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LOANWORDS
(BORROWING)
Fallt von unge&hr ein Fremdwort in den Brunnen einer Sprache, so wird
es so lange
darin umgetrieben, bis es ihre Earbe annimmt.
[If
a foreign word falls by
accident into the spring
of a language, it will be
driven around in there until it takes on that language’s colour.]
(Jakob Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, 1854, p. xxvi)
3.1 Introduction
I
tis common for one language
to take words from another language
and
make them part
of its own vocabulary: these are called loanwords or just
loans. The process is called linguistic borrowing, and the loanwords themselves
are also often called borrowings. Borrowing, however, is not restricted to
just lexical items taken from one language into another. Any linguistic mate¬
rial sounds, phonological
rules (or patterns
or constraints), grammatical
morphemes, syntactic patterns,
semantic associations, discourse strategies, or
whatever
- can be borrowed, that is, can be taken over from a foreign lan¬
guage so that it becomes part of the borrowing language. Borrowing normally
implies a certain degree of bilingualism for at least some people in both the
language which borrows (typically called the
recipient
language) and the lan¬
guage
which is borrowed from (called the donor language). In this chapter,
we
arc concerned with answering the questions:
(I) what are loanwords?; (2) W'hy
are words borrowed?; (3) what are the methods for determining that some¬
thing is a loanword and for identifying the source languages from which words
arc borrowed?; (4) how' are words borrowed and what happens to borrowed
words when they
are taken into another language?; and
(5) how
do loanwords
help reveal past history?
(Other aspects of
linguistic borrowing are treated
in
Chapters
10 and 1 1.)
Copyrighted
materia)
3.
What
is a
Loanword?
A
loanword
is
a lexical
hem
(a
word;, which
has
been ‘borrowed’
from
anofc
language,
a
word which
originally
was
no.
par.
of .he
vocabulary of dre
reopiot
language but
was
adopted
from
some
other
language
and made part of
the bar-
rowing
language
s
vocabulary. For
example.
Old
English did
not have the
poric
this became
an
English
word
only after
it was adopted
from french
porc^
pork',
borrowed
in the
late Middle
English
period
so we say.
as a
consequent
that pork
is a French
loanword
in
English.
French,
in
turn, has also borrowed
wonk
from
English,
for example
bifted
‘beefsteak’, among many others.
.oanwords
an
extremely
common; some
languages have
many. 1 here
arc extensive
studies of
the many Scandinavian
and
French loans in
English; Germanic
and
Baltic
loam
in
Finnish; Basque. German,
and Arabic loans in Spanish:
loanwords from Native
.American
languages in Spanish
and Spanish loans in various
Native
American
languages
(called hispantsms)’,
Turkic in Hungarian:
English in
Japanese:
Sansbi
in
Malay and other languages of
Indonesia;
Arabic in various
languages of Africa
and
Asia; and so on, to mention just a few cases which have been studied. Tot
mention a much
consulted source. Haspclmath and Tadmor
,2009)
gives caw
studies invoking the loanwords
in forty-one languages.
A quick glance at the
origins
of
the names of many common foods we eat
wil
begin to give an
appreciation of the
impact
of
loanwords on
English
vocabulary
and indeed on our lives:
cake
< Old Norse
kaka cake’
catsup, ketchup
apparently originally
from Amoy Chinese
kof
dify
k^ tsuip ‘brine of
pickled
fish or
shellfish',
borrowed into
Malay as kuhap
taken
by
Dutch as
ketjap.
the probable
source from which
English
acquired
the
term
cherry <
.Anglo-Norman
French dense (compare Modem French
(dx
cherry
(from
\
ulgar
Latin ceresin, which was borrowed from late
Greek
kerasian
‘cherry’)
chocolate <
Nahuad Mexico,
the
language of the
Aztecs)
fokolatl a drink
made
from the
seeds
of the
cacao
tree’,
borrowed into Spanish
as
dwo-
late,
from
which many
other languages of the world obtained
the
term,
for
example
Arabic
dukulata. Basque
txokolaiea. Chinese quioktH.
Finnish
German
Sdokolade Greek
Mila, Hawaiian kaloka. Hindi
unganan
csdoldde,
Italian
cioccolalo, Japenese
chokoreto, Khmer
saukaul^
f
0?3?
dokollis.
Russian
shokolad,
Somali
shukulaalo.
Tagalog
tsokolatc
I
urkish (ikolala.
Welsh
Md.
Zulu
ushokoledu etc.
la
coca
Quechua
kuka
‘coca leaves,
coca
bush’,
borrowed
via
^pamsh
and
coin
languages of
West Africa kola ‘cola
nut’
(for
“r
earlier from Arabic
for coir?
""
r
i"i
“d*"’
mraning
connected with ‘dark’.
Words
W Cze-h^Tt^
’’T""'"
aroun,>
<• ><• world.
for example
Chinese
A
Finnish W„,
German
Ka^.
Greek
11
64
Historical
Linguistics
Portusuesc
The
M
form
is from
the northern
Chinese
rid
version;,
spread
overland
to
central
Asia
and
Persia,
In
Persian n
took on
a
suffix.
Incoming
dm.
and
this
di^
*«
borrowed
in Russian.
Arabic. I
urkuk
etc
and
also in
India.
