Lexical borrowing: some general principles (Jan 2003)

two lectures

Plundered from historical linguistics books (Hock, McMahon, Campbell)

Distinguish from codeswitching:

· authority:

· Latin epigraphs

· untranslated quotations in academic articles

· secrecy:

· parents talking in front of children

· Pepys: “Here did I endeavour to see my pretty woman that I did bauser in las tenebras a little while depuis” (in addition to code!)

From

· other languages

· other varieties of the same language

· e.g., other registers (metaphorical use of trauma)

· e.g., other dialects (vat, vixen from southern dialects of OE)

· e.g., older stages of the language. By

· religious language

· poets

Requirements

· some bilingualism (read McMahon 204 on banana!)

· projected gain (social or linguistic)

Motivations for borrowing usually lumped as

· prestige

· individual

· collective: subjective desire to enrich the potential of the vernacular

· when EModE period opened, English was extending its functions

· borrowed words from the languages that had those functions: Latin, French

· it’s been said that most words tend to move from the more prestigious language

· need

· objective need to express new ideas

· when EModE period opened, intellectual and physical barriers were coming down

· scientific and technological discoveries

· but old words could also be used (e.g. trunk)

· travel

· native life and culture

· unfamiliar flora and fauna

· indigenous languages had lower prestige for English-speakers

· borrowings not necessarily directly from the indigenous language

· and also competed with old words (e.g. robin)

I’d like you to think about this with your words: what kinds of cultural contact/assumptions are reflected by the borrowings you’re looking at?

· might be quite straightforward with a commodity-word

· perhaps most interesting with “learned” synonyms of existing words

Nativization process

Stages

· word italicized/quoted/glossed

· word in wider use but still felt to be foreign

· word completely integrated (and used metaphorically, i.e. kamikaze)

Adoption vs Adaptation

Adoption (importation)

· word not modified at all; features foreign to the borrowing language maintained (phonology, morphology, orthography)

· e.g. Bach [x]

Adaptation (or phoneme substitution)

· sounds that aren’t in the borrowing language get substituted with a similar sound, e.g. Bach [k]

· e.g., [x] is a voiceless velar fricative

· e.g., [k] is a voiceless velar stop

· spelling is often influential

· the <th> and <ch> in Rothschild /rotšilt/ end up getting pronounced

· e.g. the first letter of rouge ends up getting pronounced as /r/ when /g/ might be closer

· e.g., Don Quixote in English ends up as [kwIks...]

· morphological reanalysis might happen

· Greek singular forms in –os get reanalyzed as plurals, and new singulars formed: heros

· morphological complexity of donor language lost

· el lagarto “alligator”

· la reata “lariat”

· vin aigre “vinegar, sour wine”

· aard vark “earth pig”

· sometimes the word’s pronunciation gets changed quite drastically as the result of some sort of rationalization: folk etymology

· ME berfray “moveable wooden tower used to besiege forts” -> belfry “bell tower”

· once they contained bells, word reanalyzed to include morpheme bell

· results in false morphological complexity

· ME souverain (from French, from Latin superánus) respelled sovereign as if related to Latin regnum

· Algonguin otček -> PDE woodchuck (what’s a chuck?)

· French chaise longue -> PDE chaise lounge

· can sometimes relatively date words

· ME: chair

· alveopalatal voiceless affricate has become a fricative

Which?

· depends upon conditions

· more likely earlier (first users more likely to know the language)

· more likely if the speaker knows the language

· more likely if the speaker is trying to show off (or accommodate others in the know)

· easier when it’s from a related language

· easier when the donor language’s inflectional morphology isn’t complicated

· Latin nouns delirium and investigator don’t have any weird endings

· Latin inflectional morphology usually more complicated

· e.g., verbs have various principal parts: do you use the present stem (revolve, convince, esteem) or the participle (revolute, convict, estimate)?

· easier when there have already been lots of loanwords from the same source

What can be borrowed? (didn’t give this, but made many of the points after your reports!)

· words

· usually nouns

· usually not basic vocabulary (late OE and eME borrowing of words like skin, skull, leg from ON along with prepositions and pronouns shows unusually close contact)

· collocations

· court(s) martial -> court martial

· new meanings for old words (usually cognates of each other, share an ancestor)

· e.g. Latin re + sentire “to feel”) -> French -> English

· English resent temporarily acquired the French (historical) meaning of “feel”

· C18th novels

· derivational morphemes (prefixes and suffixes)

· e.g., first edible and visible were borrowed

· then –ible was attached to other Romance bases: palatable, maybe legible (disputed etym?)

