II/2: A-prefixing in English

A couple weeks ago I have read – and  listened as well – a song of the newest (2016) Noble Prize winner on literature, Bob Dylan. The lyrics was entitled “The Times They Are a-Changin'” and the title itself contained a strange grammatical form which attracted my attention, and I am not talking about the use of alveoral nasal /n/ instead of velar nasal /ŋ/ in the present participle suffix -ing, marked by -in' notation. This allomorph is quite common for informal English. But why a-?

Obviously, Bob Dylan used it for purpose of obtaining the number of syllables he wanted, but it is not like that he invented an non-existing form or added an accidental syllable. In fact, he used an archaic or – depends on context – a regional form.

There are at least two prefixes having form of a- /ə/ in English, one of Ancient Greek origin (along with its prevocalic allomorph an- /æn-/, used also before the letter 'h'; pronounciated in some words as /eɪ̯/; meaning “not”, used to form antonymes) and one(s) of Germanic origin and it will particularly interest us. For the record, there is also one or three a- originating in Latin ab-, ad- or ex- but they are rare and no longer productive as well as... absent in the Bob Dylan's lyrics.

The Germanic a- has several etymologies confused during development of the Modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary states as follows:

“[I]t naturally happened that all these a- prefixes were at length confusedly lumped together in idea, and the resultant a-looked upon as vaguely intensive, rhetorical, euphonic [nice-sounding], or even archaic, and wholly otiose [pointless].”

One of these a- prefixes can be found in such words as arise or ashame; the second one formed e.g. await; the third one is found in anew.; all of them are no longer productive and, I presume, were confused several centuries ago. The fourth and latter one originating in the preposition a and one of its meaning is “in the act or process of”. We can found the a-prefixing in some folk songs like A-Hunting We Will Go or religious ones like Here We Come A-wassailing; moreover, it is still common in present-day Appallachian and Ozark English (both are subdialects of Southern American White English) until today. You can learn more about this phenomenon here: http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/a-prefixing.

II/1: Polish loanwords in English, Part One

English, being an international and hegemonic language on a level never known before on planet Earth, has a great impact on nearly every possible alive human language. Recently, the largest amount of loanwords (and even suffixes, at least in some slangs) in Polish comes from English; it is also the main source of internationalisms (even if, sometimes, roots of a word are Ancient Greek or Latin). The Polish loanwords in English are not so many. However, the opposite direction is also possible; Polish language is even, sometimes, source of internationalisms. We will look at some examples of them.

1. ogonek /ə'gɔːnɛk/ or /ə'gɒnɛk/ plural: ogoneks – from Polish «ogonek» [ɔ'ɡɔnɛk] (literally: 'a little tail', the diminutive form of ogon – 'a tail'). In English it means «˛», a diactical mark resembling a hook attached beneath (bottom down corner or directly under) a vowel letter of some languages using the Latin alphabet usually to indicate nasalization (with exception of Lithuanian language). It is used also in some scholarly phonetic notations (of Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, Proto-Germanic language, Vulgar Latin and Native American languages), then only in order to indicate nasalization.

Langugages that use ogonek:

From among European languages: Polish, Kashubian (a Lechitic language formerly considered to be a dialect of Polish), Lithuanian (historically to indicate nasalisation, now for the vowel length), Elfdalian (a Scandinavian language traditionally regarded as a dialect of Swedish),

From among Native American languages: Cayuga (a severely endangered Iroquioan language of Canada and United States), Winnebago (a Siouan language of the Great Plains), Dogrib (an Athabascan language of the Northwest Territories of Canada), Creek (a Muscogean language of United States), Navaho (an Athabascan language of United States), Western Apache (closely related to the former one), Mescalero-Chiricahua Apache, Tutchone (a threatened Athabascan language of Canada), Gwich’in (another one Athabascan language, spoken in Alaska, Yukon and the Northwest Territories).

The ogonek is clearly an internationalism.