Loanwords

10 Key excerpts on "Loanwords"

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  Aspects of Language Contact

  New Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Findings with Special Focus on Romancisation Processes

  • Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker, Rosa Salas Palomo, Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker, Rosa Salas Palomo(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The list consists of 1460 lexical meanings, most of which are taken from Mary Ritchie Key’s Intercontinental Dic-tionary Series . 3 Each chapter consists of a data part and a discussion part: the data is a list of those words on the project list that can be identified as Loanwords, plus perhaps other Loanwords whose meanings are more spe-cialized and hence do not appear on the project list. In addition, the source of each loanword is identified to the extent that it is known. The discussion part attempts to generalize over the data and puts the loanword into the relevant context (structural, historical, cultural, etc.), trying to explain why these words and no others were borrowed. While the data part is relatively standardized, authors have a lot of freedom in the discussion part. The remainder of this paper will mention a few general issues that will be relevant for any project that studies lexical borrowability in a compara-tive perspective. 3. Kinds of Loanwords Let me start with some terminology. It is now customary to use the terms recipient language for the language that acquires a loanword and donor lan-guage for the language that is the source of the loanword. A loanword can be defined as a word that is transferred from a donor language to a recipient language, and it should not necessarily be equated with “borrowed word”, because some linguists define borrowing in a narrow way that excludes the effects of shift-induced interference or substrate (e.g. Thomason and Kauf-man 1988: 37ff.). More general terms for contact-induced change are trans-fer and copying (Johanson 2002). According to Ross (1991), two other kinds of contact situations need to be distinguished, in addition to typical borrowing and typical shift-induced interference. He notes that typical borrowing is created by native speakers who consciously import a word from another language, whereas typical shift-induced interference is created by non-native speakers who uncon-

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  Anglicisms in German

  • Alexander Onysko(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  This argument takes the issue of loan meaning to the level of cultural considerations. As a phenomenon of language contact, borrowing is indeed a culturally induced process. A functional scenario of how words are borrowed today is that products and ideas (i.e. concrete and abstract entities) originate in a certain language-cultural area and spread from this to other language-cultural areas if there is cultural pressure and a linguistic need to refer to a concept in the RL. Examples of recent terminology that has diffused to a variety of languages are anglicisms from the fields of computer-technology, business, leisure industry, fashion, and communication such as Boom, Internet, E-Mail, Computer, Design, E-Commerce, Hightech, Online, Deal, Rap, and Web to name but a few. The new concepts are commonly integrated together with their original names and, functionally, these Loanwords enrich the semantic inventory in the receptor language. Since word forms are tied to meaning, the examples above constitute semantic borrowing. This is merely indicative of the interrelation of form and meaning as the basic characteristic of language. To assume that meaning is borrowed without form violates the concept of the double entity of the linguistic unit (cf. Holdcroft 1991: 50-51). Applying this argument to our initial definition of loan meaning, the conclusion can be drawn that the postulate of loan meaning as meaning borrowed without form contradicts the nature of language. Meaning is accessed through form or, in other words, form evokes meaning depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts. In terms of language influence this means that borrowing phenomena are discernible on the level of word form since signs generally change across languages whereas the concepts that are signified (i.e. the meaning of the signs) are more likely to remain the same or similar. For

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  Loanwords in the Chinese Language

  • Shi Youwei(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 An overview of Chinese loanword studies

  6.1 Areas of loanword studies

  The linguistic, cultural, and social functions intrinsic to any lexicon mean that the loanword, as part and parcel of it, is the semiotic integration of language, culture, and society. From that, we can explore the following five areas, which each include further concentrations for loanword studies.

  With loanword studies a part of language research, we may have an investigation of:

  1. The etymology of the loanword to examine which language it comes from and the lexical and semantic origin of the word
  2. Lexical identity, such as criteria to be used to determine the identity, qualifications, tier, and type of the loanword, and to prevent any false or pseudo-words from entering into the category or to remove such words which have already entered
  3. Lexical composition to analyze the various representation forms and modes of composition so as to help determine the type and stratum of the loanword
  4. Semantic evolution to ascertain the initial meaning of the word at the time of borrowing and how it has evolved into the present meaning
  5. Written representation to analyze how the loanword is presented in writing and how it affects the borrowing language and its loanword assimilation in order to work out a viable scheme for written representation
  6. Phonetic representation: how the loanword is actually pronounced in real life and how it phonetically varies between different geographic regions and demographic communities
  7. Linguistic impact: how the loanword influences the borrowing language in terms of word formation, phonetics, syntax, pragmatics, and rhetoric, and how it affects the lexicon of the language as a whole

