LATIN BORROWINGS DENOTING AN INHABITED PLACE IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN: HISTORICAL ASPECT

Abstract

The article deals with Latin borrowings denoting an inhabited place and the ways they enter the West Germanic languages, namely English and German. The notion of an inhabited place reflects the realia, which is connected with the compact living of a group of individuals on a certain territory. The research is based on the principles of anthropocentrism, lexical semantics, etymology and historical linguistics. The paper argues that etymological aspect is one of the most important in understanding the development and evolution of the lexeme. The paper aims at singling out and classifying Latin borrowings with the seme ‘inhabited place’ in the West Germanic Languages. Etymological analysis used in the research helped to characterize borrowed appellatives. Contrasting method singled out common and divergent features in the development of Latin borrowings in English and German. It is stated that English and German are prominent for the enriching their vocabulary due to borrowings from Latin. A great deal of Latin elements entered the languages at different historical stages. Several groups of Latin borrowings were singled out in the research according to their evolution in the analyzed languages and the period they were borrowed. These groups combined borrowings with the following features: Common Germanic lexemes which show both the modification of form and meaning saving the seme ‘inhabited place’ in one of the languages at present; early Latin borrowings which lose the meaning of an inhabited place in both languages; words which demonstrate the different evolution of their semantic structure and develop the meaning of an inhabited place in one of the languages; borrowings which save the seme ‘inhabited place’ with certain modifications of meaning in both English and German; lexemes which have the seme at the time of borrowing but lose it later in one of the languages; appellatives which enter German directly and English via French; English appellatives that do not have correspondences in German and enter the language via Old and Middle French.