Questions tagged [borrowing]
When words are taken from one language and incorporated into another.
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Is there any specific term for "English-originated?
I'm working on an academic writing in English, but as a non-native speaker, I feel lacking of vocabulary.
When a word has its origin in the Chinese language, we use the term 'Sino-' such as Sino-...
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What is it called when a new word is replaced by a more familiar one?
I mean the phenomenon that happens when a language borrows a word, but it gets replaced by a similar-sounding word that is already in the language like from Spanish 'aguacate' to 'avocado' or 'echeque ...
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How do people deal with loanwords with highly alien phonemes?
I've been thinking about how a people who speak a language without rhotics would perceive a rhotic sound. Obviously of course, this would depend on exactly which rhotic we're talking about. I thought ...
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142 views
Why does Hebrew transcribe Akkadian š inconsistently?
Biblical Hebrew consistently uses the letter ס (s) to transcribe names with the Akkadian consonant š. For example, Esarhaddon for Aššur-aḥa-iddina, Esther from Ištar, Sargon from Šarru-ukīn (all ...
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Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
I'm a student of formal linguistics and Russian language, my question has been surprisingly hard to google -- I've studied a little Ukrainian, and I've read that its structurally similar to Russian ...
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137 views
Sami loanwords in Swedish language [closed]
Are there any words in Swedish borrowed directly from Sami languages? Excluding proper nouns.
One example would be enough for "yes" answer. A link to some research on related subject is required for "...
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Borrowing words along with the articles or other grammatical parts (like Spanish from Arabic)
Disclaimer: I do not know Arabic.
Here is an example of Spanish words of Arabic origin: alacrán, albañil, alquimia...
I wonder why Spanish language borrowed so many Arabic words along with the ...
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Does Sanskrit really have a large proportion of borrowings from non IE stock?
A comment on an answer to anoher question about Lithuanian suggests that 'quite a large number of words was borrowed from non-IE languages'.
While some words in Sanskrit indeed seem to have Fenno-...
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Greek words with initial “ia” instead of “a” [closed]
Greek verbs with initial #i+H4-
from Arnaud Fournet (May 2017)
*H4eH4- ‘to heal, guard’:
(1)Hurrian a-tt- ‘to guard, protect’
(2) Greek ἰάομαι ‘to heal’ < *y-ā-
(3) The question : why "ia" instead ...
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Languages preserving loanword inflections
Erudite English has an interesting practice where the plural form of loanwords may follow the inflectional grammar of the source language. Thus "campi" as well as "campuses", "minima" as well as "...
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Can anybody recommend some textbooks/articles that deal with the adaption of loan words into Spanish?
I'm doing a phonology project on Spanish and one of the components is describing how the language adapts loanwords. I'm particularly interested in Arabic loanwords and how they are adapted as I ...
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Why are some words to express country names different between Chinese and Japanese?
In some countries, their principal chinese characters are represented differently between Chinese and Japanese. For example,
意 vs 伊 (Italy)
法 vs 仏 (France)
德 vs 独 (Germany)
That being said, there ...
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2answers
75 views
Is the the Turkish word kin 'hate, venom etc' restricted to Anatolian-Turkish only?
The word kin 'hate, venom, spite' is quite unusual and took my attention for its meaning 'venom'. Is it an Anatolian-Turkish/Azeri only word or is it common in other Turkic languages? Does anyone know ...
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1answer
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In Arabic loanwords, why does Persian change the short vowels with different vowels instead of matching them with long counterparts?
Classical Arabic (4th-9th century) short vowels are /a/, /u/, and /i/, and long vowels are /a:/, /u:/, and /i:/.
New Persian (1000-1200 years old) short vowels are /æ/, /o/, and /e/, and long vowels ...
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Word classification and labeling
I got myself in a controversial discussion on word classification. To my knowledge words can be classified as a) inherited from a parent language, b) inherited substrate words, c) a result of ...
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Term for borrowing an inflected form as an uninflected form
Sometimes when a word is borrowed from one language to another, what is an inflected form in the source language becomes an uninflected form in the target language. Examples of this are the Italian ...