  With loanword studies part of cultural studies, we may examine through Loanwords:

  • 8 Cultural exchange: the background of the cultural exchange behind the lexical borrowing, the trajectory of the borrowing, the cause and effect, the driving forces or the potential resistance, and its resolution in such exchanges

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  Universal or Diverse Paths to English Phonology

  • Ulrike Gut, Robert Fuchs, Eva-Maria Wunder, Ulrike Gut, Robert Fuchs, Eva-Maria Wunder(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2. Unlimited/infinite set of vocabulary. (Hence, called Loanwords and not loan- language) (Hence, called second language and not second word/vocabulary) 3. Only “words” from another language are adopted. So, one may not be aware of the syntax or the morphology of the L2. Use of words of the L2 in sentences of the L1. So, dictated by faithfulness to the morphosyntax and phonology of the L1. 3. Acquisition of an L2/L3 involves learning not just words, but the phonology, the syntax, the semantics and the morphology of the L2/L3 and involves the use of “full sentences” in the second language. So, dictated by faithfulness to the morphosyntax and phonology of the L2/L3. 4. Product of the historical/diachronic development of a language in a language contact situation – phylogenesis. 4. Product of the development of a language in an individual -ontogenesis.

  2 Statement of the problem

  With regard to English Loanwords in Bangla, we find that the phonological changes that they undergo are different from the changes we perceive in some Sanskrit or Arabic loans. We note that an important factor that has been ignored in studies on loanword adaptation is the following:

  The Many-to-One Problem:

  Most studies focus on one source language and one target language, e.g. English Loanwords in Korean or Japanese, French loans in Arabic and so on. There are no studies of Loanwords in multilingual contexts where there may be two or more source languages. Different repair strategies may be perceived in Loanwords adopted from different languages at different times. For example, the borrowing language may use the repair strategy of deletion when incorporating Loanwords from Language A at one point of time, whereas it may use epenthesis for Language B at another point of time, for the common problem of avoidance of a complex coda or onset. For example, an English word like cream could be incorporated as /kəri:m/ by epenthesis of a vowel to avoid the complex sequence /kr/ in the onset of the syllable, whereas a Hindi word with a complex onset like / / may be pronounced as /

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  Lexical borrowing and deborrowing in Spanish in New York City

  Towards a synthesis of the social correlates of lexical use and diffusion in immigrant contexts

  • Rachel Varra(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  An established loanword is a linguistically integrated foreign-origin word that is “widely used in the speech community, and (has) achieved a certain level of recognition or acceptance, if not normative approval” (Poplack, Sankoff & Miller 1988: 52). Lexical borrowing “involves the incorporation of individual L2 words (…) into discourse of L1” (Poplack, Sankoff & Miller 1988: 52). In other words, lexical borrowing refers to a word that is in the social and linguistic processes of being adopted and adapted. Finally, codeswitching refers to a linguistic process of speaking one language and then another in discourse, without either language influencing the linguistic patterns of the other (Poplack 1980; Poplack & Sankoff 1984: 102). 18 In general, for Poplack, Loanwords and lexical borrowings are necessarily single-word strings. Codeswitches, while mainly referring to multiple-word foreign-origin strings, can also theoretically be single foreign-origin words. To distinguish between single-word borrowings and Loanwords, on the one hand, and single-word codeswitches on the other, Poplack and her colleagues have relied upon the morphosyntactic and phonological behavior of these strings. In particular, the tendency is to claim that if the string is morphophonologically similar to that of recipient language vocabulary, then the string is a lexical borrowing. 19 If not, then it is a (single-word) codeswitch. While the general terminological and theoretical framework presented by Poplack is essentially that which is adopted for this work, the use of recipient language phonology and morphology to make the lexical borrowing~codeswitch distinction is theoretically infelicitous and problematic practically

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  Language Contact. Volume 1

  • Jeroen Darquennes, Joseph C. Salmons, Wim Vandenbussche, Jeroen Darquennes, Joseph C. Salmons, Wim Vandenbussche(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  As the native vocabularies of the world’s languages grow, they rarely remain self-sufficient, attracting instead elements or forms from other languages. And as language contact seems to be the norm, borrowing is a common means of vocabulary expansion. According to Geeraerts (2015: 422), “borrowing competes with morphological word formation for being the most common, the most productive lexicogenetic mechanism”. In other words, lexical creativity is furnished mainly either by use of native morphology (and processes like derivational affixation) or by introduction of foreign loans, and less so by pure neologism or by transformation of existing words (through processes such as clipping, blending, and acronym creation).

