...The study of language has become a subject of interest for many years. English for instance, has without a doubt become the global language. Whenever we turn on the news to find out what is happening from four corner of the world, local people are being interviewed and telling us about it in English. To be more specific, English is adopted as an internal lingua franca and second language for most Europeans (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Dutch, and France) although English is not treated as an official language in these countries. While in most Asian countries, having English is always associated with having a prestigious job and career. However, people do not realize that English has adopted enormous number of words from various countries in the world since the imperialism and trade kicked off.
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This essay will respectively discuss the various ways that word-formation processes come into a language, adapted from Yule (1996, p.63-70) namely; coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms, derivation, prefixes and suffixes, infixes and multiple processes. Furthermore, this essay will also discuss the implications of word formation for a language learning and teaching process....
Discuss the various ways new words come into a language
Language is at the centre of human life. We use it to express our love or our hatred, to achieve our goals and further our careers, to gain artistic satisfaction or simple pleasure. Through language we plan our lives and remember our past; we exchange ideas, experiences; we form our social and individual identities (Cook, 2001).
The study of language has become a subject of interest for many years. English for instance, has without a doubt become the global language. Whenever we turn on the news to find out what is happening from four corner of the world, local people are being interviewed and telling us about it in English. To be more specific, English is adopted as an internal lingua franca and second language for most Europeans (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Dutch, and France) although English is not treated as an official language in these countries. While in most Asian countries, having English is always associated with having a prestigious job and career. However, people do not realize that English has adopted enormous number of words from various countries in the world since the imperialism and trade kicked off.
In this 21st century, English vocabulary has changed continually over more than 1,500 years of development and this attracts many prominent dictionary-publishing companies to produce dictionaries. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 20 volumes, 1989), contains more than 600,000 words, including obsolete forms and variant spellings. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century.
This essay will respectively discuss the various ways that word-formation processes come into a language, adapted from Yule (1996, p.63-70) namely; coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms, derivation, prefixes and suffixes, infixes and multiple processes. Furthermore, this essay will also discuss the implications of word formation for a language learning and teaching process.
- Coinage (an adoption of brand names as common words)
The word formation of coinage means the invention of totally new words. The most typical sources of coinage process are from trade-invented names of one company’s product, which become general terms (without initial capital letters) for any version of that product. The word Hoover for instance was the trade name of the machine that was used for cleaning and now we use it as a verb. The companies using the names usually have copyrighted them and object to their use in public documents, so they should be avoided in formal writing (or a lawsuit could follow!) Examples: xerox, kleenex, band-aid, kitty litter. According to Wilton (2005) there are basically two types of coining: motivated and ex nihilo. The distinction is that in motivated root creation there is some discernible logic behind the new word; in ex nihilo root creation there is not. One fairly common form of motivated root creation is echoic or onomatopoetic words; words are invented which (to native speakers at least) sound like the sound they name or the entity that produces the sound. Examples: hiss, sizzle, cuckoo, and cock. Ex nihilo root creation has no logic behind it. Examples are grok, invented by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, or googol, which was invented on request by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew.
- Borrowing
One of the most common sources of new words in English is the process called Borrowing: a word is taken from another language. It may be adapted to the borrowing language's phonological system to varying degrees. Examples: skunk, tomato (from indigenous languages of the Americas), sushi, taboo, wok (from Pacific Rim languages), chic, shmuck, macho, spaghetti, psychology, telephone, physician, education (from European languages), hummus, chutzpah, cipher, artichoke (from Semitic languages), yam, tote, banana (from African languages). According to Wilton (2005) there are three reasons for borrowing and each display its own patterns and "rules":
- Domination by another culture. The best example is the Norman domination of England. Norman French became the language of the courts and the aristocracy.
- Close contact between speakers of different languages. This can be seen in the American West with adoption of Spanish words, through the use of pidgins and other trading languages, and in the adoption of words from India and other areas of the British Empire.
- Need. Often a foreign word expresses an idea or a nuance better than existing words. Nouns are frequently adopted for this reason, but not all such words are nouns. Words and phrases such as lassez-faire express ideas that couldn't be easily expressed without adopting the words into English.
Related to my own context, Indonesian language also adopts some loan language from foreign languages. The Dutch colonization left an imprint on the language that can be seen in words such as polisi (police), kualitas (quality), telepon (telephone), bis (bus), kopi (coffee), rokok (cigarette) or universitas (university). There are also some words derived from Portuguese (sabun, soap, jendela, window or gereja, church), Chinese (pisau, knife or dagger; loteng, [upper] floor), Hindi (meja, table; kaca, mirror) and from Arabic (khusus, special; maaf, sorry; selamat ..., a greeting).
- Compounding
Compounding or composition is the use of two or more roots to form a word; for instance, Bookcase is the composition of book and case. One particular type of compounding is the phrasal verb. It is a type of composition where several words combine to form a verb, but instead of combining into a single word they combine into a phrase. Examples are get up, turn about, and take down. Over time, the spaces between the words in the phrase are often lost, forming a single word. Compounding words also can be found in Indonesian language, for instance “kayuapi” which “kayu”=wood and “api”=fire so kayuapi means firewood and “suratkabar”, Surat=letter and kabar=news so suratkabar means newspaper.
There are three common types of compounding process in different language proposed by Wikipedia (2005); compound nouns, verb-noun compound and compound ad positions
1. Compound nouns
Most natural languages have compound nouns and sometimes compound adjectives. The position of the head within a compound often depends on the branching tendency of the language, i. e. the most common order of constituents in phrases where nouns are modified by adjectives, by possessors, by other nouns, etc. While Germanic languages, for example, are left-branching when it comes to noun phrases (the modifiers come before the head), the Romance languages are usually right-branching. In French, compound nouns are often formed by left-hand heads with prepositional components inserted before the modifier, as in chemin-de-fer ("railway", lit. "road of iron") and moulin à vent ("windmill", lit. "mill (that works)-by-means-of wind").
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- Quote paper
- Anne-Katrin Wilking (Author), 2011, How new words come into the language, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/177150
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