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[not verified in body] [4] [page range too broad] English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, [5] and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, [6] with the rest made up of outside ...
In linguistics, borrowing is a type of language change in which a language or dialect undergoes change as a result of contact with another language or dialect. In typical cases of borrowing, speakers of one language (the "recipient" language) adopt into their own speech a novel linguistic feature that they were exposed to due to its presence in a different language (the "source" or "donor ...
The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicisation. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English.
For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English, even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two may be thought of as distinct languages, but Modern English is a "descendant" of its "ancestor" Old English.
Some English words can be written with diacritics; these are mostly loanwords, usually from French. [14] As vocabulary becomes naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, rôle and hôtel originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accents are almost ...
English does have some words that are associated with gender, but it does not have a true grammatical gender system. "English used to have grammatical gender. We started losing it as a language ...
In other cases the term may be calqued (loan translated) at some stage, such as English ready-to-wear → French prêt-à-porter (1951) → English prêt-à-porter (1957). [ 1 ] In some cases the borrowing process can be more complicated and the words might move through different languages before coming back to the originating language.
An exception to this is Hong Kong Cantonese, which has many words from English due to British rule in the city until 1997. [26] Taiwan also tends to borrow more words directly from English. [25] However, English grammar did have an influence on Chinese due to the amount of material being translated between the two languages during the ...