22
votes
Which of 可爱/可愛い was exported to the other between Chinese and Japanese?
It must be remembered that in the Japanese language system, the lexeme's sound and the lexeme's spelling are much less correlated with each other than even in Chinese; the phenomenon of 訓読み kun'yomi ...
- 7,626
15
votes
Accepted
Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
Besides prestige reasons, there is also the fact that the Old Japanese numeral systems can be seen as inconvenient, especially for higher numbers. Disadvantages compared to the Chinese system are:
...
- 441
13
votes
Borrowing words along with the articles or other grammatical parts (like Spanish from Arabic)
This is a linguistic process called rebracketing, and more specifically juncture loss.
Rebracketing is when word or morpheme boundaries are re-analyzed, especially when a word is borrowed from one ...
- 69.5k
12
votes
Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
The reason is similar to the reason why English has borrowed (French) words for beef, pork, mutton even though there are Germanic words for cows, swine and sheep. There is a tendency to borrow words ...
- 83.4k
11
votes
Why does Hebrew transcribe Akkadian š inconsistently?
Yes, some people think Akkadian š was pronounced [s].
For the sibilants, traditionally /š/ has been held to be postalveolar [ʃ], and /s/, /z/, /ṣ/ analyzed as fricatives; but attested ...
- 18.7k
10
votes
Accepted
Languages preserving loanword inflections
A great number of loanwords from Ancient Greek have been integrated into Czech with great attention to the original forms. For instance, many Ancient Greek nouns from the third (athematic) declension ...
10
votes
Accepted
Do dead languages borrow words?
Yes, borrowing still happens—in both directions!
While Latin is dead in that nobody speaks it as their first language, it's still used for official purposes by scientists and the Vatican. When they ...
- 69.5k
10
votes
Why does English have words from Latin and none from Celtic?
As jk says, there are very few Latin loans in English from pre-Saxon times. English does have quite a lot of words borrowed from Latin and Romance, but the vast majority of them come from well after ...
- 69.5k
9
votes
Accepted
Why do French words tend to become so much more intense in English?
It's because of a generalized phenomenon where loans generally have a narrower, more specific meaning in their destination language than in their original language.
The best example is in my opinion ...
- 1,023
9
votes
Accepted
Similarities between Sumerian and Semitic languages
First off, it's worth noting that the main contact between Semitic and Sumerian involved Akkadian, not Hebrew, and the Akkadian words are a bit different—"mother" is ummu, and "father" is abu. And ...
- 69.5k
7
votes
Greek words with initial "ia" instead of "a"
Personally I find all this laryngealist madness highly unscientific. Some scholars use laryngeal phonemes as a jolly when there is something uncertain in the etymology of some word. These ...
- 2,679
7
votes
Accepted
Why does Hebrew transcribe Akkadian š inconsistently?
While Akkadian š is generally cognate with Hebrew š or ś, there's good reason to believe its pronunciation was quite different! The reason it's transcribed as š is mostly historical—Akkadian was first ...
- 69.5k
7
votes
Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
My guess is this question has more to do with history and culture than language per se.
You can say that English was influenced by French 'a lot' due to the Norman conquest (you can probably speak ...
- 171
6
votes
Languages preserving loanword inflections
This is more likely to happen when the original language is fairly well known amongst the community of writers–speakers of the adopting language.
Latin often does it for Greek words. That is, one ...
- 8,014
6
votes
Word classification and labeling
Yard, bard, computer, paradise are all considered to be English words. You can find each of them listed in an English dictionary, non-italicized, with no usage note saying they are words in another ...
- 18.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Sami loanwords in Swedish language
The set of candidates is small. The word "tundra" is from Saami (Proto-Sami *tuonder), though I don't know if it went direct to Swedish, or via Russian. There are some Saami words used in Norwegian (...
- 83.4k
6
votes
Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
You can find examples of words borrowed into Russian language on Wiktionary RU. However, this is far from being a comprehensive list. The number of words borrowed from Turkic languages is somewhere ...
- 161
6
votes
How do people deal with loanwords with highly alien phonemes?
Rhotics aren't a special case here. They will still either be deleted or be replaced with the sound that is perceptually (to speakers of the receiving language) closest to the original sound.
English'...
- 2,570
6
votes
What is a loan creation?
The original German term was Lehnschöpfung that was calqued into English.
There are three beasts to distinguish here:
The loan word (German Lehnwort) that is directly borrowed from the donor ...
- 31.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Pronunciation and spelling of English loanwords in Japanese
Many of the 外来語 gairaigo loanwords in Japanese are indeed from German, many of which date from the very late 19th century / early 20th century.
アレルギー arerugī (note the long i at the end!!!) is ...
- 7,626
6
votes
Compound English word with most etymologies
Remacadamized (Latin/French, Gaelic, Hebrew, Greek, English) isn't in the OED, but Macadamized is.
- 7,504
6
votes
At some point, was г/Г pronounced in Russian like it still is in Ukrainian (somewhat akin to h/H in hotel, i.e. /h/)? Or is it purely regional?
The pronunciation of г as /h/ is purely regional (Southern dialects) by now; diachronically, it used to be /g/ in Proto-Slavic and that changed into /h/ in some languages (Ukrainian, Belorussian, ...
- 464
5
votes
What is it called when a new word is replaced by a more familiar one?
This is called an "expressive loan": when a loanword is reanalyzed to fit into the patterns of the new language.
If an unfamiliar, archaic, or foreign word shifts into something meaningful in the new ...
- 69.5k
5
votes
Accepted
How do you call a languages tendency to adopt foreign words rather than translate them to their language?
Language purism is the tendency to avoid "foreign" words and innovations in general. It is the exception. Accepting new words from different sources is the natural flow of human communication and ...
- 106
5
votes
Accepted
Loanwords with different meanings from original language?
In German a word like Handy or Oldtimer can be called a Scheinanglizismus (pseudo-Anglicism).
Of course that is specific to this one source language, and there are others for other languages.
More ...
- 8,189
5
votes
Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
They are pronounced that way, before the importing of the Chinese characters, and even to this day: ひとつ、ふたつ、みっつ、よっつ、いつつ、むっつ、ななつ、やっつ、ここのつ、とお.
There even is the shortened way of counting: ひ、ふ、み、よ、い、む、な、...
- 159
5
votes
Accepted
Has a word or a phrase been borrowed into another language with permission?
If proper names count, as a comment suggests, an elementary school on Bainbridge Island, Washington has recently been given a new name which comes from the local indigenous language, Lushootseed. The ...
- 281
4
votes
Borrowing words along with the articles or other grammatical parts (like Spanish from Arabic)
Cases like this don't even require borrowing.
Consider English "newt". This is a native English word, but it's got half an article stuck on it. Old English "efte" became Middle English "ewte", but ...
- 2,645
4
votes
Does Sanskrit really have a large proportion of borrowings from non IE stock?
Sanskrit and wider the Vedic language really had a non-IE substratum, or, to be more precise, no less than three substrata: Dravidian, Munda, and one more called "unknown Language X". Apart from T. ...
- 18.6k
4
votes
Greek words with initial "ia" instead of "a"
The origin of iáomai is unknown, but it seems as though the first two syllables could result from *iCa-, where C = a consonant that was lost in all forms of Greek before dialectal breakup, but after ...
- 1,387
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