Words of native origin in English. Semantic and stylistic characteristics of native words. Word-forming ability of native words.

According to the origin, the word-stock of English may be subdivided into two main sets – native and borrowed (loanwords).
Native Words
A native word is a word which belongs to the original English stock, as known from the Old English period. The native words are further subdivided into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin.
The words of Indo-European origin are mainly terms of kinship (e.g. father, mother, son), terms from nature (e.g. sun, moon, water, tree), names of animals and birds, (e.g. bull, cat, wolf), parts of the human body (e.g. arm, eye, foot), most frequent verbs (e.g. come, sit, stand) and others.
A bigger part of the native vocabulary is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock. These words have parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc. The number of semantic groups is bigger than those of Indo-European origin. Their character is mainly general. E.g.: summer, winter, rain, bridge, house, shop, shirt, shoe, life, need, to bake, to buy, to learn, to make, to see, and many others.
Native words constitute about 80 % of the 500 most frequent words in English. They may be characterized bya high lexical and grammatical valency (ability to combine with other words), high frequency and developed polysemy. They are often monosyllabic, have great wordbuilding power and enter a number of set expressions.

Most of the native words have undergone great changes in their semantic structure, and as a result are nowadays polysemantic, e.g. the word finger does not only denote a part of a hand as in Old English, but also 1) the part of a glove covering one of the fingers, 2) a finger-like part in various machines, 3) a hand of a clock, 4) an index, 5) a unit of measurement. Highly polysemantic are the words man, head, hand, go, etc.

36. Etymological survey of the English language: sources and types of borrowings. (По типам чет нихера не нашел).

The English language happened to come in long and close contact with several other languages, mainly Latin, French and Old Norse (or Scandinavian). Investigations have shown that the flow of borrowings has been steady and uninterrupted. The greatest number has come from French (e.g. air, place, brave). They refer to various fields of social-political, scientific and cultural life. A large portion of borrowings (41%) is scientific and technical terms.

The number and character of borrowings do not only depend on the historical conditions, on the nature and length of the contacts, but also on the degree of the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned. The closer the languages, the deeper and more versatile is the influence.This largely accounts for the well-marked contrast between the French and the Scandinavian influence on the English language. Thus under the influence of the Scandinavian languages, which were closely related to Old English, some classes of words were borrowed that could not have been adopted from non-related or distantly related languages (the pronouns they, their, them, for instance); a number of Scandinavian borrowings were felt as derived from native words (they were of the same root and the connection between them was easily seen), e.g. drop (AS.) — drip (Scand); the Scandinavian influence even accelerated to a certain degree the development of the grammatical structure

of English.