Phillip Durkin again, this time talking about the path that a borrowed word takes to get into English; he also notes some interesting groups of words that it would be worth learning three of to give as multiple examples, rather than just giving one. If you see a borrowed word on the exam paper, you can link it to other borrowings you know and speculate about the similarities or differences, perhaps about how those words have arrived in English or how they have been modified to integrate well - I thought how the germanic bollwerk became bouelvard because it sounded more French with a classic French noun suffix (-ard) and how the orthography of the central phoneme was altered because w in German produces the sound we associate (as do the French) with v was really interesting. Try and fake interest if nothing could be further from the truth!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26137419
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