky stratum of words of unknown origin seems, however, to be distributed fairly evenly throughout the English vocabulary.) Table 5: Statistics from Scheler (1977: 72) on the etymological composition of the Present-Day Standard English vocabulary In COED % ALD % GSL %
French 22724 28.37 9777 35.89 1514 38.00 Other Romance
8. Conclusion English is a language which has borrowed heavily from a number of sources, including certain languages with which it is closely related. What makes the level of borrowing in English interesting is the degree to which loanwords are not merely cultural in nature but also the extent to which they reflect Bloomfield’s concept of intimate borrowing (something which is especially true of the Norse component). Over a third of the verbs and more than half the nouns in the English subdatabase are borrowed items; inherited items from Old English barely outnumber the quantity of borrowed or innovated items on the list.
The structural impact of other languages upon English is increasingly being seen to be massive, while most of the productive Old English inflectional morphology has melted away, though the jury is still out about the extent to which this morphological attrition of the Old English systems is the result of contact-induced language change in the Viking, Norman and later eras. The effects of contact and change go even further however. Elements of a variety of origins can combine readily to form new English compound words, such as number plate, in which the first element comes from Latin, the second from Greek via Latin. But both have been mediated via French, while much Old English vocabulary (and most Old English morphology) has been utterly lost. The impact of loan elements can be seen in English textual material all the more clearly the further away from the most frequent vocabulary and constructions one goes. If we include the effects of contact-induced analogy and morphological levelling, and of transfers of structural and semantic patterns (with subsequent reorganisation of language systems) as well as transfers of fabric, then the effects of contact-induced change in the history of English over the past millennium or so are of simply staggering dimensions. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of Siân Proffitt, Katie Unsworth, Marie Phillips, Sarah Woodward, Joanne Thompson, Margaret Davey, Anna Phelan, Matt Johnson, Vicky Houghton, Helen Morgan and Katy Johnson in preparing the
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data sets underlying this paper, and especial thanks to Helen Dowd and Sarah Downes for their great and selfless assistance in checking and corroborating so much of the material which found its way into the subdatabase entries for English. I would also like to thank Uri Tadmor, Martin Haspelmath and Laurent Sagart for comments on this chapter when it was presented as a paper in Leipzig in May 2006, and to Bernard Comrie, Julia Cissewski, and the Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie for making possible my role as a Visiting Scholar at MPI-EVA in September 2006. Sources and guidance Baugh, Albert C., and Cable, Thomas. 2002 (first published 1949). A history of the
English language. London: Routledge. Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times. London: Edward Arnold. Bense, J. F. 1939. A dictionary of the Low-Dutch element in the English vocabulary.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Björkman, Erik. 1900-1902. Scandinavian Loan Words in Middle English. Halle: E.
Karras. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt. Burnley, David. 1992. “Lexis and semantics.” The Cambridge history of the English
language, Volume II, edted by Norman Blake, 409-499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Capelli, Cristian, Nicola Redhead, Julia K. Abernethy, Fiona Gratrix, James F. Wilson, Torolf Moen, Tor Hervig, Martin Richards, Michael P. H. Stumpf, Peter A. Underhill, Paul Bradshaw, Alom Shaha, Mark G. Thomas, Neal Bradman and David B. Goldstein. 2003. ‘A Y chromosome census of the British Isles.’ Current Biology 13 (11): 979-984.
Cassidy, Frederic Gomes. 1999. “English: a Germanic language?” Interdigitations: essays for Irmengard Rauch, edited by Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbert and Lihua Zhang, 75-79. New York: Peter Lang.
Clark-Hall, John R., and Herbert T. Merritt. 1962. A concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Crystal, David. 2004. The Stories of English. London: Penguin. Finkenstaedt, T., E. Leisi and D. Wolff. 1970. A Chronological English Dictionary.
Heidelberg: Winter. Filppula, Markku, Klemola, Juhani, and Heli Pitkänen eds. 2002. The Celtic Roots of
English. Joensuu: Joensuu University Press. (Studies in Language 37.) Fowler, Henry W., ed. 1964. Concise Oxford dictionary of current English. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Francis, W. Nelson, and Henry Kučera. 1982. Frequency Analysis of American Usage.
