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Contemporary English is a unique mixture of Germanic & Romanic elements. This mixing has resulted in the international character of the vocabulary. In the comparison with other languages English possesses great richness of vocabulary.
All languages are mixtures to a greater or lesser extent, but the present day English vocabulary is unique in this respect.
A brief look on various historical strata of the English vocabulary:
1) Through cultural contacts with Romans partly already on the continent and all through the influence of Christianity a very early stratum of Latin-Greek words entered the language.
| ON | OE | Modern E |
| syster | sweoster | sister |
| fiscr | fisc | fish |
| felagi | felawe | fellow |
However there were also many words in the two languages which were different, and some of them were borrowed into English, such nouns as: bull, cake, egg, kid, knife, skirt, window etc, such adjectives as: flat, ill, happy, low, odd, ugly, wrong, such verbs as : call, die, guess, get, give, scream and many others.
Even some pronouns
and connective words were borrowed which happens very seldom, such as:
same, both, till, fro, though, and pronominal forms with «th»: they,
them, their. Scandinavian influenced the development of phrasal verbs,
which did not exist in Old English, at the same time some prefixed verbs
came out of usage, e.g. ofniman, beniman. Phrasal verbs are now highly
productive in English /take off, give in etc/.
German borrowings.
There are some 800 words borrowed from German into English. Some of them have classical roots, e.g. in some geological terms, such as: cobalt, bismuth, zink, quarts, gneiss, wolfram. There were also words denoting objects used in everyday life which were borrowed from German: iceberg, lobby, and rucksack, Kindergarten etc.
In the period
of the Second World War the following words were borrowed: Volkssturm,
Luftwaffe, SS-man, Bundeswehr, gestapo, gas chamber and many others.
After the Second World War the following words were borrowed: Berufsverbot,
Volkswagen etc.
Holland borrowings.
Holland and England have constant interrelations for many centuries and more than 2000 Holland borrowings were borrowed into English. Most of them are nautical terms and were mainly borrowed in the 14-th century, such as: freight, skipper, pump, keel, dock, reef, deck, leak and many others.
Besides two
main groups of borrowings (Romanic and Germanic) there are also borrowings
from a lot of other languages. We shall speak about Russian borrowings,
borrowings from the language, which belongs to Slavoninc languages.
Russian borrowings.
There were constant contacts between England and Russia and they borrowed words from one language into the other. Among early Russian borrowings there are mainly words connected with trade relations, such as: rouble, copeck, pood, sterlet, vodka, sable, and also words relating to nature, such as: taiga, tundra, steppe etc.
There is also a large group of Russian borrowings which came into English through Rushian literature of the 19-th century, such as : Narodnik, moujik, duma, zemstvo. volost, ukase etc, and also words which were formed in Russian with Latin roots, such as: nihilist, intelligenzia, Decembrist etc.
After the Great October Revolution many new words appeared in Russian connected with the new political system, new culture, and many of them were borrowed into English, such as: collectivization. udarnik, Komsomol etc and also translation loans, such as: shock worker, collective farm, five-year plan etc.
One more group of Russian borrowings is connected with perestroika, such as: glasnost, nomenklatura, apparatchik etc.