Reading Report #5

AL710 Historical-Comparative Linguistics

Topic 9: Borrowing
For: Aj. Phinnarat By: Tiffany Barkman
Hock defines borrowing as "the adoption of individual words or even of large sets of vocabulary items from another language or dialect" (Hock 1991: 380). He gives examples in English of the words rouge, a kind of makeup, and macho, an adjective to describe a man.

Types of Linguistic Borrowing

Under the topic "the substance of borrowing," Hock reminds readers that borrowing goes beyond the adoption of single words (Hock 1991: 382-387). Often as a result of borrowing lexical items, other kinds of borrowing may also result. Derivational and other morphemes can be borrowed, or native derivational morphemes can be added to borrowed words. Morphological rules can be borrowed. New phones or new distributions for previously existing phones can be introduced into languages through loanwords. Beyond this, whole phrases or collocations of words can be borrowed, such as the English it goes without saying from the French il va sans dire. Morphosyntactic processes such as comparative structures can also be taken from one language into another. That these types of processes can be observed supports Sankoff in her comments, which are applied here to phonology, but can have even farther reaching effects: "If it were the case that no speakers from the borrowing language ever became fluent in the language being borrowed from, this pattern [of phonological adaptation] might be more universal. Nevertheless, most studies report that phonological adaptation of loanwords is not total. Some foreign pronunciations are retained, and indeed have often been a source of phonological innovation in the receiving language" (Sankoff 2001: 9). While almost any linguistic feature can be borrowed, languages have preferences. Within the realm of lexical items, specialized and technological vocabulary are borrowed most easily. In English, for example, we see inflation, atom, and finance as loanwords. There is also relationship between borrowing and grammatical classes. Nouns are generally much more frequently borrowed than other parts of speech, while pronouns are among the least frequently borrowed. In other areas of vocabulary borrowing, there may be other motivating factors. One of these is prestige. When the French dominated the English after the Norman conquest, and their culture and cuisine were considered prestigious, in addition to many other borrowings, French words were taken and used to refer to animal meat in its edible form. Pork, from the French porc pig, is just one example. Yet even if the face of contact with a language considered of high prestige, basic vocabulary and verbs tend to be relatively resistant to borrowing. The

last point Hock makes about where and why borrowings most commonly takes place is to mention that derivational morphemes are much more easily received into a language than inflectional affixes. Even with these preferences in mind, we must remember that the existence of bilingual speakers can lead to the possibility of all kinds of borrowing, including grammatical. When code switching, a bilingual speaker may "adopt" or "import" grammatical categories like aspect or gender when one language includes these but the other does not. When features are changed to suit the recipient language, this can be referred to as "adaptation" and "substitution." In any given speech situation, a speaker may adopt or adapt a feature from a foreign language to use in the current language of communication, or may choose some compromise between full adoption and full adaptation. For example, the Iranian language Balochi has been the source of widespread borrowing into Brahui. One instance of grammatical borrowing in this context has been pronouns which are suffixed to nouns to become possessive, and to verbs as objects, following Balochi style (McMahon 1994: 204, 211). Let us now look to what other authors have to say regarding other aspects of and other perspectives from which to look at linguistic borrowing. Borrowing is divided into three broad categories by Arlotto (Arlotto 1972: 184-194). The first is probably the type that the common person would most readily think of: lexical borrowing. A common motivation for this type of linguistic borrowing is the borrowing of an item from another culture, which then requires a name. Speakers will often take the source culture's name of that item and adapt it into their own language. We can see this when English speakers come to know the food and then the name 'somtam in Thai, and simply use that Thai lexical item to refer to it. Various phonological changes tend to apply to loanwords in the recipient languages. Because borrowed words are often more or less adapted to fit into a language's phonological system, some phonemes may be completely lost in translation, particularly when a tonal language acts as the donor, and the recipient language is not tonal. Usually, foreign sounds encountered in loanwords are replaced by phones which are native to the recipient language and are somehow perceived to be similar to the sound being replaced. When English speakers pronounce Bach as [bak], we see a voiceless velar fricative being replaced by a stop, because of the lack of a fricative at that place of articulation in English. Insertions or deletions may also occur to conform a loanwords phonological structure to the structures permissible within the recipient language. This is seen in Burmese in the loanword "bus car," for example. To conform to the CV() syllable pattern, the pronunciation comes out as [ba s ka]. In terms of loanwords, there can also be impact on morphology in the transition from lending to borrowing language. Morphological boundaries can be lost, so that the recipient language reinterprets two or more morphemes as one. The English alligator is borrowed from Spanish el largato, 'the alligator', but is taken to be one word and requires an article in English (Campbell 2004: 70). Another topic to consider in relation to lexical borrowing is loan translation. This phenomenon can also be referred to as calquing, or semantic borrowing. It is the process of borrowing terminology from another language, but rather than taking the lexical item directly from the donor language, each component present in the donor language is translated into the recipient language. In borrowing the word "boyfriend" from English into Chinese, for instance, it became nan pengyu male friend.

Following this discussion regarding lexical borrowing, Arlotto deals with phonological borrowing. Although in lexical borrowing sounds are generally adjusted to fit the recipient languages phonological system, it is possible to have phonological borrowing. It is less frequent than lexical borrowing, and tends to require quite a few bilingual speakers. The phoneme // which didn't used to exist in English was introduced during a time of heavy borrowing from the French. Currently, a common context in which this high bilingualism may occur is in countries which have more than one official language. The final type of borrowing considered by Arlotto is syntactic. This may be even less common than phonological borrowing. We can see an example, however, in English, although it has not been taken into the wider grammatical system. In borrowing legal terms like attorney general, the noun comes before the adjective, as it did in the donor language, French, but not as it normally should in English. There have been a few constructions, such as postmaster general, which followed this construction, spreading it by analogy.

