Loanword

A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from one language and incorporated into another.

General

By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French. The terms "borrow" and "loanword", although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words because nothing is returned to the host languages. Instead, "adopt"/"adoption" or "adapt"/"adaption" are used by many linguists, either in parallel to, or in preference to, these words.

Classes

Certain classes of words are more commonly borrowed than others, usually words for exotic concepts or ideas. What is "exotic" varies from language to language. Thus, English names for creatures not native to Great Britain are almost always loanwords, and most of the technical vocabulary referring to classical music is borrowed from Italian.

By contrast, function words such as pronouns, numbers, and words referring to universal concepts, are usually not borrowed, but have been in some cases (e.g., English they from Old Norse ).

Classification

The studies by Werner Betz (1949, 1959), Einar Haugen (1950, also 1956), and Uriel Weinreich (1953) are regarded as the classical theoretical works on loan influence. The basic theoretical statements all depart from Betz’s nomenclature. Duckworth (1977) enlarges Betz’s scheme by the type “partial substitution” and supplements the system with English terms:

# importation ## foreign word = non-integrated word from a foreign language, spelt as is, e.g. E café (from French); Sp. whisk(e)y (from English) (*the word whisky/whiskey in fact comes from the Scots or Irish Gaelic phrase "uisce beatha" which is a calque of the Latin "aqua vitae", water of life); E weltanschauung (< G Weltanschauung); It. mouse ‘computer device’ (< E mouse ‘rodent; computer device’). ## loan word = integrated word from a foreign language, orthography adapted for the receiving language, e.g. E music (from French "musique"); Sp. chófer (from French "chauffeur"). # partial substitution: composite words, in which one part is borrowed, another one substituted, e.g. OE Saturnes dæg ‘Saturday’ (< Lat. Saturni dies), G Showgeschäft ‘literally: show-business’ (< E show business), G Live-Sendung ‘literally: live-broadcast’ (< E live broadcast). # substitution ## loan coinage ### loan formation #### loan translation = translation of the elements of the foreign word, e.g. OE Monan dæg ‘Monday’ (< Lat. Lunae dies), Fr. gratte-ciel and Sp. rasca·cielos ‘both literally: scrape-sky’ (< E skyscraper), E world view (< G Welt·anschauung), AmSp. manzana de Adán (< E Adam’s apple; vs. EurSp. nuez [de la garganta] ‘literally: nut [of the throat]’). #### loan rendering = translation of part of the elements of the foreign word, e.g. E brother·hood (< Lat. frater·nitas [= Lat. frater ‘brother’ + suffix]); G. Fernsehen(literally "far seeing"), translating elements of E. television or F. télévision, the first element Gk. telos "far" and the second L. visio "sight". ### loan creation coinage independent of the foreign word, but created out of the desire to replace a foreign word, e.g. E brandy (< Fr. cognac). ## loan meaning = indigenous word to which the meaning of the foreign word is transferred, e.g. OE cniht ‘servant + disciple of Jesus’ (< Lat. discipulus ‘student, disciple of Jesus’), OE heofon ‘sky, abode of the gods + Christian heaven’ (< Lat. caelum ‘sky, abode of the gods, Christian heaven’), G Maus and Fr souris ‘rodent + computer device’ (< E mouse ‘rodent, computer device’).

On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen (1950: 214f.) distinguishes three basic groups of borrowings: “(1) Loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution. [. . .]. (2) Loanblends show morphemic substitution as well as importation. [. . .]. (3) Loanshifts show morphemic substitution without importation”. Haugen has later refined (1956) his model in a review of Gneuss’s (1955) book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one by Betz (1949) again.

Weinreich (1953: 47ff.) differentiates between two mechanisms of lexical interference, namely those initiated by simple words and those initiated by compound words and phrases. Weinreich (1953: 47) defines simple words “from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category ‘simple’ words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalysed form”. After this general classification, Weinreich then resorts to Betz’s (1949) terminology.

Models that try to integrate borrowing in an overall classification of vocabulary change, or onomasiological change, have recently been proposed by Peter Koch (2002) and Joachim Grzega (2003, 2004).

Ghil'ad Zuckermann's analysis of multisourced neologization (2003) challenges Einar Haugen's classic typology of lexical borrowing. While Haugen categorizes borrowing into either substitution or importation, Zuckermann explores cases of "simultaneous substitution and importation" in the form of camouflaged borrowing. He proposes a new classification of multisourced neologisms, words deriving from two or more sources at the same time. Examples of such mechanisms are phonetic matching, semanticized phonetic matching and phono-semantic matching. Phono-semantic matching is distinct from calquing. While calquing includes (semantic) translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching (i.e. retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existent word/morpheme in the target language).

