The most characteristic feature of English is its mixed character. While it is wrong to speak of the mixed character of the language as a whole, the com-posite nature of the English vocabulary cannot be denied.
Some special terms:
1. native words - words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British
Isles from the continent in the 5th century by the Germanic tribes - the Angles,
the Saxons and the Jutes;
2. borrowing - l)the process of adopting words from other languages and
2) the result of this process. Not only words, but also word-building affixes
were borrowed into English (-able, -ment, -ity). Some word-groups, too, were
borrowed in their foreign form (coup-d'etat, vis-a-vis).
In the second meaning the term borrowing is also used to denote translation-loans, or loan-translations (êàëüêè) - words and expressions formed from the language material under the influence of some foreign words and expressions, e.g.: mother tongue < L. lingua materna, it goes without saying < Fr. cela va sans dire, wall newspaper < Russ. ñòåíãàçåòà.
3. The term source of borrowing is applied to the language from which a
particular word was taken into English. The term origin of the _word should
be applied to the language the word may be traced to. E.g., the French borrow
ing table is Latin by origin (L. tabula), the Latin borrowing school came into
Latin from the Greek language (Gr. schole).
Whereas the source of borrowing is as a rule known and can be stated with some certainty, the actual origin of the word may be rather doubtful.