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considered to be 'foreign' when the objects or ideas they refer to are largely restricted to an alien culture. One respondent to our questionnaire has this to say about wok: 'Of course it is a Chinese word. I never use the word because I don't use the thing.' A word like tea is considered to be English partly because its referent has become very much a part of the life of the English-speaking world. Using familiarity with the objects designated by the words as the sole yardstick would exclude thousands upon thousands of words listed in various standard dictionaries from the English word stock, among many other words like fo from 佛, petunse from 白墩子 'China stone', and loquat from 蘆橘. This criterion must therefore be supplemented.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "The Vocabulary of widely-diffused and highly-cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits. So the English Vocabulary contains a nucleus or central mass of many thousands of words whose "Anglicity" is unquestioned; some of them only literary, some of them only colloquial, the great majority at once literary and colloquial, they are the common words of the language. But they are linked on every side with other words which are less and less entitled to this appellation, and which pertain ever more and more distinctly to the domain of local dialect, of the slang and cant of "sets" and classes, of the peculiar technicalities of trades and professions, of the scientific terminology common to all civilized nations, of the actual languages of other lands and peoples. And there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference'. (xxvii) The phrase that is of special interest to us is 'the actual language of other lands and peoples'. Of the words in the English vocabulary some would be, in the words of the O.E.D. 'originally native', and could be traced to 'their earliest English, or earliest Teutonic form', (xxxi) but an English word may also have been ‘adopted from some foreign language, i.e., it is a word once foreign, but now, without or with intentional change of form, used as English'. (xxx)
I have said that the line dividing English words from ‘foreign' words cannot always be sharply drawn. A word may be
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considered to be 'foreign' when the objects or ideas they refer to are largely restricted to an alien culture. One respondent to our questionnaire has this to say about wok: 'Of course it is a Chinese word. I never use the word because I don't use the thing.' A word like tea is considered to be English partly because its referent has become very much a part of the life of the English- speaking world. Using familiarity with the objects designated by the words as the sole yardstick would exclude thousands upon thousands of words listed in various standard dictionaries from the English word stock, among many other words like fo from 佛, petunse from 白墩子 China stone', and loquat from 蘆橘, This criterion must therefore be supplemented.
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "The Vocabulary of widely-diffused and highly-cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits. So the English Vocabulary contains a nucleus or central mass of many thousands of words whose "Anglicity" is unquestioned; some of them only literary, some of them only colloquial, the great majority at once literary and colloquial, they are the common words of the language. But they are linked on every side with other words which are less and less entitled to this appellation, and which pertain ever more and more distinctly to the domain of local dialect, of the slang and cant of "sets" and classes, of the peculiar technicalities of trades and professions, of the scientific terminology common to all civilized nations, of the actual languages of other lands and peoples. And there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference'. (xxvii) The phrase that is of special interest to us is 'the actual language of other lands and peoples'. Of the words in the English vocabulary some would be, in the words of the O.E.D. 'originally native', and could be traced to 'their earliest English, or earliest Teutonic form', (xxxi) but an English word may also have been ‘adopted from some foreign language, i.e, it is a word once foreign, but now, without or with intentional change of form, used as English'. (xxx)
I have said that the line dividing English words from ‘foreign' words cannot always be sharply drawn. A word may be
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