Reasons for Linguistic Borrowing

We will look now to Campbell for a brief overview of why words are borrowed before turning to the question of how we can identify loanwords and know which language was the donor and which the recipient. Campbell, along with other authors, lists two main reasons for borrowing, and then one less common one (Campbell 2004: 64-65). As already stated in reference to Hock's discourse on borrowing, the two primary motivators for borrowing are need and prestige. Because the automobile, for example, is a fairly recent concept in history, it can be seen that some form of this word has been borrowed into a wide number of languages. In Finnish this resulted in auto, in Swedish bil. These are examples of word borrowing motivated by need -- a lexical item was required in order to refer to the new referent. In terms of prestige, we can remember the example relating to French cuisine which was cited earlier. In fact, the word cuisine itself is French for 'kitchen'. Because French was considered as socially higher status, this word has been borrowed into English and tends to be used for high dining. But beyond these two reasons, there can be a third. A language may borrow in order to use the new word in a derogatory way, wanting to represent a negative evaluation. The Korean word [hstis], borrowed from the English hostess, refers to women who work at nightclubs and bars particularly for male customers, and is a classic example of a loanword to express negative meaning.

Criteria for determining Linguistic Borrowing and Its Direction

There are four or five criteria which can be used as clues to allow linguists to understand that a word is borrowed, and which language was the source and which the receiver. The first and best piece of evidence can usually be found phonologically. Where we find phonological patterns in a lexical item that are not normal to the phonological patterns of the language, there is a high possibility that it is a loanword. For example igo 'he is rich' in Chiricahua Apache can be identified as borrowed because there are not generally initial []s in the language. Other phonological clues can be taken from history. We can look to sound changes that have taken place diachronically to understand the direction of borrowing. In two Mayan languages we see that one underwent the sound change *o: > u while the other didn't. When words bearing [u] appear in the second language, but are known to have been pronounced [o:] in the protolanguage, they are suspect as loanwords.

Another criteria which can give clues regarding loanwords is morphological complexity. An example can be seen in the word alligator as explained above. Because the lexical item is morphologically more complex in Spanish, it is most likely that English is the borrowing language. The difficulty here is that folk etymology is also a productive process. Speakers of a language can understand words to have morphology which were not, in fact, originally there in the lexical items. And so, we look to other clues on which we can rely. Cognates can give us further information regarding loanwords. If cognates of a lexical item being considered can be found across many of the sister languages of one language in which it occurs, but none or only few of the sister languages in which the other occurrence is found, we suspect that the lending language is the one whose sisters have cognates. By this criteria, we can see Spanish ganso 'goose' as borrowed from Germanic *gans, since there are cognates across the Germanic languages. Within the Romance languages, to which Spanish belongs, there are no true cognates. Looking at the geographical and ecological settings in which a language is spoken can also give clues. Since the English language was not originally spoken in areas where zebras or aardvarks could be found, we can suspect these two lexical items as loanwords. In fact, zebra is from a Congo language, borrowed through French, while aardvark is an Afrikaans word. Lastly, there may be other semantic clues surrounding a word which can alert us as to their status as loanwords. For example, since the word papoose can be explained by the paraphrase 'Indian baby', we are made aware that it is likely a term being borrowed from an American Indian language.

Personal Response:
Borrowing seems to be a very interesting and engaging subject among linguists and non-linguists alike. It can be quite fascinating to speculate about the etymological processes a lexical item, for example, has gone through, and what this might reflect of the sociopolitical situations which gave rise to various borrowing, usages and shifts in phonology and semantics over time. There is also something about sharing terminology across language boundaries that seems to offer speakers a kind of unanticipated kinship. We see in these processes the usefulness of models such as those proposed by Schmidt in his wave theory. Without these types of perspectives on language relationships, we wouldn't have a basis on which to research or describe the horizontal influence which takes place cross-linguistically, and the relationships that result. Linguistic borrowing can be a tricky subject, probably particularly so for those focused on language preservation and endangered languages. It is worth noting that both very precarious and perhaps dying languages as well as vivacious and flourishing languages can experience vast amounts of linguistic borrowing. For any individual or committee attempting to guide -- however officially or unofficially -- the future of a language, there are difficult questions to be asked. How much attempt should be made to regulate borrowing? Is calquing a preferred alternative? Will the language prosper most if speakers are left to whatever innovations they may naturally make, and whatever changes are coming to it? We see that language change, and in specific, borrowing, are not bad things or dangerous to a language. They are perfectly natural, and allow languages to grow and even reproduce. But there are cases in which

they become signs of or outcomes of the beginning of language death. These are questions which linguists, community leaders, and even the average speaker will need to continue to wrestle with, and all the more so in this era of rapid change, significant language contact, and large amounts of crosslinguistic borrowing.

References:
Arlotto, Anthony. 1972. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. Campbell, Lyle. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Hock, Hans Henrich. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McMahon, April M.S. 1994. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. Sankoff, Gillian. 2001. Linguistic Outcomes of Language Contact. Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. by Peter Trudgill, J. Chambers & N. Schilling-Estes. 638-668. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Note: In some examples given, tone has been overlooked for reasons of simplification.