English
gets
rim
(meanmg
not just
regular
W
but’
a drink
made
by
blending
black
tea.
honey and spices,
and
milk’;
from
Hindi
chay
‘tea'.
tomato
Nahuatl
tomall.
through
Spanish
tornote
waffle
<
Dutch
wafel
‘waffle'.
These
arc but a few
of
the
borrowed
words
involving English
foodstuffi.
languages
borrow
words
from
other
languages
primarily
because of need and
pnstige.
When speakers
of
a language
acquire
some
new item or
(
oncept from
elsewhere, they
need a name
for
the new acquisition:
often a
foreign name is
borrowed
along
with the
new concept.
This explains,
for
example, why so mam
languages have
similar words
for ‘automobile'
Sas
in German
Automobil,
didj.
Russian avlomobil1.
Finnish
auto, Swedish
bil from
the last syllable
of
autonM.
Uzbek
avtomobiT): ‘coffee’
(Russian
kofe, Finnish
kahn. Japanese
kohiiy. tobacco'
(Finnish tupakka, Indonesian
tembakau |tombakau],
Japanese
tabako ‘cigarette,
tobacco’, Spanish tabaco
‘tobacco’); and
Coca-Cola, for example, since
languages
presumably needed new
names for these new’ concepts
when they were acquired.
Of
course, most examples of loanwords are not
so widespread
as these.
The other
main reason why words are taken over from another
language is
for prestige, because the foreign term for some reason was highly
esteemed.
For
example. English could have done perfectly well with only native terms
for pig
fiesh/pig meat’ and ‘cow fiesh/cow
meat',
but
for
reasons of prestige,
pork
(from
French
pmc pig’i and ^rf(from French boeuf
beef, ox,
steer’) were
borrowed, as
well as many other terms of ‘cuisine’
from French cuisine itself is from
French
cuisme ‘kitchen’
- because French had more social status and was
considered
more prestigious than English during
the period of Norman French dominance
in England
(
1300). Some examples
are
bacon (from Old
French
bata^.
itself earlier borrowed from Germanic).
lettuce (<
Old French laitues,
plural
of
laitue lettuce i.
mutton (<
Old French
moton, cf.
Modem French mouton ‘sheep’),
rolal
< Old
French
sahule. from Vulgar
Latin
saiata
‘salted’,
ultimately
from older
herbs
salala salted vegetables
. vegetables
seasoned with brine being
a popular
Roman
dish i. ieai< Old
French
zw/‘calf, cf.
Modem
French veou, and so
many more.
I
dmurt aka
Votyak,
a Uralic
language)
borrowed from Tatar (a Turkic
lan¬
guage; words for such things as mother', father',
‘grandmother', grandfather
.
husband. older
brother
. older sister', uncle’,
and
‘human', among other
things. Since
I
dmurt
had native terms for
father'
and mother' and these
other
in x lore < ontact with I
atar. need was not the
motivation for these
borrowings
rat nr prestige was.
Similarly.
Finnish
borrowed words for mother'
(diti, from
Goth*C
01(
HiRh
German neb. Proto-Germanic
daughter
froln
Bahie;
compare
Uthuanian (cFjaWr))i
.J??
comparc
Uthuanian
«sA (genitive)); and
‘bride’.
i
r
nr<
'
an<*
loot^
‘
among
many
other
borrowings
from
Baltic
and
German* (compare
Anttila
Clearly,
Finnish
had
previously
I
Loanwords (Borrowing) 65
had
terms
for
close female kin and for these body parts before borrowing these
terms
from
neighbouring
Indo-European
languages, and thus it is prestige that
accounts
for these
borrowings and not need.
Some
loans
involve a
third, much rarer (and
less important) reason lor bor¬
rowing,
the opposite
of
prestige: borrowing due to negative evaluation, the
adoption
of
the foreign word to be derogatory. Here arc a few
examples,
all bor¬
rowed
presumably
with derogatory intentions. French habler ‘to
speak
a lot with
exaggeration
and
bragging' is
borrowed from Spanish hablar ‘to speak'. Finnish
koni
‘nag’ (old
horse],
with negative
connotations, is borrowed
from
Russian kon>.
a neutral
term
for
‘horse’,
with
no
negative connotations in the donor language.
More
examples
can be found in negative names for ethnic groups, such as unfa¬
vourable
kraut
for ‘German’, from German Kraut herb, plant', shortened from
Sauerkraut
sauerkraut (pickled
cabbage)’. In some cases it is not so clear where
the negative
associations come
from, as in the
case of English hausfrau with the
pejorative
meaning of ‘frumpy, overly domesticated
woman’,
borrowed from
German Hausfrau
‘housewife, home-maker’, which has neutral
connotations in
German.
Loanwords
of English origin in other languages can
also reflect less
than positive
attitudes, as in
the case
ofjapanese
wan-man ‘the type
of leader
who
wants to
make all decisions without
consulting anyone' from English
one man. and
Japanese bosu,
from English
boss,
where in Japanese
bosu almost always implies
a
boss involved in
clandestine activities. The Russian
loanwords
biznes
‘business'
and biznesmen
‘businessman’
arc also often considered pejorative.
Korean
hostis,
borrowed from English
hostess, has a negative
connotation, referring to the
woman who works at nightclubs
and bars that serve
mainly male customers.
It
is possible,
of
course, that some examples
of this sort
were not borrowed with
derogatory purposes in
mind at
all, but rather
merely involve
things which have
low status or negative
connotations.
