The Influence of Latin to the English Language. Morphological and Lexical Features

Examination Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: Distinction: 9.5/10, University of Jaén, language: English, abstract: This paper examines the enormous productivity of Latin in the English language throughout time. Influences, however, will be remarked on the lexical and morphological fields. Therefore, due to length restrictions, other aspects such as phonology will be overlooked. Firstly, the general linguistic, historical and social contextualization of Latin will be described. In other words, it will be analyzed how Latin came into contact with English.

Afterwards, different periods of influence will be covered, as well as the morphological heritage that the English language took from Latin, ranging from derivation (for example prefixation and suffixation) to inflectional and compound processes. In all cases, the most illustrative examples will be offered. Finally, the etymological explanation will help to establish certain parallelisms between Latin and English. Thereby, it will be essential to state the idea, that English and Latin share numerous similar features, is still present, despite belonging to different language families, as well as their own peculiarities, which is to say, those properties that make both languages different in comparison to other ones.