Contents

1 2 3 4 5 Content Words and the Position of Nouns .................................................................................. 3 Nativization of Borrowed Nouns ................................................................................................. 7 Borrowing of Verbs................................................................................................................... 10 Adjectives and Lexical Adverbs ................................................................................................. 14 References ............................................................................................................................... 17

Faruk Samet Agu brahim elik

Abstract This essay tries to explain the integration process of loan words into a recipient language. The essay divides the issue into chapters related to nouns, verbs, adjectives and lexical adverbs. Throughout the whole essay, ideas are given with related examples. Some of those examples are from other sources and some are directly written by the authors.

LEXICAL BORROWING
1 Content Words and the Position of Nouns
Borrowing can be made in all levels of language structure but there is a generally accepted idea that some vocabulary items to some extent resistant to borrowing. Cross-linguistic samples are collected and evaluated on the basic of systematic analysis. These sample analysis support the idea that some vocabulary items are resistant to borrowing. In this field a well know researcher Morris Swadesh is one of the pioneers with his list of 207 items about basic vocabulary, one of the main beginning points for the researches of linguistics. The analysis of borrowing are carried out on the basis of the method lexico-statistics. The lexicostatistics method creates the foundations for researchers to compare borrowings among languages to understand the hypothesis about language families, sub-families and the calculation of the division of the languages. This process is defined as glottochronology. Swadesh points out some vocabulary items called generic concepts in his list. There generic concepts is the most relevant vocabulary about the human nature and independent from the environment. These vocabulary items are the names of the body-parts, close kin, body-related activities, pronouns, interrogatives and basic concepts for nature and geography. The generic concepts are resistant to borrowing because each and every community has such vocabulary items in their own languages and they do not need to borrow the relevant labels from languages of neighboring communities.

The idea about the generic concepts and their resistance to borrowing is focused on the gap hypothesis. Swadeshs list aims to indicate the generic relatedness rather than to verify the stability of the vocabulary in situations of contact. Nouns are the most favorite vocabulary items borrowed. This prominence is described in many statistics. One of the statistics is the comparison the borrowing of Spanish word classes into three indigenous languages of South America. The table 1.1 below shows the statistics;

Word class Noun Verb Adverb Adjective Total

Otomi 40.7 4.8 4.5 1.9 51.9

Quechua 54.0 17.7 3.4 8.5 83.6

Guarani 37.2 18.3 2.3 7.4 65.2

Figure 1.1. Proportion of content-lexical word classes among Spanish borrowings

The survey about the words forms and morphemes that are borrowed from Spanish to Nahault, is carried out and a list of vocabulary items is presented in Field (2002). The nouns are the largest borrowing area. Nahault language borrowed 552 nouns, 80 verbs, 75 adjectives and 45 adverbs. Of some 522 borrowed nouns, 221 nouns represent institutional agents and names of organizations or institutions. 142 nouns represents abstract concepts including religion, legal and culture. 121 nouns are animates such as persons, kinship terms, animals. 75 nouns represent materials, artifacts and buildings. In the situation of contact, nouns have a

high borrowability and there is an order in the noun classes that are borrowed from least to most favorite classes. Another research about the borrowing of English words into Japanese is carried out by Rebuck (2002). In this research Rebuck points out that borrowing is not done not only to fill lexical gaps but also to a need for special effects, imitation of fashions, trends and synonyms. Loveday presents the statistics about borrowing English vocabulary items to Japanese vocabulary. The statistics are shown in the table below.

Computer

Broadcasting Journalism Marketting

Engineering Flowers

Vegetables Animals

Colours

99%

82%

75%

67%

52%

35%

24%

9%

F gure 1.2.Percentage of English loans in Japanese by selected, specialized semantic domains (from Loveday 1996)

American languages are carried out by Brown (1999). It is concluded from the investigation that even European words for objects and concepts have a different degree of borrowability. The hierarchy is determined by the pragmatic saliency. The terms for living things outrank the terms for artifacts and the terms for animals outrank the terms for plants. The loanwords in the Romani dialect of Selice are investigated by Elsik (in press). As a result of the investigation a list of 1430 lexemes is prepared. Because of the high political and commercial interaction, most of the words are borrowed from the Hungarian. The Hungarian words make up the 63% of all nouns on the list, 41% of verbs, 42% of adjectives, 50% of

adverbs and 23% of function words. The same order of the percentages can be seen in the loanwords from Slovak.