3.3 How do Words get
Borrowed?
Borrowed words arc usually remodelled
to fit the phonological
and morphological
structure of the
borrowing language, at
least in
early stages
of language
contact.
The traditional view of
how words get
borrowed and
what happens
to them
as
they arc assimilated into the
borrowing language
holds that
loanwords
that arc
introduced
to the
borrowing language
by bilinguals
may contain
sounds
which
are foreign to the receiving language,
but due to phonetic
interference
die
foreign
sounds are changed to conform
to native
sounds and phonetic
constraints.
I his
is
frequendy called adaptation (or phoneme
substitution}. In adaptation,
a foreign sound
in
borrowed
words which does
not exist in
the receiving
language
is
replaced
by
the nearest
phonetic equivalent
to
it in the
borrowing
language. For
example,
formerly
Finnish had no
voiced stops
b, d,g,
in loans
borrowed
into Finnish
from
Germanic languages which contained
b, d, g, voiceless
stops (p,
t, k),
the closest
phonetic
counterparts
in
Finnish,
replaced
these
voiced
sounds, as
seen
in, for
example, parta ‘beard’
(f rom Germanic
*bardaz} and humpuuki
‘humbug
(ultimately
from English humbug).
Similarly, in Sayula
Popoluca
(a Mixe-Zoquean
language*
of
southern
Mexico), which
had no native
I or r,
die
foreign /
and r of borrowed
Loanwords (Borrowing) 67
vatic
caused
/v/ to liccome a separate phoneme in its own right, no longer
just
the
allophonic
variant of /f/ that occurred
only
between
vowels,
lire pho¬
nological patterns
(phonotactics, syllable structure) of a language can also be
altered
by
the acceptance in more intimate language contact of loans which do
not
conform
to native patterns. For example,
while
native Finnish words
permit
no initial
consonant
clusters, now through intimate contact and the introduction
of
many
borrowings from other languages, especially from Swedish and later
from
English, Finnish phonology permits loans with initial
clusters,
as
seen in,
for
example,
the more recent loans krokotiili
crocodile',
kruunu ‘crown’ (compare
Swedish
krona}, prcsidcntti
‘president’, smaragdi emerald’ (from Swedish smaragd).
and so
on.
While
there may be typical patterns of substitution for foreign sounds and pho¬
nological patterns,
substitutions in borrowed words in a language are not always
uniform. The
same foreign sound or pattern
can sometimes be borrowed in one
loanword
in
one way
and in
another loanword in a different way. This
happens
for
the following reasons.
Sometimes
different words are borrowed al different
times, so that older loans
reflect sound
substitutions before intimate contact brought new sounds and pat¬
terns into
the borrowing language, while more recent borrow
ings may exhibit
the
newer segments or patterns acquired
after more intensive contact. (The
extent
to w hich the source language
is
known by speakers
of the borrowing language
is
relevant here.; An example is Sayula Popoluca
turu bull' (recently borrowed from
Spanish
toro), with
r.
where earlier loans would
have substituted n for this
foreign
sound
(mentioned above). Another example is seen in the comparison
of Tzotzil
Mayan) fndatu dishes' (from Spanish plato
plate,
dish’),
borrowed
earlier w hen
Tzotzil
permitted
no initial consonant
clusters,
and Tzotzil [datu plate',
borrowed
later from the same Spanish
source, now
containing the initial consonant
cluster
which was formerly prohibited.
In most
cases, borrowings
are based on pronunciation,
as illustrated in
the case
of Finnish ninkkaa- to make up (apply
cosmetics)',
based on the English pronun¬
ciation of make /meik/.
However,
in
some cases, loans can
be based on
written
versions
(‘spelling pronunciations’),
as seen in the case
of Finnish jeeppi
De:P:*J
jeep', which
can only
Im* based on a spelling
pronunciation
of English jeep.
not
on the English pronunciation (/Jip/
[IPA/djip/]
i Finnish
has /i/ and/i:/
and
so
if the loan were based on pronunciation
and not spelling,
it would have /i:/
or
/i/ in the f irst syllable of a loan for
'
jeep’
(note that
Ixirrowed
nouns that end in a
consonant add i in
Finnish). In die case
of English quixotic
|kwik sunk]
pursuing
ideals
without thought of practicality’
(that is, exhibiting
behaviour
like that of
Don
Quixote), a loan from Spanish,
based
on Dun Quixote.
the [ks| in
English is
due to a spelling
pronunciation
of the . In
older Spanish.
represented
U]; this sound later changed to (x)
(voiceless velar
fricative) in
Spanish and came
to
be
spelled as (compare
Spanish quqotesco
|kixo
teskoj
quixotic. with
(xj). 1’he
Spanish source
for this loan
never had
|ks| in its pronunciation.
In
contrast, the original
Lil
pronunciation
is reflected
in
the Don Quiihotteol
French
novels and
operas
based on Miguel
de Cervantes
Don
Quijote,
also reflected in
the tide of Salman Rushdie’s
novel
Quichotte.)
Another
example »
™S
“
‘exaggerated masculinitv’.
In
North
America
it
follows
Spanish pronunetati®
^thhfl
(Ima
tjumoul),
but it
is pronounced
by
many in
Bnt.sh
Commonwealth
countries
as
(makizmouj,
a pronunciation
based
on Italian
spelling
where
represents Iki],
the
showing
that the
'c'
is not
pronounced
as|tj] as it
would
be
if
spelled
in Italian
as .
