LINGUIST List 10.11

Tue Jan 5 1999

Sum: Lexical Borrowing

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • nourgalalusa.net>, Third Summary, Lexical Borrowing

    Message 1: Third Summary, Lexical Borrowing

     Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 19:36:34
    From: nourgalalusa.net> <nourgalalusa.net>
    Subject: Third Summary, Lexical Borrowing


    Dear linguist,

    I'd like to thank all persons who sent me in response to my query (9,1777 Qs:lexical borrowing) through the linguist. This is the third summary of some contributions that I received.

    I owe many thanks to the following persons:

    Artan Pernaska Dr. BERT PEETERS Dan Moonhawk Dan Myres Dr.ELEANOR BATCHELDER JAMES KERNICHER Dr. HERNIK JOERGENSEN Dr. MAHER BAHLOUL Dr.Moses Nyongwa PAN NING



    Some References:

    - Marcel Dansi " Loan words and phonological methodology" (a book)

    - Myres,Dan 1997, Teaching culture with language:Words of foreign origin and linguistic purism Journal oh the Chinese Languages Association 32:2. 41-55

    - Opening Chapter of Michael Picones entitled" Anglicisms,neologisms & dynamic French" Amesterdam, John Benjamins Ph.D dissertation

    - Ph.D dissertation on Word Formation in Bantu Languages The dissertation is written in French and is still to be published. Here is its whole title: Aspects theoriques de la creation lexicale: le cas du bamileke, Ph.D. Dissertation, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, 1995, Montreal (Quebec), Canada. The English abstract of this dissertation on Linguist dissertation Abstracts (Internet). By: Moses Nyongwa



    - Hans Henrich Hock 1988 "Principles of historical linguistics" (a section pp.380-426)



    Comments:

    1- Pan Ning: You can use the theories of such as the X-tier theory, the moraic theory to analyse the phonological adaptation.I'm a Chinese, you see,onset consonants clusters are prohibited in my language. So to translate English names which has onset C.clusters.such as "strong", we simply insert vowels to turn the monosyllabic words into a three-syllable word-[sit6lang](i is a dental front high vowel, 6 is schwa). My language doesn't allow obstruent coda, then to tranlate the name [luk], we insert a schwa at the end-[luk6], hence break one syllable into two syllables. Hope this information might be useful to you.

    2- Moonhawk: I'll put before you a rather exotic case, of Sign being borrowed into the lexicons of languages in North America as different as English and Chinese who found themselves bumping into each other on the Great Plains.

    This should be filed under "work in progress" rather than "definitively cited somewhere".

    In an anthropological linguistic "core vocabulary" view, the word for "God" in any language has to be considered a highly cultural/linguistic problematic -- mostly usually conservative in our experience, but then what beyond that?

    What would it take for a whole language of Western European descent to change its word for what in English we say as "God" (with a capital G, which automatically confers a certain "sanctity" to that which it graces!), Deo, Deus, Gott, Dieu, or whatever? And yet that's what I conclude must have happened with either the Cheyenne or the Sioux and many other tribes who used Plains Indian Sign Language.

    How else is one to explain that Ch. "ma?he-o?o" [great/big-animate/spirit] and totally unrelated Lakota "wakan tanka" [spirit large] correspond significantly with a Sign language which I conclude was prior to either one of those tribes historically entering the Plains, where our Noun-God equivalent is motioned as the three Signs for "big", "medicine" and "above"? The question we're left with is: is that synchronicity something that came with successive contact with Plains Sign, in which case they changed the morphemes within their respective languages to correspond with the locally "common" way of morphemically referring to a process-God, or did they both independently bring this morphemically similar phrase from languages in Native America as different as English and Chinese?

    I don't know the "absolute" answer, but either would be interesting. If they did change on contact with the Plains (as did some of the Creation stories, which moved in locus to the Black Hills of SD), what were the Pre-Plains-Sign morphemes for "God" in those languages?

    We know now that all Native American (and maybe pan-indigenous) notions of "God", no matter what they look like in order to make sense to English speakers, are really verbs rather than nouns -- processes, relationships and transformations as primary instead of "things" in a Newtonian way. Actually, some are more like 'roots' than either verbs or nouns, but that's a nuance for further thought. And we know now that this is totally in line with the insights of 20th Century physicists such as Heisenberg, who bemoaned "We have reached the limits of our language" while exemplifying by saying, "We know an atom only by its radiating -- but there is no THING there radiating [caps added]."

    Quantum/relativity scientists must abandon their daily language (usu. English or another Western European language), languages which emphasize fragmentation, and must temporarily adopt a mathematical language of wholeness (non-euclidean geometry) in order to see wholeness. Native Americans never "grew" languages of fragmentation, but (as in the movie "Dances with Wolves") live daily various languages of wholeness -- bare predicates with no specific subjects or objects, exactly equivalent to the structure of "quantum eventing". What might it be like to have such a human language as a DAILY language, rather than speaking a daily language one must flee from in order to apprehend wholeness?



    3- James Kirchner:

    - Phonological adaptation of loan words in recepient language

    Czech adapts loanwords to its own phonological system, naturally substituting the closest sound in its own language for that in the donor language. The unusual thing in Czech, as opposed to Russian, for example, is that the front/back feature of a vowel is regarded as more important than the rounding feature. When borrowing from French, therefore, you get things like this:

    French Czech bureau [biro] menu [meni:] buffet [bife]/[bufet] deja vu [deZa vi:] masseur [mase:r]

    The list goes on. There are also some spelling pronunciations, which have become reflected in Czech spelling:

    English Czech

    cowboy kovboj

    >- Morphological adaptation of loan words in recepient (or different) > languages

    All foreign words ending in "-ation" in Czech take the suffix "-ace" [atse]. As far as I know, this suffix is only found on loanwords from Romance languages.

    cooperation kooperace provocation provokace

    Czech often ads a feminine or neuter diminutive ending when adapting a foreign term, evidently in order to make it declinable.

    English Czech Keds (gym shoes) kecky (many Czechs don't know this is a loanword) IBM [ajbijemko] JVC [dZejvisiCko]

    They also add feminine endings for making a feminine equivalent of the word:

    kovboj kovbojka (cowgirl) byznysman byznysmanka (businesswoman)

    And they add augmentative suffixes for various purposes:

    puberta (puberty) pubertak (a male, of any age, who acts like his hormones are making him act crazy)

    bufet (cafeteria) bufetak (a man who stands around a cafeteria and eats the remains of customers' meals; a man who eats from garbage cans)

    4-Artan Pernaska:

    Just for an example, I am listing below few borrowings of different periods into Albanian. You can contact me for more examples.

    Alb. "tapet/-i" from Lat. "tapetum" Alb. "diatez/-a" from Gr. "" Alb. "gjeografi/-a" from Gr. "" Alb. "aranxhat/-a" from It. "" Alb. "peshkatar/i/[-ja]" from It. "pescatore" Alb. "bulevard/-i" from Fr. "boulevard" Alb. "inauguroj" from Fr. "inaugurer" Alb. "shampanj/-a" from Fr. "champagne" Alb. "kros/-i" from Engl. "cross" Alb. "blu xhins/-e" from Engl. "blue jeans" Alb. "xhus" from Engl. "juice" Alb. "Hivzi" "Ivzi" from Turkish "" Alb. "dyfek" from Turkish "tfeng" Alb. "qilim" from Turkish "kilim" Alb. "konak" from Turkish "konak" Alb. "qitap" from Arabic "kitab" etc.

    Best

    Thank you again,

    Noran Galal