Beyond words

Idiomatic expressions and phrases, sometimes translated word-for-word, can be borrowed, usually from a language that has "prestige" at the time. Often, a borrowed idiom is used as a euphemism for a less polite term in the original language. In English, this has usually been Latinisms from the Latin language and Gallicisms from French. If the phrase is translated word-for-word, it is known as a calque.

In English

English has many loanwords. In 1973, a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd edition) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff. Their estimates for the origin of English words were as follows:

French and Norman, including Old French, Old Norman, Anglo-French and Anglo-Norman: 28.3%

Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%

Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English: 25%

Greek: 5.32%

No etymology given or unknown: 4.03%

Derived from proper names: 3.28%

All other languages contributed less than 1%

The reasons for English's vast borrowing include:

(to a relatively small extent) the existence of other languages native to Britain;

the invasion of England by the Vikings and the Normans, and continuing French influence;

borrowings and new coinages from Latin and Greek, as in other European languages;

cultural openness to borrowing; and

its modern global importance.

The flexibility of English's syllable structure, while possibly a contributing factor, is certainly not essential – languages with very restricted syllable structures such as Japanese borrow a similarly large portion of their vocabulary.

The lack of restrictions on the syllable structure does mean that words do not usually need to be heavily modified in borrowing, though due to phonemic and phonetic differences, the English pronunciations of loanwords often differ from the original pronunciations to such a degree that a native speaker of the language it was borrowed from is not able to recognize it as a loanword when spoken.

English has often borrowed words from the cultures and languages of the British Colonies. One very popular example from this is the word "sombrero". In Spanish, this word simply means "hat". But, in English, this word means a wide-brimmed, festive Mexican hat. Other words, for example, words borrowed from Hindi include: syce/sais, dinghy, chutney, pundit, wallah, pajama/pyjamas (from Persian origin), bungalow and jodhpurs. Other examples include: trek, aardvark, laager, wildebeest and veld from Afrikaans; orangutan, shirang, amok from (Malay); and sjambok via Afrikaans from Malay.

English also acquires loanwords in which foreign sounds are part of the foreign pronunciation. For example, the Hawaiian word aā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the English pronunciation, or , contains at most one. In addition, the English spelling usually removes the okina and macron diacritics.

Affixes

The majority of English affixes, such as "un-", "-ing", and "-ly", were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the agentive suffix -er, which is very prolific, is borrowed ultimately from Latin -arius (with similar forms found in other Germanic languages). The English verbal suffix -ize comes from Greek -ιζειν (-izein) via Latin -izare.

Other languages

Direct adoptions, calques (expressions translated word-by-word), or even grammatical constructions and orthographical conventions from English are called anglicisms. Similarly, a straight clone from Swedish – like the word smörgåsbord – is called a sveticism (in Swedish svecism). In French, the result of perceived over-use of English words and expressions is called franglais. Such English terms in French include le week-end, le job (in France) or la job (in Canada), and le bifteck (beefsteak). Denglisch is English influence on German. Another popular term is Spanglish, the English influence on the Spanish language, and Dunglish, the English influence on the Dutch language. The mix of Spanish and Catalan words or grammar structures in a sentence is called Catanyol (Catalan-Espanyol).

During more than 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and administrative language of the empire was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic called Ottoman Turkish, considerably differing from the everyday spoken Turkish of the time. Many such words were exported to other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek and Ladino. After the empire fell in World War I and the Republic of Turkey was founded, the Turkish language underwent an extensive language reform led by the newly founded Turkish Language Association, during which many adopted words were replaced with new formations derived from Turkic roots. This was part of the ongoing cultural reform of the time, in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms, which also included the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet. Turkish also has taken many words from French, such as pantolon for 'trousers' (from French pantalon) and komik for 'funny' (from French comique), mostly pronounced very similarly. Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications tend to use more Islamic-derived words, left-wing ones use more adopted from Europe, while centrist ones use more native Turkish root words.

The Italian government has recently expressed its displeasure over the use of English words and syntax in Italian. English words are often used where they are more convenient than a longer Italian expression, as in "computer" for elaboratore elettronico or "week-end" for finesettimana; but also where equally convenient Italian words already exist, as in "fashion" for moda and "meeting" for conferenza.

Words are occasionally imported with a different meaning than that in the source language. Among the best known examples of this is the German word Handy, which is a adaptation of the English adjective "handy", but means mobile phone and is thus a noun. (See also: Pseudo-anglicism.) Conversely, in English the prefix über-, taken from German, is used in a way that it is rarely used in German.

Words taken into different languages are sometimes spelled as in the original language (such as many of the terms above). Sometimes adopted words retain original (or near-original) pronunciation, but undergo a spelling change to represent the orthography of the adopting language. Welsh is a language where this is done with some consistency, with words like gêm (game), cwl (cool), and ded-gifawe (dead giveaway). The French expression "cul de sac" (meaning "dead end" or "no through road") is used in English as is, with the same meaning but a spelling pronunciation: the 'l' is mute in French but enunciated in English.