English Albanian Maltese Turkish Hebrew Malay Japanese Hausa Arabic Farsi Swahili

University Universitet Universita niversite Universita Universiti Yunibashiti Jami a Dzamia* Danesgah* Chuo kikuu*

Democracy Demokraci Demokrazija Demokrasi Demokratya Demoktasi Minsei* Dimokurad iyya Dimoqratiyya Demokrasi Kidemokrasi

Television Television Televizjoni Televizyon Televizya Televisyen Terebijon Telebijin Tilfizyon Televizyon Televishemi

Figure1.3 Loanwords for three concepts in several languages (inherited terms are marked with a star*)

Nouns have the highest borrowability. The main reason behind this statistics is the function of the nouns. The most differentiated domain for labeling concepts, objects and roles are covered by nouns. Technological innovations, instruments, conceptual innovations, procedures, institutions and institutional agents, artifacts, industrial and agricultural products are included in the list of most borrowed noun classes. This classification of the nouns is not a coincidence. The languages with a high foreign interaction borrow some vocabulary items such as institutional, social and technological terms. Innovations have an important role in this

process. The name of the innovation is borrowed by many languages. Some languages change the word according to their own rules and some borrow as the same as the original form. This borrowing is shown the table 1.3 above. Statistics about the hierarch in the borrowings are represented with the examples of specific kinship terms. Kin terms are personal relation words but in some societies extended kinship terms show the relation with outsiders so kinship terms is an interesting area of investigation to understand the process in borrowings. For Example; the kinship terms in English are divided into two groups. Father, mother, sister, brother, daughter and son are the words from English and Germanic terminology. However, the terms such as grandparents, aunt, cousin, niece, uncle and nephew are loanwords from French. The terms that closest to the speaker are the most frequently used words. The society has a resistance to borrow terms used everyday language. Nuclear family terms are used in daily life but the other terms of kinship are not used everyday language and there kinship terms have a higher borrowability than the nuclear family terms. Some languages have a wide usage of kinship terms. For Example; grandfather and grandmother are used in everyday language in some societies and these terms also have a resistance to change with loanwords.

2 Nativization of Borrowed Nouns

Nouns have an important place in borrowing concept since they represent the most differentiated inventory of labels for concepts, practices, products, human agents and more. Another feature of nouns that makes them borrowable is the ease of integration to another language. For example, they are easier to integrate than verbs, because verbs may have different forms for different uses. In general, languages use four different way of integrating a word into itself. These ways are: (1) To treat borrowed nouns just like native nouns, and
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integrate them into native inflectional patterns. (2) To avoid integration and maintain just a simplified representation of borrowed nouns. (3) To integrate nouns along with their original inflection in the source language. (4) To apply a special integration strategy that marks out borrowed nouns as loans (Matras, 2009). The first way which is treating the borrowed nouns just like the native nouns and integrating them into native inflectional patterns can be seen in the languages such as Turkish which shows case, possessive inflection, and other forms of nominal inflection. These languages tend to apply these native features into the borrowed nouns as well. Some examples are (Matras, 2009): a. Turkish: dnya world, from Arabic/Persian dnya-n n gelece -I world-GEN future-3SG the future of the world b. Domari: kart postcard, via Arabic kart from English card Ktib-k-ed-a aha kart-s Write-LOAN.TR-PAST-3SG.M this card-ACC He wrote this card. c. Japanese: kyatto-f do cat-food, baransu balance kyatto-f do wa eiy -baransu ni cat.food TOP nutrition.balance DAT Gender is another point that must be taken into consideration in borrowing issue. Languages which have gender in their native nouns assign gender to borrowed noun, too. Moreover, they can change the gender of the nouns. For example, ta?rix history is masculine in Arabic, but in Kurdish the borrowed noun tarix is feminine. A new noun can be assigned a gender in three ways. They can be assigned natural gender, they can be accepted with their existing gender, or they can be given a new gender with the effect of an existing structure in the recipient gender. An example of the third way can be given from German language. The word computer fits into the class of instruments which ends with er in German such as kratz-er scraper. Since nouns like this in German are masculine, computer is borrowed as a
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masculine noun. Another example can be given from Hebrew. In Hebrew, ,European abstract nouns ending with atsya, such as komunikatsya communication, which normally derive from Polish or Russian are classified as feminine, because in Hebrew, nouns ending with /-a/ are generally in feminine class. This fact shows that the morphological and phonological shape of the word and the correlation of gender with phonological shapes in the inherited vocabulary influence the gender of the borrowed words.

