Prace komisji nauk.pdf - Instytut Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu ...

The second example. The official Dutch name of what the English call a
roundabout and the Americans a traffic circle is rotonde, from French/Italian
rotunda (Polish rotunda). The principle is known: at a crossing cars are driving
around a circus and as long as they are on the roundabout, they have right of
way. Dutch children can speak of a rondtonde. They connects the word with
“rond” = “round”. This is quite understandable: a roundabout (it is even present
in the English word) is round. The underlying hypothesis is: a similar meaning
requires a similar form. In historical linguistics we speak of folk etymology in
such a case. But it is so-called folk etymology: the folk, the people don’t
etymologize properly like a real etymologist does. In many cases, the result of
folk etymology is that forms, often of foreign origin, become more transparent.
Summary 2
We have also to take into account the role of the children in language change.
New forms can be created by them and taken with them into adulthood. But the
difference to adult speakers is not absolute. Adults remain children to a certain
extent: we can also find analogies, folk etymologies, semantic differentiations in
the speech of adults. And we cannot exclude avoidance of homonymy and ease
of articulation in the speech of children. Children are also language users and
adults keep acquiring their language. Analogy especially is a frequent
phenomenon in the speech of adults. It is an important way of making new
expressions. A fairly new English word is to computerize; it is formed by
analogy to already existing words with the suffix –ize, for instance to
automatize. Think also of computer centre, an example of composition, of
computer and centre, formed by analogy to already existing compositions with
centre, e.g. television centre. Composition is a very popular way of word
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