  Haugen (1950) and Fischer (2003) give detailed descriptions of the typology of loans. Loanwords, perhaps the most common type of vocabulary expansion through contact, are whole words borrowed from another language in form and meaning. Yoghourt from Turkish and sushi from Japanese are examples of Loanwords in English. Loan translations, or calques, are replications of the structure of foreign language words or expressions using synonymous native word forms. Uranoksístis , in Greek, is a loan translation of the English ‘skyscraper’, a compound of uranós (‘sky’) and ksíno (‘to scrape’). Loan blends combine both direct borrowing and native substitution of morphs in complex borrowed words. The German word Grüngrocer was coined by combining the German grün (‘ green’), with the English ‘grocer’. Semantic loans are words whose meaning is extended as a result of association with the meaning of a partly synonymous word in a foreign language (see Chapter 4 for details on contact-induced semantic change). For example, the English verb ‘to realize’ means both ‘to make something become true’ and ‘to become aware of something’. The German verb realisieren

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  Trask's Historical Linguistics

  • Robert McColl Millar, Larry Trask(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are, in fact, many different ways of acquiring new words, some of them very common, others rather unusual. In this chapter we will review these sources of new words, beginning with the simplest and most obvious source of all.

  2.1 Borrowing

  At present there are some 6,000 different languages spoken on our planet; every one of these languages has a vocabulary containing many thousands of words. Moreover, speakers of every one of these languages are in contact with neighbours who speak different languages this is true today even for people living on remote Pacific islands on which they had previously been isolated for centuries. Consequently, everybody is in a position to learn some of the words used by their neighbours, and very frequently people take a liking to some of their neighbours’ words and take those words over into their own language. So, for example, the word glasnost was taken into English from Russian in the mid-1980s to denote the new political and social climate initiated by President Gorbachev in the former USSR, and, by extension, greater openness in any organization, just as the Russians had earlier taken the word vokzal from English to denote a mainline railway station (at the time, Vauxhall Station in London was a particularly important station).

  This process is somewhat curiously called borrowing – ‘curiously’, because, of course, the lending language does not lose the use of the word, nor does the borrowing language intend to give it back. A better term might be ‘copying’, but ‘borrowing’ has long been established in this sense. Words that are borrowed are called loan words.

  Such borrowing is one of the most frequent ways of acquiring new words, and speakers of all languages do it. English-speakers have long been globally among the most enthusiastic borrowers of other people’s words and many, many thousands of English words have been acquired in just this way. We get kayak from an Eskimo language, whisky from Scottish Gaelic, ukulele from Hawaiian, yoghurt from Turkish, mayonnaise from French, algebra from Arabic, sherry from Spanish, ski from Norwegian, waltz from German and kangaroo

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  Studies by Einar Haugen

  Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, April 19, 1971

  • Evelyn S. Firchow(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The term is ambiguous because it can mean either that the language has adopted elements of foreign origin at some time in the past, or that it shows mutually in-consistent elements in its present-day structure as a result of such adoption. Yet we know that great numbers of words in English which once were adopted are now quite indistinguishable from native words by any synchronic test. Schuchardt insisted that all languages were mixed, but in saying this he gave the word so wide an application that its value for characterizing individual languages would seem to be greatly reduced. In some circles the term 'mixed' or 'hybrid' has actually acquired a pejorative sense, so that reformers have set to work 'purifying' the language without seeing clearly what they were about. For the reasons here given, the term 'mixture' is not used in the present discussion. It may have its place in a popularized presentation of the 4 Paul, Prinzipien 338; Meillet, La méthode comparative 82 (Oslo, 1925); Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique générale 76 (Paris, 1921). THE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC BORROWING 163 problem, but in technical discussion it is more usefully replaced by the term 'borrowing', which we shall now proceed to define. 3. A DEFINITION OF BORROWING At first blush the term 'borrowing' might seem to be almost as inept for the process we wish to analyze as 'mixture'. The metaphor implied is certainly absurd, since the borrowing takes place without the lender's consent or even awareness, and the borrower is under no obligation to repay the loan. One might as well call it stealing, were it not that the owner is deprived of nothing and feels no urge to recover his goods. The process might be called an adoption, for the speaker does adopt elements from a second language into his own. But what would one call a word that had been adopted — an adoptee? Anthropologists speak of 'diffusion' in connection with a similar process in the spread of non-linguistic cultural items.