For
example, contrast
the
pronunciation
of
such
loans
in
English
from
Italian
as tappucann.
cm, and capmcui
that have |lji| with
gnocchi, macchuillo
‘strained’
(as in
cafimcchiato
strained
coffee’). Ma.huurllum. and
zucchini
that
have [ki].
In another
case, Spanish
elite [elite]
‘elite’
was
borrowed
from French
[e
lit] ‘elite’
but Spanish
placed
stress
on the first
syllable due
to a
misunder¬
standing of French
spelling: Spanish
speakers
misinterpreted
the acute accent
mark
on the
as representing
stress, as it does
in Spanish;
however, in French
orthography
has nothing to do
with stress but rather
signals a close front
mid vowel [e], which
contrasts with
(with no diacritic) representing
an
open
front mid vowel [c|.
It is good to
remember that words can be borrowed
into some particu¬
lar language
and then borrowed further by other languages,
so that some
borrowed words do not come directly from their ultimate source
but rather
via intermediate languages. For example, English borrowed
tofu bean curd’
from Japanese, but Japanese had
borrowed it earlier from Chinese
doufu idw
‘beans +
Ju
‘rotten’). English
got many terms for things encountered
in the
New
World from
Spanish, which in turn had borrowed
them
from indigenous
American languages. English
has a large
number of loanwords that
it took
from
Spanish but which
came into
Spanish first as loanwords from
Nahuatl
(language
of the Aztecs):
coyote <
Spanish
coyote < Nahuatl
coyotl ‘coyote’;
avocado <
Spanish aguacate
< Nahuatl
dwaka-d ‘avocado’: chilli < Spanish
chile
Nahuatl chilli chilli,
chilli
pepper, red';
chipotle < Spanish
chipotle
Nahuatl
chil-pok th
type of chilli pepper (chil-
‘chilli
pepper'
-th ‘a noun
suffix’);
chocolate <
Spanish
chocolate
Nahuatl lokoli-U ‘chocolate’; cocoa,
cacao
<
Spanish
cacao <
Nahuatl
kakau-a tl ‘cacao,
chocolate
bean';
mezcal
(mescal
Spanish
mezcal
Nahuatl
medkal-li
‘mescal,
distilled alcoholic beverage
made
from
any
type
of agave’; ocelot
Spanish
ocelote <
Nahuatl oselo-ll
ocelot’;
tomato <
Spanish
tornote jitomate
in Mexico)
Nahuatl
U,ma-tl
'tomato';
among
others.
In
some
cases a loan
can be
passed
from
one
language
to another
and
on to
others in a
chain of
successive
borrowings. For
example. Finnish suklaa
‘choco¬
late
was
borrowed
from
Swedish
choklad
[§uklad],
which was taken from
French
eariicr
^nch from Spanish
Mae
[fokolate],
which
is
borrowed
from
Nahuatl chocola-tl
[fokolatl] chocolate’.
'
r
noton^
rcm°dclled to
accommodate
aspects
of the phonolog)
terns of it i'*^
‘
can
adapted
to fit the
morphological
pat-
into somi
anguage.
For
example,
Spanish and
French
borrowings
digms
whn
k™
,nadc
lo fit morphological
para-
momhrm T
1,
to signal
diflerent
grammatical
morphemes,
such
as ‘singular’
and
plural'
difference
as in-
and
Ink-
‘to
cure’W-
‘medicine’
violate
expectations
for sounds
in native
wonk,
makinc
them
candidates
for possible
loans.
On further
mvesttgauon. the
sourtn
of these
borrowings
arc
found
in
neighbouring
languages: comes
frw
Mixc-Zoquean
*pala
‘woven
mat’
(Nahuad
changed a >
t in this
environmem
andi
Il
before
a);
po:lo:-
is
from
Totonac puM
silk-cotton
tree
(ceiba;';
pd-l
is from
Totonac
‘to
cure, get
well'. Il is
the aberrant
initial
p- of these
forms
which suggests
that
they
may be
loans
and which prods
us to look for
their
sources
in
other
languages.
Words
which
violate
the typical
phonological
patterns
(canonical
forms,
syllable
structure, phonotactics)
of
a language
arc likely
to be
loans.
Foe
example.
Mayan
languages
typically
have only
monosyllabic
roots (of the
form
CVC); the polysyllabic
morphemes
found
in Mayan
languages, which
violate
this
monosyllabic
pattern,
turn
out mostly to
be loanwords (or from earlier
compounds).
For example,
the polysyllabic
monomorphemic
tinamit town' of
Kaqchikcl
(Mayan) is a loanword
from
Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan.
Since
this pol¬
ysyllabic
form violates
the
typical
monosyllabic structure
of Mayan roots, the
inference is that it is probably
a
loan,
and indeed its source is found in Nahuatl
(the language of the Toltecs
and Aztecs) tena:mitl
‘fence
or wall of a town/city’,
'fortified town’.
(2) Phonological history. In some cases where the
phonological
history of the
languages of a family is
known,
information concerning the sound
changes that
they
have
undergone can be
helpful
for
determining
loans, the direction of
bor¬
rowing. and what the donor
language was.
English
underwent the
sound change in
which sk>
fas
for example
in Proto-
Germanic *skipaz
‘ship > Modem English
ship.
