Borrowings from other languages as adoptions of novel cultural influences

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Institut für Fremdsprachliche Philologien), course: English Words as Witnesses of Times, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Reading a newspaper can be challenging and often people wonder about the meaning of a particular word. It would be interesting to know why some words look so unfamiliar and where they are originated, what they mean and how they entered the language. English as a world language is an interesting example in order to look at these questions and answer them. One way words enter a language is they are borrowed from another and it seems that this is true in many cases for English. In the following paper I want to prove that the English language was constantly adopting words due to cultural influences from the outside. First I will give some theoretical background knowledge, followed by a historical overview and an analysis of an example to underline the given facts. In the following I will start to give you a definition of borrowings.