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  Loanwords and Japanese Identity

  Inundating or Absorbed?

  • Naoko Hosokawa(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In terms of frequently employed adjectives, too, there are a significant number of points of commonality between the narratives in France and Japan. In both cases, the national language is described as comprehensible, beautiful, pure, familiar, effortful, traditional, and appropriate. At the same time, within both defences of Loanwords, the language is often described as vigorous, hospitable, and flexible. Loanwords, meanwhile, are often described as incomprehensible, ambiguous, and threatening, or new, enriching, and international, depending on the stance being taken. Thus, in both the French and Japanese discourses, those who criticise Loanwords often describe them as a source of confusion, corruption, and impurity that exists alongside other non-standard elements of language, and they are sometimes seen as a sign of snobbism which allows specialists to showcase their knowledge of professional jargon – as in extract (5). Yet, in both national narratives, among those who defend this kind of linguistic borrowing, the use of Loanwords is just as likely to be associated with manifestations of cultural and linguistic flexibility and vitality – as in extract (2).

  There is also a high degree of overlap between both discourses in their recurrent use of metaphors with ecological and water-related themes, and in uses of personification. The French metaphor of ‘bad grass’ (mauvaise herbe), used for Loanwords, and ‘a tree’ (un arbre), used for the French language, share much in common with the ecosystem metaphor recurrently used in the Japanese discourse. Similarly, in both cases, although less frequently in the French discourse, Loanwords are compared to water advancing on a bank or on a coastline, using expressions such as ‘a wave’ (vague) in the French discourse, and ‘a wave’ (nami), ‘a big wave’ (о̄nami), ‘a flood’ (kо̄zui), and ‘inundation’ (hanran) in the Japanese discourse. Finally, in both cases, Loanwords are sometimes personified, as in the examples of ‘a lady’ (une femme) in the French case and ‘a bride’ (yome

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  Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts: Vol 1

  • Ian Young, Robert Rezetko(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  How are Persian Loanwords Recognised? We must first state the obvious: Loanwords in Hebrew do not bear a tag stating ‘borrowed from Akkadian’ or ‘Persian loanword’. Any word of the Hebrew Bible is potentially (but generally unlikely to be) a loanword.

  Watson describes the process of discovering Loanwords as follows:

  Generally speaking, the drive to find Loanwords comes from the need to resolve philological problems. If no meaning or derivation can be found for a particular word in one Semitic language, then one has to turn to other Semitic languages. So, for Hebrew, the scholar turns to Arabic, Syriac or Aramaic and if necessary, to Akkadian, Phoenician or Ugaritic. If this yields no results, then the lexica of non-Semitic languages are searched: Hittite, Egyptian, Hurrian, Greek (Watson 2005: 192).

  As a glance at any discussion of Loanwords will show, scholars often disagree on the origin of various suggested Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible. The basis for this disagreement is different evaluations of how well the form and meaning of the suspected foreign word fit the attested form and meaning in the Hebrew Bible. That the identification of Loanwords is hypothetical is well stated by Mankowski: ‘These considerations serve to underline the fact that, for the languages in question, the identification of a loanword will almost always be conjectural: a series of ordered hypotheses about the history of the language contact situation, the diachronic phonological development of the donor and receptor languages, and the ad hoc progress of semantic continuity for the word in question’ (Mankowski 2000: 7; cf. 3–7).

  An additional, absolutely crucial factor, is a scholar’s judgment that a particular language could historically have been the source of the borrowing. It is a well-known phenomenon that all languages, even those completely unrelated to each other, share a number of words that are coincidentally similar in form and meaning. In the case where the meaning of a word in its biblical context is unsure, we could imagine that a number of similar-sounding non-Hebrew words could make passable sense in that context. But is it likely that a word found in an Australian aboriginal language could have been loaned into BH? At the very beginning of investigation of possible Loanwords in BH, it is common sense that there have to be some decisions made as to which languages to look to as possible sources of Loanwords in ancient Hebrew.

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