[VICTORIA_FROMKIN,_ROBERT_RODMAN_and_NINA_HYAMS]_A(BookZa.org)

1. Lexical Change

2. Lexical Change
Changes in the lexicon also occur, among which
are changes in the lexical categories
•of words (i.e., their “parts of speech”),
addition of new words, the “borrowing”
•of words from another language, the loss of
words, and the shift in the
meaning of words over time.

3. Change in Category
•The words food and verb are ordinarily used
as nouns, but Bucky the cat refuses
•to be so restricted and “wordifies” them into
verbs. If we speakers of English
•adopt Bucky’s usage, then food and verb will
become verbs in addition to nouns.

4. Recently, a radio announcer said that Congress was “to-ing and fro-ing” on a
certain issue, to mean “wavering.” This strange compound verb is derived from
the adverb to and fro.~1
In British English, hoover is a verb meaning “to vacuum
up,” derived from the proper noun Hoover, the name of
a vacuum cleaner manufacturer.
More recently the noun text has been “verbed” and
means “to communicate by text message,” and even
more recent is the hijacking of the verb twitter as the
name of a social networking and micro-blogging service.

5. Word Coinage
Words may be created outright to fit some purpose
The advertising industry has added many words to English, such
as Kodak, nylon, Orlon, and Dacron.
Specific brand names such as Xerox, Band-Aid, Kleenex, Jell-O,
Brillo, andVaseline are now sometimes used as the generic name
for different brands of these types of products. Some of these
words were actually created from existing
words (e.g., Kleenex from the word clean and Jell-O from gel).

6. Greek roots borrowed into English have also provided a means
for coining new
words. Thermos “hot” plus metron “measure” gave us
thermometer. From akros
“topmost” and phobia “fear,” we get acrophobia, “dread of
heights.” To avoid
going out on Friday the thirteenth, you may say that you have
triskaidekaphobia,
a profound fear of the number 13. An ingenious cartoonist,
Robert Osborn, has
“invented” some phobias, to each of which he gives an
appropriate name:ia

7. logizomechanophobia
“fear of reckoning
machines” from Greek
logizomai
“to reckon or compute” +
mekhane “device” +
phobia
ellipsosyllabophobia
“fear of words with a
missing syllable” from
Greek elleipsis “a falling
short” + syllabē “syllable”
+ phobia
pornophobia “fear of prostitutes” from
Greek porne “harlot” +
phobia

8. Latin, like Greek, has also provided prefixes and suffixes that are used productively
with both native and nonnative roots. The prefix ex- comes from Latin:
ex-husband ex-wife ex-sister-in-law ex-teacher
The suffix -able/-ible is also Latin and can be attached to almost any English verb:
writable readable answerable movable learnable

9. Words from Names
sandwich Named for the fourth Earl of
Sandwich, who put his food
between two slices of bread so that he
could eat while he
gambled

10. robot After the mechanical creatures in the Czech writer Karel
Capek’s play R.U.R., the initials standing for “Rossum’s Universal
Robots.
gargantuan Named for Gargantua, the creature with a huge
appetite created
by Rabelais.
jumbo After an elephant brought to the United States by P. T.
Barnum.
(“Jumbo olives” need not be as big as an elephant,
however.)
.

11. We admit to ignorance of the Susan, an unknown servant from whom
the compound lazy susan is derived; or the Betty or Charlotte or Chuck
from whom we got brown betty, charlotte russe, or chuck wagon. We
can point out, however, that denim was named for the material used
for overalls and carpeting, which originally was imported de Nîmes
(“from Nîmes”) in France, and argyle from the kind of socks worn by
the chiefs of Argyll of the Campbell clan in Scotland. The word
paparazzo, “a freelance photographer who doggedly pursues
celebrities,” was a little-known word until the death of Princess Diana
in 1997, who was hounded by paparazzi (plural) before her fatal
automobile accident. This eponym comes from the news photographer
character Signor Paparazzo in the motion picture La Dolce Vita

12. Blends are similar to compounds in that they are produced by
combining two words, but parts of the words that are
combined are deleted. Smog, from smoke + fog; brunch, from
breakfast and lunch; motel, from motor + hotel; infomercial,
from info + commercial; and urinalysis, from urine + analysis
are examples of blends that have attained full lexical status in
English. Podcast (podcasting, podcaster) is a relatively new
word meaning “Internet audio broadcast” and recently joined
the English language as a blend of iPod and broadcast. Lewis
Carroll’s chortle, from chuckle + snort, has achieved limited
acceptance in English

13. Carroll is famous for both coining and blending words. In Through the
Looking-Glass, he describes the “meanings” of the made-up words in
“Jabberwocky” as follows:
. . . “Brillig” means four o’ clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin
broiling things for dinner . . . “Slithy” means “lithe and slimy” . . . You see it’s
like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. . . .
“Toves” are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and
they’re something like corkscrews . . . also they make their nests under sun-
dials—also they live on cheese. . . . To “gyre” is to go round and round like a
gyroscope. To “gimble” is to make holes like a gimlet. And “the wabe” is the
grass-plot round a sun-dial . . . It’s called “wabe” . . . because it goes a long
way before it and a long way behind it. . . . “Mimsy” is “flimsy and miserable”
(there’s another portmanteau . . . for you).

14. ReducedWords
Speakers tend to abbreviate words in various ways to
shorten the messages they convey. We used to find this
in telegrams and telexes. Now it is seen dramatically in
the creativity used on messages typed into cell phones
in text messaging and similar communication
technologies. However, we will concern ourselves with
spoken language and observe three reduction
phenomena: clipping, acronyms, and alphabetic abbreviations.