English borrowed a number
of words with /sk/ from
Old Norse
and Scandinavian languages which
haw
/sk/.
and they are readily
identified as
loanwords because sk was not possible
in
native English words
after the
sound change.
For
example,
shirt underwent
thr
sk
/change; it comes from Old
English
scyrtt ‘skirt,
tunic', inherited from
Proto-
Germanic *skurtjm a
short garment'.
However,
skirt is
borrowed
from
()ld
Norse
skyrta shirt, a
kind ol kirtle
. and is
also
from
that
same Proto-Germanic
*skur^m.
Hus unchanged sk of skirt indicates that
this is
a loanword in English.
contrasting
with native
shirt,
which did
undergo
the
change.
Some other
examples
arc:
sky
< Old Norse sky
‘sky’
skin
Old Norse
da ‘animal hide,
fur’ (the
Anglo-Saxon word
was
huit.
*
scale
(for
weighing)
< tW
‘bowl,
drinking cup' (used
also as the cup
or pan
lor
weighing)
scant
Old
Norse
skamt.
skammr
‘short,
brief
to hurt,
injure,
harm,
damage’
on
nO,Ch’
incision'
‘"'a'1*
scrap
Old
Norse
skrap
scraps,
trifles'
2 < OU
V
™Pe-
erase,
scratch out’
Ml< OW K
ability to
make
out’
*UU
Old
Norse
skalh skull,
bald
head'
Loanwords (Borrowing) 71
In
the
Mayan family, a number of languages have borrowed from Cholan
Mayan), since
Cholan
speakers
were the principal bearers of Classic
Maya
civilization.
Cholan.
however, underwent a number of sound changes which
languages
of the other
branches of the family did not, and this makes it fairly
easy to
identify many
of these
Cholan loans. For
example, Cholan underwent
the
sound
change *o:> u. Yucatec did not undergo
this sound change, although some
borrowings
from Cholan into
Yucatec show the results of this
Cholan change; for
example,
Yucatec
kitts
*turkcy’< Cholan kuts (from Proto-Mayan
*ko:ts); Yucatec
turn
‘stone, year, stela (monument)' < Cholan tun ‘stone’
(compare Proto-Mayan
*to:r/
‘stone’). Since these words in Yucatec show the
results of a sound change that
t<x)k
place
in
Cholan
but which native Yucatec words
did not undergo (compare
for
example
Cholan silts',
Yucatec
sd:ts' < Proto-Mayan *so:ts' ‘bat’), it is clear in
these
cases that Yucatec borrowed the words and Cholan is the donor language
(Justcsonet
al. 1985: 14).
3.4.
Morphological complexity
The moqihological make-up
of words can help determine the direction
of bor¬
rowing. in cases of borrowing, when the form in question in one language is
morphologically complex
(composed of two or more morphemes) or has an ety¬
mology which is morphologically
complex, but the form in the other languages
has no morphological analysis, then
usually the donor language is the one with
the morphologically complex form and the borrower is
the one with the mono-
morphemic form. For example, English alligator
is borrowed from Spanish el
lagarto “the alligator’: since it is monomorphemic in English,
but based on two
morphemes in Spanish, el ‘the’ +
lagarto alligator’, the direction
of borrowing
must be from Spanish to
English. Crocodile is
similar, ultimately
from Greek
‘pebbles, gravel’ + drnlos
‘worm, dragon’. Latin borrowed it from Greek
as
crocodilusr, English borrowed it from Old French.
It is monomorphemic in Latin
(and
English), but has a polymorphemic etymology
in
Greek, indicating
that the
word was borrowed f
rom
Greek, llnegar in English
is a loan from French vinaigre.
which is from
vin
‘wine’
aigre
‘sour’:
since its
etymology is polymorphemic
in
French but monomorphemic in
English, the direction
of borrowing is
clearly
from French to English. Slogan is
revealed as a loan from
Scottish Gaelic sluagh
ghainn
‘war-cry’: it is morphologically complex
in Gaelic but not
in English, from
the compound sluagh army’
case
is whisky, earlier as
whiskybae
in
English, from Scottish
Gaelic uisgebealha
‘water
of life (uisge ‘water +
bethu ‘life’).
Spanish borrowed many words from
Arabic, starting in 7 1 1
, during the period
of
Moorish domination
in Spain
(711 1492). Many
Arabic loans in Spanish
include
what was originally the
Arabic definite
article al-
but are monomorphe¬
mic in
Spanish. A few examples
of this are:
albanil “mason’
(Arabic banna
“builder, mason’)
albondiga ‘meat ball’
(Arabic bunduq
‘bullet,
hazelnut )
alcalde “mayor’ (compare
Arabic qa^i
’judge
)
Loanwords (Borrowing) 73
3.4.2 Clues from cognates
When a word in two (or more) languages is suspected of being borrowed, if it has
legitimate cognates (with regular sound correspondences;
sec Chapter 7) across
sister languages of one language family, but is found in only one language (or a
few languages) of another family, then the donor language is usually one of the
languages
for which the form in question
has cognates in its
sister languages.
For
example,
Finnish
tytdr ‘daughter’ has no cognates
in the non-Finnic branches of
the Uralic family,
while cognates
of Proto-Indo-European
*dhugh
Jer
‘daughter’
are known from most Indo-European languages, including ones as geograph¬
ically far apart as Sanskrit and English (Sanskrit duhilr and English daughter).