· then –able attached to native bases: eatable, readable, unputdownable

· some inflectional morphemes (learned plurals)

· e.g. Latin –us, plural –i

· comes in with words like cactus

· sometimes wrongly attached to words like hippopotamus

· new graphemes

· e.g. <ae> in words from Latin

· now varies with <e>: medieval, encyclopedia

· new environments for old graphs

· e.g. final <-i> in sushi, spaghetti

· new phonemes

· e.g., in OE, [v] was the allophone or variant of /f/ between vowels

· you couldn’t have [v] if it wasn’t between vowels, i.e. at the beginning of a word

· in ME, with borrowing of vat and vixen from southern dialects and borrowing of veal and vine from French, /v/ became phonemic (smallest meaningful unit of sound: veal/feel)

· e.g., in OE, the sound Ž didn’t exist

· came in with words from French like rouge, beige (tended to be word-final)

· reinforced with an EModE sound change /zy/ in measure, leisure, etc. (medial)

· new environments for old phonemes

· e.g., in OE, the sound /ĵ/ was medial or final: secgan, ecg

· initial sound, came in from French: gem, gentle

· new phonological rules

· palatalization in French has caused alternation in pairs like electric, electricity, edification, edifice; allegation vs allege

· has borrowed enough pairs to entrench it

Grey area: calques/loan-translations

· language uses its own elements to “translate” foreign word or phrase

· word: OE translated Latin omni-potent as eall+mihtig; Latin ev-angelium (“good + news, message”; from Greek eu...) as godspell -> gospel

· idiom: il va sans dire -> “it goes without saying”

· grammar: more, most as comparative and superlative influenced by French more, most (native strategy: -er, -est)

Loanwords in Early Modern English: Latin

Diagnostic elements of “Early Modern” English include

· spread of English (this week)

· at expense of Celtic languages within Britain

· into other countries: North America (first wave, when /r/) and other areas like Australia

· development of a single prestige variety of English for literary and administrative use (next week)

· big influx of vocabulary so that English could function in new areas

· Nevalainen in CHEL: in EModE loans rather than affixation and compounding more common way of enlarging the vocabulary

· Latin main source: prestige language

· your second topic next week: why that word for that concept/thing?

· prepared for by lots of French and Latin borrowings in ME (i.e. if lots of –ation words already, language prepped for even more)

· codification of English in dictionaries and grammars

· not surprising that the earliest dictionaries were “hard word”

Process of standardization of a vernacular has been classified into two stages (book by Joseph)

· elaboration: add to vocabulary so that English can talk about philosophy

· lots of redundancy: expiative, expiatory, expiatorious, expiable

· some words borrowed more than once: Latin aestimare, aestimatus

· at different points in time (e.g. aim from French by the 14^th c, estimate from Latin in the 17^th century)

· from different parts of the same verb (e.g., revolve from infinitive, revolution from participle)

· general linguistic principle: no utter synonyms, so some sort of differentiation

· semantic differentiation

· register differentiation

· control and codification:

· pick one from the many variants

· put it into a dictionary or grammar, just like Latin had

· stigmatize the other ones

Review: prestige of Latin

Spelling issues

· ME: borrowings from French, Latin

· e.g. aventure and dette from French in C13th

· EModE: etymological respelling (or selection of more Latinate variant)

· e.g. b starts appearing in debt in C15th

· e.g. d starts appearing in adventure in C15th

-affects the pronunciation

Lexical issues

· borrowings from French or Latin said by Crystal “usually more formal, careful, bookish, or polite” (page 124), often more specialized and perhaps less accessible in the mental lexicon (Williams 115)

· ask, question, interrogate

· end, terminate

· stop, desist

· the same word can get “borrowed” at different times: e.g. Latin verb aestimare, aestimatus became OF esmer

· Latin meanings basis of later ones (I went to a Latin dictionary)

· to appraise, to determine the extrinsic/monetary value of a thing

· to weigh, to estimate the intrinsic/moral worth of a thing

· one source of formal variation: whether the verb comes from the infinitive (esteem) or the participle (estimate); similarly, currere, cursum “to run” (current, cursor)

· other examples:

· another source of variation: when it was borrowed and from what language

· borrowed first into ME from OFr esmer as aim

· OFr was Latinizing too: reborrowed Latin as estim-er, taken into C15th English as esteem

· C16th English then went directly to the Latin for estimate

· semantic/register competition/differentiation: the interesting bit!

· do your words have meanings in common? (check Latin dictionary)

· how much competition is there when they end up in English

· do they end up with different meanings? in different registers?

· EXX:

· aim: entered English with all the Latin meanings in 1300s

· “esteem”: thou eymest the son of man (c14th)

· “estimate”, calculate: no man might aim the number .. (c14th)

· but what stuck was the (also C14th) meaning that had narrowed via “calculate” to mean

· to calculate one’s course with a view to arriving at a point

· (“to aim at singularity”)

· to calculate the direction of anything about to be launched, to direct a missile

· esteem entered (c15th) with both the “appraise” sense and the “attach subjective value” sense:

· “His land shalbe worthe according as it is esteemed”

· “How is the man esteemed here in the city?”

· what stuck was the narrowed/ameliorated “attach subjective value” sense, to “to think highly of” (c16th)

· the “appraise” sense became obsolete

· estimate came in by C16th

· its main current meanings derive from the “appraise, assign a value to”

· specifically without actually counting or measuring

· one spelling was <aestimate>

· you can borrow more than words

· words

· the odd grapheme: <ae> in <aestimate> ...

· a few “inflectional morphemes” (grammar endings)

· not productive: only on loanwords

· once you have enough Latin words like cactus, cacti, fungus, fungi

· fungu (back formation)

· prefixes and suffixes:

· edible and visible borrowed

then –ible attached to other Romance bases: palatable