15. Clipping
is the abbreviation of longer words into shorter ones, such as fax
for facsimile, the British word telly for television, prof for
professor, piano for pianoforte, and gym for gymnasium. Once
considered slang, these words have now become lexicalized, that
is, full words in their own right. These are only a few examples of
such clipped forms that are now used as whole words. Other
examples are ad, bike, math, gas, phone, bus, and van (from
advertisement, bicycle, mathematics, gasoline, telephone,
omnibus, and caravan). More recently, dis and rad (from
disrespect and radical) have entered the language, and dis has
come to be used as a verb meaning “to show disrespect

16. Acronyms
are words derived from the initials of several words. Such words
are pronounced as the spelling indicates: NASA [næsə] from
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, UNESCO
[yunɛsko] from United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural organization, and UNICEF [yunisɛf] from United Nations
International Children’s Emergency Fund. Radar from “radio
detecting and ranging,” laser from “light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation,” scuba from “self-contained
underwater breathing apparatus,” and RAM from “random
access memory” show the creative efforts of word coiners, as
does snafu, which was coined by soldiers in World War II and is
rendered in polite circles as “situation normal, all fouled up.”
Recently coined additions are
AIDS (1980s), from the initials of acquired immune deficiency
syndrome, and SARS (2000s), from severe acute respiratory syndrome.

17. When the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word, the “acronym” is
produced by sounding out each letter, as in NFL [ɛ̃nɛfɛl] for National Football
League, UCLA [yusiɛle] for University of California, Los Angeles, and MRI [ɛ̃maraɪ]
for magnetic resonance imaging. These special kinds of acronyms are sometimes
called alphabetic abbreviations.
Acronyms and alphabetic abbreviations are being added to the
vocabulary daily with the proliferation of computers and widespread use of the
Internet, including blog (web log), jpeg (joint photographics expert group), GUI,
pronounced
“gooey,” for graphical user interface, PDA (personal digital assistant), and MP3
for MPEG layer 3, where MPEG itself is the acronym for moving picture experts
group.
Unbelievable though it may seem, acronyms in use somewhere in the
Englishspeaking world number into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of
thousands, a dramatic nod to the creativity and changeability of human language

18. Languages pay little attention to Polonius’s admonition quoted above, and
many are avid borrowers and lenders. Borrowing words from other languages is
an important source of new words, which are called loan words. Borrowing
occurs when one language adds a word or morpheme from another language
to its own lexicon. This often happens in situations of language contact, when
speakers of
different languages regularly interact with one another, and especially where
there are many bilingual or multilingual speakers.
The pronunciation of loan words is often (but not always) altered to fit the
phonological rules of the borrowing language. For example, English borrowed
ensemble [ãsãbəl] from French but pronounce it [ãnsãmbəl], with [n] and [m]
inserted, because English doesn’t ordinarily have syllables centered on nasal
vowels alone. Other borrowed words such as the composer’s name Bach will
often be pronounced as the original German [bax], with a final velar fricative,
even though such a pronunciation does not conform to the rules of
English.

19. History through Loan Words
We may trace the history of the English-speaking peoples by studying the
kinds of loan words in their language, their source, and when they were
borrowed. Until the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Angles, the Saxons, and
the Jutes inhabited England. They were of Germanic origin when they came to
Britain in the fifth century to eventually become the English. Originally, they
spoke Germanic dialects, from which Old English developed. These dialects
contained some Latin borrowings but few foreign elements beyond that. These
Germanic tribes had displaced the earlier Celtic inhabitants, whose influence
on Old En glish was
confined to a few Celtic place names. (The modern languages Welsh, Irish, and
Scots Gaelic are descended from the Celtic dialects.)

20. English has borrowed from Yiddish. Many non-Jews as well as non-
Yiddishspeaking Jews use Yiddish words. There was once even a bumper
sticker proclaiming:
“Marcel Proust is a yenta.” Yenta is a Yiddish word meaning “gossipy
woman.” Lox, meaning “smoked salmon,” and bagel, “a doughnut dipped
in cement,” now belong to English, as well as Yiddish expressions like
chutzpah, schmaltz, schlemiel, schmuck, schmo, schlep, and kibitz.
English is a lender of many words to other languages, especially
in the areas of technology, sports, and entertainment. Words and
expressions such as jazz, whisky, blue jeans, rock music, supermarket,
baseball, picnic, and computer have been borrowed from English into
languages as diverse as Twi, Hungarian,
Russian, and Japanese.

21. Semantic Change
Broadening
When the meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to
mean and more. The Middle English word dogge referred to a specific breed of
dog, but was eventually broadened to encompass all members of the species
canis familiaris. The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance,
from “holy day.” Today the word refers to any day that we do not have to work.
Picture used to mean “painted representation,” but now you can take a picture
with a camera, not to mention a cell phone. Quarantine once had the restricted
meaning of “forty days’ isolation,” and manage once meant simply to handle a
horse

22. Meaning Shifts
The third kind of semantic change that a lexical item may
undergo is a shift in meaning. The word knight once meant
“youth” but shifted to “mounted man-at-arms.” Lust used to
mean simply “pleasure,” with no negative or sexual
overtones. Lewd was merely “ignorant,” and immoral meant
“not customary.” Silly used to mean “happy” in Old English. By
the Middle English period it had come to mean “naive,” and
only in Modern English does it mean “foolish.” The
overworked Modern English word nice meant “ignorant” a
thousand years ago. When Juliet tells Romeo, “I am too fond,”
she is not claiming she likes Romeo too much. She means “I
am too foolish.”