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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