Where Do Words Come From?
Where Do Words Come From?
Historical Development
Ordinarily we pay little attention to the words we speak. We concentrate instead on the meaning we intend to express and are seldom conscious of how we express that meaning. Only if we make a mistake and have to correct it or have difficulty remembering a word do we become conscious of our words. This means that most of us don't know where the words we use come from and how they come to have the meanings they do. Since words play such an important role in our lives, making our life easy or difficult depending on which words we choose on a given occasion, exploring their nature and origin should provide an interesting adventure.English words come from several different sources. They develop naturally over the course of centuries from ancestral languages, they are also borrowed from other languages, and we create many of them by various means of word formation. Each of these sources have made a material impact on the vocabulary available to us today. Let's take a look at all three in order.
Native Words
First of all, it is important to know that languages may be related just like people. You have probably noticed that people from England, Brooklyn, and North Carolina all speak differently. They pronounce the same words differently and they even use different words for the same meaning. The English call the "hood" of a car the "bonnet" and the people in Brooklyn "schlep" things around while people in North Carolina "tote" them.These differences make up what are called dialects and the people in England speak one of several British dialects, the people in Brooklyn speak a Brooklyn dialect, and those in North Carolina speak a Southern dialect. Dialects are variants of a language, variants with slightly different pronunciation, different grammatical rules, and slightly different vocabularies. The interesting thing about dialects is that as they continue to develop over time, the differences become greater and greater until people from one dialect area cannot understand those from another. When this happens, the people from the different dialect areas are speaking different languages.
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