New York: Houghton Mifflin. Geipel, John. 1971. The Viking Legacy. Newton Abbot (Devon): David and Charles. Heath, Jeffrey. 1984. “Language contact and language change.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 13: 367-384. Hoad, T. F. 1993. Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: OUP. Hornby, A. S. 1974. Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary of current English. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Keller, Wolfgang. 1925. “Skandinavischer Einfluss in der englischen Flexion”
Probleme der englischen Sprache und Kultur: Festschrift für Johannes Hoops, edited by Wolfgang Keller, 80-87. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Kroch, Anthony S., Ann Taylor, and Donald Ringe. “The Middle English verb-second constraint: a case study in language contact and language change.” In Susan Herring, Lene Schoesler, and Pieter van Reenen. (eds.), Textual Parameters in Older Language, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 195. pp. 353—391, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leech, Geoffrey N., Paul Rayson and Andrew Wilson. 2001. Word Frequencies in written and spoken English. London: Pearson.
Liberman, Anatoly. 1994. “Etymological studies IV: The ‘Dregs’ of English Etymology.’ General Linguistics 32: 16-35.
McWhorter, John H. 2002. “What happened to English?” Diachronica 19 (2): 217-272.
McWhorter, John H. 2006. What else happened to English?: A brief for the Celtic Hypothesis. Plenary lecture, Directions in English Language Studies, Manchester, 6-8 April, 2006
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Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. “Early Modern English lexis and semantics.” The Cambridge history of the English language, Volume III, edited by Roger Lass, 332-458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
OED online. www.oed.com. Accessed November 2005-June 2007. Pollington, Stephen. 1993. Wordcraft: concise dictionary and thesaurus, modern
English-Old English. Pinner, Middlesex: Anglo-Saxon. Ringe, Don. 2006. A linguistic history of English, part I. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Scheler, Manfred. 1977. Der englische Wortschatz. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Scott, Walter. 1819. Ivanhoe. Many editions. Serjeantson, Mary S. 1935. A history of foreign words in English. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul. Skeat, Walter William. 1882. An etymological dictionary of the English language.
Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language contact, creolization
and genetic linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Tristram, Hildegard. 2004. “Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England, or what was Old English like?” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 40: 87-110.
West, Michael P. 1969. A General Service List of English words. London: Longman. Williams, Joseph M. 1975. Origins of the English language: a social and linguistic
history. New York: Free Press.
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Loanword appendix This appendix includes loanwords in the subdatabase presented according to the language from which they directly came into English. Needless to say many words on the list have their ultimate origins in other languages. For example tea derives from the Fuzhou variety of Chinese but came into English through Dutch, and so it is listed under Dutch here. Since the two largest loan contributors, French and Latin, are Italic/Romance languages, words from these and form other such languages are listed first, followed by words from Germanic languages, from Greek and from Celtic languages, with words of other origins and of unknown origin following. Words borrowed from French (all forms and periods) mountain plain valley rock precipice cave soil calm lake bay ocean cape river forest air flame match male (both occurrences) female (both occurrences) to marry divorce
collar(bone) palm (foot)print chest spleen stomach to piss to conceive corpse carcass fever goitre blister disease to cure scar doctor mute famine to boil to roast to fry pan plate pestle bowl saucer fork dinner supper to peel to strain to crush flour mortar
latch tent to close chimney blanket chair table lamp torch carpet post arch mason brick mortar 2 farmer garden fence to dig pitchfork branch trunk flower lemon orange (sugar) cane cassava manioc millet gourd poison mushroom (pine)cone chain to beat
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scissors to press carpenter glue to forge potter chisel to move to turn to turn around to roll to catch to crouch to dance to disappear to pursue to chase to arrive to approach to enter to return (home) to carry to push to preserve to rescue to injure to hurt to damage to destroy money coin rich poor debt to pay
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bill tax to beg wages merchant shop store price ?to barter (in) front (of) to stay to remain remains to pile up to join to collect to return to divide to cover large pointed to measure corner line 1 square round to change to count part piece second pair age to finish to cease