Therefore, the direction
of borrowing is
from one of these Indo-European lan¬
guages (actually from Baltic) to Finnish.
Spanish
and Portuguese
have
ganso ‘goose’, borrowed from Germanic *gans-,
Germanic has cognates,
for example
German Gans,
Afrikaans gans, English goose,
from Proto-Germanic *gans-, but this Spanish and Portuguese word lacks true
cognates in most other Romance languages.
Rather, they have such things as
French
oif, Italian oca, Catalan oca, and others reflecting Latin auca ‘goose’. (Latin
also has anser ‘goose’ which is cognate with Proto-Germanic *gans
‘goose’, from
Proto-Indo-European
_*ghans-_ however, this is not the source of Spanish
and
Portuguese ganso, borrowed from Germanic.) Thus, the direction of borrow ing is
from Germanic to Spanish and Portuguese.
3.4.3 Geographical and ecological clues
The geographical
and ecological associations of words suspected
of being
loans
can often provide clues helpful to determining whether they are borrow ed and
what the identity of the donor language is. For example, the geographical and
ecological remoteness from earlier English-speaking territory of aardvark, gnu,
impala, and zebra
-
animals found natively only in Africa
makes these words
likely
candidates for loanwords in English.
Indeed, they
were borrowed from
local languages in
Africa with which speakers of European languages came into
contact w'hen they entered die habitats where these animals are found
is from Afrikaans aardvark (also morphologically complex, aard ‘earth’ + vark ‘pig’),
gnu from a Khoe language, impala from Zulu, and
zebra
from a Congo language
{zebra perhaps
being Ixmtow ed first into
Portuguese or Spanish
or Italian from an
African language and then from one of them borrowed
into English).
Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs and Toltecs) started out in the region
of northwestern Mexico and migrated from there into central Mexico and on
to Central America. Since cacao (the source of chocolate, cocoa) did not grow'
in die original Nahuatl desert homeland, the Nahuatl word kakaiva- ‘cacao’ is
likely to
be a loan.
Indeed, it was borrowed
from Mixe-Zoquean (Proto-Mixe-
Zoquean
*kakait a ‘cacao’), spoken
in the
zone from where cacao trees spread
in early times. Several other loans in Nahuatl reflect the adoption
of names for
plants
and animals not encountered before the migration into lower Mexico,
w'hcrc previously unknown items endemic to the more tropical climate were
Copyrighted
materia)
74 Historical Linguistics
encountered. In Nez Perce (a Sahaptian language of the northwestern USA),
lapatdri ‘potato’
is borrowed from Canadian French la palate,
it is clearly
a loan
and clearly from French, not only because it is morphologically analysable in
French {la ‘the’ + patale ‘potato’)
and not in Nez Perce, but also because we know
that potatoes
were introduced to this area after European contact (Callaghan and
Gamble 1997: III). Knowledge of this history suggests that the term could be
a borrowing. Further investigation
shows this to
be the case,
a borrowing from
French into Nez Perce.
Inferences from geography
and ecology' are not as strong
as those from the
phonological and morphological criteria mentioned above; however, when
coupled with other
information,
the inferences which they provide can be useful.
3.4.4 Other semantic clues
A still weaker kind of inference, related to the last criterion, can sometimes be
obtained from the semantic domain of a suspected loan. For example, English
words such as squaw,
papoose, powwow, tomahawk, wickiup, and so on have para¬
phrases involving ‘Indian’/‘Native American’, that
is, ‘Indian
woman’, 'Indian
baby’,
‘Indian house’, etc.;
this suggests possible borrowing
from American
Indian languages.
Upon
further investigation, this supposition proves true;
these words arc borrowed from Algonquian
languages into English. In another
example, in Xinkan (a small family of four languages in Guatemala) most
terms for cultivated plants are known to l>e Ixirrowed from Mayan; this bring
the case, any additional terms in
this semantic domain that
we encounter may
be suspected of also being borrowings. This criterion is only a rough indication
of
possibilities.
Sources for the borrowing
must still be sought,
and it is
neces¬
sary
to try
to determine the exact nature of the loans, if indeed borrowings are
involved.
3.5 Loans as Clues to Linguistic Changes in the Past
Evidence preserved
in loanwords may help
to document older stages
of a lan¬
guage lx“fore later changes took place. An often-cited example is that of early
Germanic loans in Finnish which document older stages in the development
of Germanic. These loans bear evidence of things in Germanic which can be
reconstructed only with difficulty from the evidence retained in the Germanic
languages themselves some of these reconstructed
things are confirmed only
through comparisons
of Germanic w ith other branches of Indo-European.
For
example, Finnish rengas ‘ring’ (borrowed; see Proto-Germanic *hreng-a$ reveals
two things about Germanic. First, it documents Germanic at the stage before
the sound change of e to i before n {e > i / ri) all attested Germanic languages
show only the forms with i, the result after this change,
as in English
ring. A
comparison of
Finnish rengas
w ith kuningas ‘king’ (also borrowed
from Germanic,
Proto-Germanic *kuning-az) shows that Germanic originally contrasted i and e
in the position before n, which is not seen in Germanic after the two sounds
merged before n. Second, both these loans document the Proto-Germanic
Copyrighted
materia)
Form.
show
original
in^ocalic
M
(borrowed
as w or
a):
‘knife
razor’:
Akaieko
nau^
Q’anjobal
nawut
Choi Hawaii Tzotzil
^(<
na^
form
in
Spanish,
in
die
last two)
clmo
‘nail
Akaieko
km!,
Choi
law.
