Лекции по лексикологии английского языка. Гусева Г.В. - 45 стр.

UptoLike

Составители:

Рубрика:

Lecture 12

The Origin of English Words

I. Native Words

Native words, though they constitute only 30% of the English vocabulary,

are the most frequently used words.

Native words are subdivided into twop groups: Indo-European and Common

Germanic.

The oldest layer of words in English are words met in Indo-European

languages. there are several semantic groups of them:

a) words denoting kinship: father (Vater, pater), mother (Mutter, mater),

son (Sohn), daughter (Tochter);

b) words denoting important objects and phenomena of nature: the sun (die

Sohne), water (Wasser);

c) names of animals and birds: cat (Katze), goose (Gans), wolf (Wolf);

d) names of parts of a human body: heart (Herz);

e) some of the most often used verb: sit (sitzen), stand (stehen);

f) some numerals: two (zwei), three (drei).

A much larger group of native vocabulary are Common Germanic words

(German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic). Here we can find the nouns: summer,

winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, life, shoe; the verbs: bake, burn,

buy, drive,hear, keep, learn; the adjectives: broad, dead, deaf, deep.

Native words have a great world-building capacity, form a lot of

phraseological units, they are mostly polysemantic.