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Which of 可爱/可愛い was exported to the other between Chinese and Japanese?
In Chinese (Mandarin), there exists a word 可爱 that means "pretty" or "cute" in English. In Japanese, there is also a word 可愛い (adjective) that means the same thing in English.
Given that both words ...
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Historical development of English pronunciation(s) of “hygiene”
I have a two-part question about the pronunciation of hygiene in English. The usual pronunciation, as shown by a variety of online dictionaries accessible from OneLook Dictionary Search, is /...
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Name of the act of borrowing linguistic concepts from different languages
What is the term for concepts that got translated from one language or another?
I've heard this term in a conversation about Czech Anglicisms such like: "Mějte hezký den." - the literal version of ...
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What factors influence the way we adapt loanwords into English?
If someone pronounces "pizza" as /piːzə/ instead of /pitsə/, we'd surely raise an eyebrow at them. But few people (that I know personally) mind when we pronounce "tagliatelle" with a hard G (I wasn't ...
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544 views
Why are raccoons called “washbears” in many languages?
Examples of words that literally mean "washbear" can be found here. This is apparently due to the fact that raccoons just love to wash things so much. But is it just a coincidence that many languages ...
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Other languages that borrow as promiscuously as English?
I've heard people say that the reason English is such a great language is that it's enriched itself by stealing so promiscuously from other languages. The image I get of English is that she's like the ...
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What phonological process changes е to ё in Russian?
I've been studying Russian for years now, but the one thing that I can't seem to wrap my mind around is why would the sound е je come to be pronounced like ё jo in certain circumstances?
Obviously, ...
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1answer
108 views
Why do loanwords tend to be more polite, formal, technical, etc. than native words?
Why do loanwords tend to be more polite, formal, technical, etc. than native words? I've noticed that native words in my language, especially those that refer to body waste and genitals, tend to be ...
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Treatment of final E's in loanwords to English
Karaoke (from Japanese), simile (from Latin), tu quoque (Latin), apostrophe (Ancient Greek via Latin), machete (Spanish), and other loanwords with final E sounds all end up with an /i/ at the end.
...
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1answer
118 views
Why are the Turkeys name in reference to other cultures?
Introduction
After being literally translated into english, the name of the Turkey (bird) follow some interesting pattern.
In english, they are called "Turkey".
In turkish, they are called "Hindi".
...
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1answer
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c- in Irish clann “offspring”
Irish clann "plant; offspring; child" (the source of English clan) is borrowed from Welsh plant with the same meanings, which is itself a borrowing of Latin planta. Why did Irish change the initial p ...
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How did the name for st Peter become to be rendered as “Peter” in English, and why is not rendered as “stone” or “rock”
As I understand it, in the original bible passage, Jesus says to Peter "And I tell you that you are Petros, and on this petra I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it"
And ...
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1answer
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English & Competing Borrowings: How many “pre-Norman” loanwords are known to have been replaced by “post-Hastings” ones?
What I am looking for:
As my question suggests, I'm interested in words English has adopted from other languages. More specifically, I'm interested in old Celtic or Scandinavian (or other) loanwords ...
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2answers
243 views
Base language of Mitanni Texts
I was going through the sources for early indo-iranian and according to B. Fortson the first documented manifestation of this branch are the proper names in Mitanni Texts. Since the indo-iranian word ...
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Examples of Borrowing Languages
In the Wikipedia page History of the English language it is mentioned that English is a "borrowing language", with the implication that there are many loan words in English. What other languages may ...
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Has any language ever borrowed an interrogative or relative pronoun?
One of the lexical similarities between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic is in the interrogative and relative pronouns. For the former, in PIE there's a family of interrogatives ...
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Did Uralic borrow basic vocabulary from PIE, and if so why?
This section of the Wikipedia article on laryngeal theory lists proposed IE-to-Uralic loanwords containing laryngeals. Several of these have quite basic meanings: "woman", "person", "do", "give", "go"....
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Is there a source that lists English Loanwords into Mandarin Chinese?
Is there a source(database, dataset, etc.) that lists English Loanwords into Mandarin Chinese?
