Do languages borrow morphemes?

Question

It is clear that languages can borrow words and even syntax from other languages but do they borrow morphemes?

For example, the English morpheme -ation has a very specific usage in Portuguese. It is specially seen in the word embromation, that comes from the verb embromar, something like “to deceive”. The morpheme -ation transforms it into a noun used to describe bad English. It can also be added to any other word to give it an “English quality”, always in a funny way and making reference to one's poor mastering of English. Although it is certainly not part of the standard Portuguese, it is recognized by almost any speaker and has been used in language school advertisement. (There are funny examples of embromation on YouTube, both here and here.)

Are there any other cases of morphemic borowing, be they jokes or part of the standard system of a language?

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Edit: some theorical considerations

The very concept of morpheme was brought up several times throughout the answers and the comments to my question, so I would like to quickly address this point. My notion of morphology and consequently morphemes comes from Steven Pinker's pretheoretical Words and Rules. He considers morphology to be separated from syntax and responsible for the “rules for forming complex words, including regulars” (page 23). Its main job is to make it possible to join lexicon elements, such as words and morphemes, together, thus saving us from the trouble of memorizing the past form for every verb, for example. Rather than defining morphemes, I will only say that they are the set of memorized chunks that affixes such as -ation (as in “affiliation”), un- (“unthinkable”) and -s (“dogs”) belong to.

Also, it is quite natural that a language will borrow morphemes (and lexicon, syntax etc.) from the language(s) it came from. I would say that my main interest are those cases in which the borrowing had little to do with political imposition of a language (like Ancient Rome did in most cases, or Spain in its colonies) or linguistic evolution and heritage. Rather, I'm looking for morphemes borrowed because of the need of expression that morpheme would cover.

To conclude, I don't have any specific definition for morpheme, nor am I too concerned with the issues the concept brings; also, “pure” borrowings constitute stronger evidence than “forced” ones.

Answer 1

English has done this rather extensively -- the "-ation" you quote is originally Latin. The verbalizing suffix "-ize" is originally Greek (and entered the language via Latin (borrowing) and French (descent from Latin)). And "-ify" is originally Latin. Both these are unambiguously productive (as is "-ation"). More recently and colloquially, English speakers have borrowed "uber-" as a prefix (from German). Attached to an adjective ("uber-tired," "uber-happy") it carries roughly the meaning of "very." On nouns ("uber-linguist") it means something like "very exemplary."

For a non-English example, the Basque past participle suffix "-tu" (the only pp. suffix which is productive today) is widely (though not universally, as I understand) held to be derived from Latin "-tum," the neuter past participle suffix.

These are just examples from two languages I happen to know something about. So I'd say that this happens all the time, both as a colloquialism or "joke" and also as a part of core linguistic meaning.

Answer 2

Yes there are borrowings. Like Aaron said, English (I'll take it as an example) has done it extensively. If you click on the "Example Greek and Latin Roots" link in this page, you'll see a lot of morphemes borrowed by English from Greek and Latin. Some examples can be:

• anthrop — human;
• bio — life;
• cac — bad;
• chrom — color;
• chron — time;
• circum — around;
• gam — marriage, sexual union;
• log — study, speak;
• mis — hate;
• phil — love, tendency;
• phon — sound, speech sound;
• corp/corpor — body, flesh.

...and many more. (You can find more morphemes also in the wikipedia page that I linked when answering to the question that hippietrail linked.)

Regarding specifically the list above, some of them are even combined:

• misanthropy — mis + anthrop + y;
• cacophony — cac + o + phon + y.

There was another thing I wanted to talk about. Some scholars and linguists, like Hugo Schuchardt have stated that morphemes are transferable only indirectly: They are acquired through the introduction of words. In other words, the speakers of a given language become acquainted with morphemes because they were "brought in" with the loanwords. After the morphemes have been "interiorized" by the speakers, they might create new words in their native language using those morphemes.

Not all agree with this, as it happens with the trends of thoughts, but it's an interesting point of view. You can read more about it in this document. It doesn't go really in depth, but it's a good starting point if you want to investigate the matter. I couldn't find any other interesting links about it.

Answer 3

No one has mentioned probably the best and most humorous example: acquisition of the plural morpheme -s into Japanese.

American sports, particularly baseball, are very popular in Japan, and american teams are followed very closely. Many teams have plural names — the Red Socks, the Cardinals, etc. You have the same pattern in american bands, too — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. Apparently, Japanese speakers interpreted the plural morpheme to be something like a team-generating morpheme: you take a noun, add -s to it, and you get a team name.

Answer 4

Norwegian has borrowed the semantically murky derivation {-is} from Swedish, I've only seen it make nouns. Unfortunately that morph is so short it probably haven't been indexed by Google Scholar. I'll keep an eye out for links on it.