Cosmopolitan Vocabulary

One of the most obvious characteristics of Present-day English is the size and mixed character of its vocabulary. English is classified as a Germanic language. That is to say, it belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian also belong. It shares with these languages similar grammatical structure and many common words. On the other hand, more than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been direct, a great many through French, some through the other Romance languages. As a result, English also shares a great number of words with those languages of Europe that are derived from Latin, notably French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. All of this means that English presents a somewhat familiar appearance to anyone who speaks either a Germanic or a Romance language. There are parts of the language which one feels one does not have to learn, or learns with little effort. To a lesser extent the English vocabulary contains borrowings from many other languages. Instead of making new words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, as German does, English has shown a marked tendency to go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual capacity for assimilating outside elements. We do not feel that there is anything “foreign” about the words chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, and skunk, all of which we have borrowed from the Native American. We are not conscious that the words brandy, cruller, landscape, measles, uproar, and wagon are from Dutch. And so with many other words in daily use. From Italian come balcony, canto, duet, granite, opera, piano, umbrella, volcano; from Spanish, alligator, cargo, contraband, cork, hammock, mosquito, sherry, stampede, tornado, vanilla; from Greek, directly or indirectly, acme, acrobat, anthology, barometer, catarrh, catastrophe, chronology, elastic, magic, tactics, tantalize, and a host of others; from Russian, steppe, vodka, ruble, troika, glasnost, perestroika; from Persian, caravan, dervish, divan, khaki, mogul, shawl, sherbet, and ultimately from Persian jasmine, paradise, check, chess, lemon, lilac, turban, borax, and possibly spinach. A few minutes spent in the examination of any good etymological dictionary will show that English has borrowed from Hebrew and Arabic, Hungarian, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Chinese, the languages of Java, Australia, Tahiti, Polynesia, West Africa, and from one of the aboriginal languages of Brazil. And it has assimilated these heterogeneous elements so successfully that only the professional student of language is aware of their origin. Studies of vocabulary acquisition in second language learning support the impression that many students have had in studying a foreign language: Despite problems with faux amis—those words that have different meanings in two different languages—cognates generally are learned more rapidly and retained longer than words that are unrelated towords in the native language lexicon. The cosmopolitan vocabulary of English with its cognates in many languages is an undoubted asset.