XLVII The Pronunciation of Latin Learned Loan Words and Foreign Words in Old English

Abstract

The obvious and very necessary distinction between learned and popular loan words was first made by A. Pogatscher in his Zur Lautlehre der griechischen, lateinischen und romanischen Lehnworte im Altenglischen. E. Sievers made a further division, realizing that a distinction, recognized by Pogatscher (for example, on p. 31), but not stressed by him sufficiently for Sievers's purposes, should be made between two classes of learned borrowings. With an approach somewhat different from that of Pogatscher, he at first distinguishes two groups, loan words (Lehnwörter) and foreign words (Fremdwörter), designating by the former term such words as are a part of the vocabulary of living communication and bear a more or less native stamp; by the latter, such words as exist for the most part only in learned literature and are distinctly felt as foreign, such as proper names like Caesar and Suetonius. The loan words of his first division Sievers further subdivides into popular loan words, the earliest of all borrowings, and learned loan words, taken over later than the popular words and owing their adoption to more or less cultural influences such as, in the case of the Old English learned borrowings, the church. These last are to be distinguished, he points out, from foreign words in that they are part of a living vocabulary, even though their use is limited to a certain class of speakers. What Sievers has done simply amounts to extracting from Pogatscher's learned loan words those bookish words which are distinctly felt as foreign and making of them a third class, which he calls foreign words.