In cases where the new word has a very unusual sound, the pronunciation is frequently radically changed, a process sometimes referred to by the archetypal name of the law of Hobson-Jobson; this is particularly noted in words from South Asian and Southeast Asian languages, as in this example. Some languages, such as Jèrriais, have a tendency to apply historical sound-shift patterns to newly introduced words; while Jèrriais speakers would have little difficulty pronouncing "parki", partchi (to park) is the word used, displaying the typical Norman ki → tchi shift.

Most languages modify foreign words to fit native pronunciation patterns. An excellent example is Japanese, which has an enormous number of foreign adoptions (gairaigo). There was a massive ancient influx from China, and then a flow of new words came from European languages, particularly from Portuguese, which was spoken by the first European people whom Japanese encountered in the transition from the Middle Ages to Early modern period, such as from pão, from copo, from frasco, from jarro, etc. Recently, most gairaigo have come from English, though there have been numerous adoptions from Dutch, German, and other languages. There are almost always significant pronunciation shifts: ; – written exactly the same as the gairaigo sōpu from English "soap"; . Longer terms often are shortened: ; ; . In some cases, the original meaning shifts considerably through unexpected logical leaps: : derived from the name of the restaurant "Imperial Viking", the first restaurant in Japan which offered buffet style meals, : derived from the words "white shirt". In other cases words are copied, seemingly at random, and used in totally inexplicable contexts. This is often the case in the names of small businesses and in anime and manga series such as Bubblegum Crisis. Gairaigo is so large a part of the modern Japanese vocabulary that there are specialized dictionaries for it.

Reborrowing

It is possible for a word to travel from one language to another and then back to the original language in a different form, a process called reborrowing. A specific example of this is the French "le biftek", which is borrowed from the English "beefsteak", while the English "beef" is originally from the Norman (cf. French "le bœuf").

Finally, another example is the word which is based on the Greek word for movement, κίνημα (transliteration: kinima), but has been re-borrowed by modern Greek as σινεμά (transliteration: sinema).

See also

Cognate

Calque

Phono-semantic matching

Hybrid word

Inkhorn debate

Language contact

Sayings

Lists of English words of international origin

List of replaced loanwords in Turkish

Semantic loan

Sino-Japanese vocabulary

Sino-Korean vocabulary

Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary

List of French loanwords in Persian‎

List of Tagalog loanwords

List of artworks known in English by a foreign title

Notes

References

Betz, Werner (1949): Deutsch und Lateinisch: Die Lehnbildungen der althochdeutschen Benediktinerregel. Bonn: Bouvier.

Betz, Werner (1959): “Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Vor- und Frühdeutschen”. In: Maurer, Friedrich / Stroh, Friedrich (eds.): Deutsche Wortgeschichte. 2nd ed. Berlin: Schmidt, vol. 1, 127–147.

Cannon, Garland (1999): “Problems in studying loans”, Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 25, 326–336.

Duckworth, David (1977): “Zur terminologischen und systematischen Grundlage der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der englisch-deutschen Interferenz: Kritische Übersicht und neuer Vorschlag”. In: Kolb, Herbert / Lauffer, Hartmut (eds.) (1977): Sprachliche Interferenz: Festschrift für Werner Betz zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 36–56.

Gneuss, Helmut (1955): Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen. Berlin: Schmidt.

Grzega, Joachim (2003): “Borrowing as a Word-Finding Process in Cognitive Historical Onomasiology”, Onomasiology Online 4, 22–42.

Grzega, Joachim (2004): Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Heidelberg: Winter.

Haugen, Einar (1950): “The analysic of linguistic borrowing”. Language 26, 210–231.

Haugen, Einar (1956): “Review of Gneuss 1955”. Language 32, 761–766.

.

Koch, Peter (2002): “Lexical Typology from a Cognitive and Linguistic Point of View”. In: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.): Lexicology: An International on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies/Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1142–1178.

Oksaar, Els (1996): “The history of contact linguistics as a discipline”. In: Goebl, Hans et al. (eds.): Kontaktlinguistik/contact linguistics/linguistique de contact: ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/an international handbook of contemporary research/manuel international des recherches contemporaines. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–12.

Stanforth, Anthony W. (2002): “Effects of language contact on the vocabulary: an overview”. In: Cruse, D. Alan et al. (eds.) (2002): Lexikologie: ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen/Lexicology: an international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, p. 805–813.

Weinreich, Uriel (1953): Languages in contact: findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton.

Zuckermann, Ghil’ad (2003), ‘‘Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew’’, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bloom, Dan (2010): "What's That Pho?". French Loan Words in Vietnam Today; Taipei Times,

External links

World Loanword Database (WOLD)

Discussion on how loan words exacerbate Future Shock (Streaming audio & mp3)

* Category:Historical linguistics Category:Etymology Category:Cultural assimilation