K’iche
klau^
I zeltal lauri,
1 ojolabal
^(‘nail’, spur’),
Tzotzil
M
(< claw
-s
‘nails’, borrowed
from
the Spanish
Oldl^
Latin
caoallus
‘work
horse’):
Akaieko
kau^ryu horse,
beast
of
burden’, Choi
kau^ayu. Q’anjobal kau^.
Q’eqchi'
kaway,
Mocho’
ku-^vh
‘horse, mule’.
Twltal
kawu.
Tzotzil
kmiavu
‘beast of burden’. (Cf.
Modem
Spanish
caballo
‘horse
These
loans
demonstrate,
first,
the distinction
between
original /b/ and /v/
of Spanish,
and,
second, the fact
that this
merger
of /b/ and /v/
had not yet
taken place in
die mid-sixteenth
century
when these
languages began
to borrow
from Spanish.
Evidence
from loanwords
can
also sometimes
contribute to
understanding the
rtlaiwt chronology of
changes in a
language
(introduced in
Chapter
2, and discussed
again in Chapter
8). For example,
Proto-Indo-European
*reg- ‘king’
underwent
the change
of V > 5 in Proto-Ccltic
(branch
of Indo-European).
Then Celtic
*rig- ‘king’
was borrowed into pre-Proto-Germanic
as *rig. Since Germanic
would
have inherited Proto-Indo-European
V as e (which
remained e in
Gothic,
but later becoming d in the other
Germanic languages:, this Germanic
word
has
to have been borrowed from a language in
which
*f
had become i. Celtic
is die
only logical candidate for that. Then after the
borrowing, the Germanic form
underwent Grimm’s
Law (the
voiced stop > voiceless stop part
of Grimm's
Law),
giving Proto-Germanic
*rik-.
From this we establish the relative
chronology:
I. First Proto-Indo-European
V>
iin Proto-Cekic (*r *rig ):
- dien Celtic was
borrowed into pre-Proto-Germanic as *rig-;
- and finally, voiced stops > voiceless by
Grimm’s Law
> *rik-.
in
Germanic.
Ringe 2009
In another example.
Mocho (Mayan,
Q’anjobalan branch) !o:rj
‘to sell
is
borrowed from
Cholan a
different
branch of Mayan,
the Cholan
subgroup
ion (compare Proto-Mayan
^ko:^.
Cholan was
the principal language
of Classic
Maya
civilization, and as such
contributed
numerous loans to languages
of
the
region.
Note
that /dZ
1PA
।
Cholan
underwent two changes:
*k > i
and
/
> n,
though
both original
*k and
remained unchanged
in Mocho’
(as
seen,
or exampk. in korjob market. which retains the native
form, from
*ko:i)
‘to
sell
<> p act o .
instrumental suffix ). I
herefore,
loanwords of Cholan
origin
such
“
Mocho
reveal tha< in
Cholan the
change
of»t >
/took place
earlier
than
I. mT
°
rrom thf
fonn of
>hf loan in
Mocho'
we
conclude
ChL™^
“
'hc S,agr
whcn
’*
had ndeen
u
before
Cholan
had
undergone
the
change
of »j>n.llius
loans
such
Loanwords (Borrowing) 77
as
this
one
reveal
the relative chronology of Cholan
changes, first *k
> f, followed
later
by
n.
3.
Caiques
(Loan
Translations, Semantic Loans)
In
loanwords, aspects
of both
the phonetic
f orm and the meaning
of the word in
the
donor
language
are transferred to the liorrowing language,
but
it is also pos¬
sible
to
borrow, in
effect, just the meaning, and instances of this arc
called caiques
or loan
translations.
This
is illustrated by the often-repeated
example of black
market,
which
owes
its origin in
English to a loan translation
of
German
Schwarynarkt.
composed
of schwarz
‘black’
and Marki
market'.
Other examples follow.
The word
for ‘railway’
(‘railroad’) is a caique based on a translation of
iron’ +
‘road/way’
in a number
of
languages: Finnish rautatie
{rauta
‘iron’
tie
‘road’); French
(hemin
de fer and Italian estrada de
jerro
(literally ‘road of iron’);
German
Eisenbahn
{Eisen ‘iron’ + Hahn ‘path, road ); Spanish ferrocarril [ferro-
iron' in
compound words
‘lane, way’): Swedish jamvdg [jam ‘iron’ + vag
‘road’); Irish
iamrod
{iam
‘iron’ + rod ‘roadway’);
Turkish demiryolu
(demir iron’ +
yolu
‘way’); etc.
(2) English
has a
number of early caiques based on
loan translations from
latin. for example: almighty
< Old
English (rlmihtig. based on lalin omnipotent
omni- all’
potent powerful,
strong’), gospel
<
godspell \god'gwiA'
+
spd‘news,
tidings’), based on I^tin
evangelium which is borrowed from
Greek eu aggelion
‘good-news/ message’ (
is the normal transliteration
for Greek [qg]).