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hour clock noon season sound colour blue to touch to taste to pinch surprised astonished quiet to embrace pain grief pity to regret to cry envy jealousy proud brave danger to choose faith(ful) deceit fault to pardon blame praise beautiful to doubt pupil to remember
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clear obscure secret certain sure cause intention easy to try manner (be)cause to reply voice language to admit to deny to refuse to betray to announce flute trumpet paper country village city boundary people chieftain to rule to govern to command to order noble citizen master
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slave servant host to obey to allow enemy stranger to invite custom quarrel plot war peace battle army soldier battle(axe) armour fortress castle tower defeat attack to surrender captive prisoner guard booty ambush line 2 trap to trap court 2 judgment judge
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plaintiff defendant to accuse to condemn to convict punishment fine prison to acquit adultery rape arson perjury religion to pray sacrifice mosque idol to preach magic sorcerer fairy president minister licence certificate crime election address car train to brake battery machine nurse
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pill tablet government police mail stamp bank number (plate) calendar card post letter cigarette music mattress toilet screw screw(driver) bottle bomb Words derived from Latin pool to extinguish person family animal vulture lion elephant camel rat insect centipede scorpion
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termites pubic (hair) vein artery spine temples (ear)lobe molar (arm)pit tendon testicles penis vagina vulva to perspire to vomit to urinate to defecate to copulate pregnant pus medicine cooked to cook pot kettle dish cup mill olive oil pepper butter cheese wine
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silk sock belt ornament cap pin candle wall camp pillow to cultivate ? spade sickle plant to plant pine vine pipe palm (tree) citrus cone to mould mat sculptor statue fan paint to paint copper to ascend to descend to exit ?paddle anchor place
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port expensive cheap cross circle similar immediate(ly) Satur(day) autumn fragrant spirit anxiety to imitate idea to study school to explain to suspect difficult falsity stupid to be silent to promise pen poet to liberate to prevent prostitute to defend to retreat to adjudicate innocent temple altar priest
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demon devil omen circumcision radio television (Greek and Latin) bicycle (Latin and Greek) motorcycle (Latin and Greek) bus (aero)plane motor petroleum hospital injection street to tan chameleon Words derived from Italian coffee plastic Words derived from Spanish lagoon savanna cockroach mosquito coyote alligator hammock adobe lasso coconut potato maize
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tobacco banana chili yam poncho canoe zero Words derived from Portuguese tapir toucan banyan buffalo Words derived from Old Norse whirl(pool) sky bat gill husband sister (X in) law they skin skull leg wing to die to kill to scrape ? to scratch calf of leg rotten knife egg
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skirt window to plough bark to hit to cut silver to sweep to cast rag bag raft to crawl to take to get to give to raise to lift cart low (and low tide) flat crooked ball dirty Thurs(day) happy anger to want mistake ugly to seem ? to guess to shriek to scold to call
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club gun law hell reindeer Words derived from Norwegian rug Words derived from Middle Low German shore shelf to smile to rub Words derived from Dutch mud swamp reef duck ? monkey shrimp to blink bamboo stump to split wagon sledge ? outrigger ? rudder to trade brackish luck to mumble sling
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tea peg Words derived from Greek church telephone electricity Words derived from British Celtic down Words derived from Welsh baby (sea)gull Words derived from Scottish Gaelic trousers clan Words derived from Malay paddy Words derived from Tahitian tattoo Words derived from Tongan taboo Words derived from Guugu Yimidhirr kangaroo Words derived from Dharuk boomerang
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Words derived from Virginia Algonquian opossum Words derived from Eastern Abenaki (Maine Algonquian) moose Words derived from Massachusett squash Words derived from Mikmaq caribou Words derived from Tupí jaguar Words of unknown origin cloud bubble boy girl ?child bird dog donkey pig prawn shark nape nipple to hiccough kidney wrinkled bald
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dandruff loom lunch bunch cabbage pad(lock) adze basket to splash to kick to pour to pound to pick to squeeze to stab to put (and put on) to keep big blunt never bad to boast to bless to curse
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