Etymological survey of Modern English
The reason of borrowings:
1. to fill a gap in vocabulary
«Potato»,»tomato» from Spanish when appeared in English (these vegetables)
2. It represents the same concept but in some aspect: a new shade of meaning. Ex.: friendly-cordial (Latin), Desire(French)-wish, Admire(Latin)-adore( French)
When borrowed words become assimilated in the language and the process of assimilation develops to the point when it’s practically impossible to recognize the origin of a word. Ex.: cat, dinner, cup
Other words bear trace of their background.
Ex.: distance, development (French suffixes); Skin, sky (Scandinavian); Police, garage, cafe (French) Stress on the last syllable.
Some Norman borrowings have become fully adopted, no phonetic traces of their French origin: table.
«Big in size» as first it retained a trace of it’s former meaning «wide» because it was applied to object with vast horizontal dimension.
Nowadays it has approached very closely to the word «big».
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