(3) A
number of languages have caiques
based on
English skyscraper,
as for
example:
French gratte del (gratte ‘grate, scrape’
German Wolkenkratzer
(Wolken ‘clouds’
kralzer
scratcher,
scraper’); Spanish
rascadelos
(rosea ‘scratch,
scrape' + delos
‘skies, heavens’); and Russian
neboskrebo
(nebo ‘sky’ + skrebo
scraper’); etc.
(4) Some Spanish examples
include: manzana
de Adan
‘Adam’s apple’
in
some American varieties of Spanish,
a loan translation
from
the English
name
compare Peninsular Spanish
nuez
(de la garganta).
literally
‘nut (of the
throat)*);
cadena ‘chain’ now used also
for ‘chain of stores’:
estrella
star' and
now also
‘star celebrity, outstanding performer’;
guerra
Jria
‘cold
war’; lercer mundo
‘
ITiird
World'; aire acondtaonado
‘air conditioning':
desempleo
‘unemployment
; supermercado
'supermarket'; etc.
A number of caiques arc
shared
widely among
the
languages of the
Mcsoamerican
linguistic area
(see Chapter
10); these
translate
the semantic
equations
illustrated in the
following:
‘boa’
=
‘deer-snake’, ‘door’
=
mouth
of
house’,
‘egg’
=
bird-stone', ‘knee’
=
‘leg-head’,
‘lime’
=
‘stone(-ash)
, ‘wrist
hand-neck'
(Campbell ct
al. 1986).
3. Emphatic Foreignization
Sometimes, speakers go out of their
way
to make
borrowed
forms
sound
even
more
foreign
by substituting
sounds
which seem
to them
more
foreign than
the
actual
sounds of the donor
language in
particular
loanwords.
These
examples
of
Loanwords (Borrowing) 79
which
indicate
where the words come from or in dictionary sources on the
language
from which particular words are
borrowed.Try to determine the
original
meaning
and form in the donor
language and note any
changes (in
meaning or
form) that the word
has undergone as it was
adapted to English.
The original meanings
of many of these may surprize you.
Chinese:
chow mein, dim sum.
kowtow, kung fu
Czech:
robot
French: boutique, camouflage,
chassis, cinema,
fuselage, sabotage
German:
angst,
blitz,
flak.
Nazi, snorkel, strafe
Hawaiian:
aloha,
lei.
ukulele, wiki
Hebrew: jubilee,
kibbutz, messiah
Italian:
ciabatta, fascism,
pasta, pizza
Japanese:
anime, emoji,
kamikaze, karaoke, karate, manga,
Pokemon
Russian:
cosmonaut, gulag, intelligentsia,
rouble, soviet,
sputnik,
vodka
Spanish:
burrito, cilantro,
macho, nacho, vanilla
Swedish or Scandinavian generally): moped,
ombudsman, slalom
Yiddish:
klutz, maven, putz,
schmooze, tush
Exercise 3.3 Maori and English loanwords
Based on the criteria for
establishing loanwords and the direction
of bor¬
rowing,determine from the following lists
of words which are
borrowed
into Maori from English and which are borrowed
into English from
Maori. Note that Maori has the
following inventory of sounds:
/p, t, k,
4),
h, r, m, n, rj,
r, i, e,
a, o, uZ
In the traditional
orthography,
/§/ (voiceless
bilabial
fricative) is spelled
; /g/ is spelled .
Also, native Maori
words
permit no consonant
clusters, rather
only syllables of the
shape
CV
(a single consonant
followed by a
single
vowel), or
word-initially also
syllables
that begin in a vowel
(that is, some
initial syllables have
the
shape of just V).
Can you say anything about the
dialect of
English from
which Maori
took its English loans
(based on the
pronunciation
reflected
in the bor¬
rowings into
Maori)?
What
can you say about the
social or
cultural nature
of the contact
between speakers of Maori and
English?
Can you
identify semantic
domains (fields
of meaning) most
susceptible to
borrowing in either
of
the
languages?
How were
words
from one
language modified
to fit
the structure
of the
other?
80
Historical
Linguistics
hAhi
‘church’
haina
‘China;
sign’
haka
‘haka, Maori
dance'
haki
‘flag’
Union
Jack}
hima
‘hammer’
hanara
‘sandal'
hAngi
‘hangi,
oven’
(hole in
the
ground with wrapped
food placed
on heated
stones in
the pit with
fire)
hanihi
‘harness’
hApa
‘harp’
hAte
‘shirt’
hemana
‘chairman’
hcrcni
‘shilling’
heti
‘shed’
- hipi
‘sheep’
hiraka
‘silk’
hiriwa
‘silver’
hoeha
‘saucer’
- hohipere
‘hospital’
19. hopa ‘job’
- hOro hall’
hD ‘shoe’
- hui ‘meeting for discussion'
- huka sugar"
- huka ‘hook’
hupa ‘soup’
- huri ‘jury’
27. iari
‘yard’
- ihipa
Egypt’
ingarangi England’
- ingarihi English’
inihi ‘inch’
32. iota
‘yacht’
iwi
‘iwi, Maori
tribe’
kaka ‘cork’
kAnara
‘colonel’
kapa
copper,
penny’
kapara
corporal’
kApata
‘cupboard’
kara
‘collar’
karaehe
‘grass; glassware,
tumbler; class’
karAhi
‘glass’
karahipi
‘scholarship’
karaka
‘clock;
clerk’
karauna
‘crown’