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358 views
Pronunciation in languages from East Asia of words that are Japanese loanwords in English
In English, most loanwords from Japanese are pronounced similarly to the Japanese word. It isn't an exact match, for example with "karaoke" the pronunciation of the second "a" differs between English ...
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2answers
141 views
Reasons for things named same way in seemingly unrelated languages
How did it come different languages share idiomatic expressions, or name something in same words?
Like, take word "inflammation" for example. In English, it's "in(ner)" and "flame". In Ukrainian, it'...
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Arabic and Persian loans in Turkish
Both Persian and Turkish - as have other "islamic" languages - have a great deal of Arabic vocabulary. Due to an (initially) favourable vowel inventory (and maybe due to the same script being used) ...
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Some common features of unrelated languages: Turkish and Persian
This is somehow related to the question Are some languages known to have taken grammatical features etc rather than just lexicon from their substrate languages?
In the area of today's Turkey, Iran ...
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Constructing/borrowing of complex scientific/technological/financial vocabulary in Esperanto [closed]
Most Esperanto scientific, some technology-specific, or financial dictionaries available online cover vast range, but mostly old terminology that was around for many years. How does one translate or ...
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Is دشمن (“enemy” in Persian) borrowed from δυσμενής (“hostile” in ancient Greek)?
A couple of years ago I encountered the world δυσμενής, meaning hostile, in an ancient Greek text I translated. If I recall correctly, this can be pronounced as "dusmenè". This always intrigued me, ...
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2answers
381 views
Is Mongolian “шинэ” / “ᠰᠢᠨᠠ”, meaning “new”, a borrowing of Chinese “新”?
I've noticed that the Mongolian word for "new" is "шинэ" (or in traditional script, "ᠰᠢᠨᠠ"). Since final vowels are not pronouned it's spoken as "shin".
The Han character for "new", "新" is also ...
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297 views
Has a spoken language ever borrowed a word from a signed language?
There are plenty of examples of signed languages borrowing or deriving words from spoken language. In ASL, the word DOG is a lexicalized fingerspelling of "dog", CHURCH is made with the "c" handshape ...
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140 views
How are foreign terms incorporated into the Arabic system of vowel alternation?
I don't know much at all about the specifics of Arabic grammar, so this question might not make sense, but as I understand it, most Arabic words consist of a three-consonant root with vowels inserted ...
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Is a loanword also a cognate or are the two terms mutually exclusive?
A borrowing or loanword is when a word from language A is added to the lexicon of language B, with whatever phonological adaptations are necessary.
But is a cognate only a word directly inherited ...
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Are tones “preserved” when borrowing between unrelated tonal languages?
Let's consider just borrowing between unrelated, national/standardized tonal languages, just in case borrowing between related languages might be a special case and borrowing between non standardized ...
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1answer
239 views
Why is the Lao word for tea “ຊາ” (saa) and not “ຈາ” (chaa)?
In just about every language, the word for "tea" can be traced to one of two variants of the same word.
Te, from the Amoy tê of Fujian Province and Taiwan.
Cha, from the Cantonese chàh of Guangzhou (...
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886 views
Could the Mandarin word “要” (yāo) and the Thai word “เอา” (ao), both meaning “to want” be related?
After a couple of weeks in Thailand and learning how to say "I don't want it" I've just realized the word for "want" is very similar to the word for "want" in Mandarin Chinese.
I know the coincidence ...
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How is tone assigned to loanwords borrowed from non-tonal languages? [duplicate]
In a tonal language like Cantonese, how is stress assigned to loanwords (from languages which don't have a tone distinction)?
For example, Hong Kong Cantonese has various words borrowed from English, ...
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Are there any loanwords between Turkish and Armenian?
In the Ottoman Empire, both Turks and Armenians shared common social and cultural domains, but are there any loanwords in either language from either side - i.e. Turkish loanwords in Armenian or ...
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Is the similarity between the Arabic word Gayyid and the English word Good due to a borrowing?
Why is the Arabic word جید (jayyid) which is pronounced gayyid in Egypt and means good, so similar to the word good or the German word gut? Is it a borrowing? (since the word for good is very ...