Although the import of productive nominal inflection is rare, it is possible to see the import of some other grammatical markers such as plural markers while borrowing a noun. However, these replicated plural markers and definite articles are not productive and they are mostly doubled through native morphology. For example, in Turkish evrak document is used as a single noun, but in Arabic it is plural and varak is single. When evrak is wanted to be plural in Turkish the plural suffix ler, -lar is added to the noun and it becomes is added to the noun and it becomes evraklar. As it is seen from the example, there emerges a double plural marking in such a circumstance. Another issue in borrowing is the pseudo-loans. There is no morphological or phonological event is such examples. They include some words that seems like borrowed from another language; however, they are coined in the recipient language by the effect of some other borrowed words. For example, German handy a mobile phone is under the category of psudo-loan words, because it only exists in German, but it has an English kind of spelling and pronunciation. Another example can be a Hebrew military slang fter which means a shortterm evening leave following a days training. This creative borrowing shows us a hint about interaction between the languages which mean they dont just copy from another language, but they transform the word into their phonological, morphological rules and into their own world view.

Lastly, it is important to mention the problems of borrowing a new word into a language. One of the main problems of borrowing a word from a language occurs at the point of phonologic differences. Languages make the loanwords pronounceable by changing their phonologic structure and so they fit them into native restrictions on words and syllabus structure. For example, Turkish language nativize word which ends with /-tion/ by changing them into /-s(I)yon/; aksiyon action and komunikasyon communication. Japanese has a more interesting strategy since it has a different syllable structure and different alphabet. Its alphabet is a kind of syllable based alphabet and it lets only n to be at the end of a syllable. As we gave as examples above, Japanese change balance into the baransu. All of these examples show us that nativization process of loanwords is more than just copypaste process.

3 Borrowing of Verbs

Verbs are among the borrowed words among the languages. We can give many examples of loan verbs between many different language pairs and groups. For example, English borrowing to demand from French and German borrowing downloaden from English. There is no one and only donor language or a recipient language. All languages share their words with each other. However, the issue is that the borrowings of verbs are a little more complex than other borrowings since verbs tend to have a more complex morphology. There have been some discussions on the ways of verb borrowing. Wichmann and Wohlgemuth (2008) hypothesize that the following hierarchy might be identified for the structural integration of loan verbs. a. No modification of the original form of the verb (direct insertion) b. Morphological modification of the original form of the verb (indirect insertion)

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c. Insertion of the original form of the verb into a compound construction where it is accompanied by an inherited verb (light verb) d. Import of the original verb along with its original inflection (paradigm transfer) Some languages adopt the new verb without any modification, but they assign them into a different category of verbs which differentiate them as loans. In direct insertion, borrowed form may be a root-like, infinitive-like, or imperative-like. For example, Vietnamese borrow verbs from Chinese without any modification, since both of those languages lack a morphological system. Imbabura Quechua is can be given as another example of direct insertion. In Quechua, Spanish verbs are borrowed as bare forms and it adds its own verbal inflection marker: balura-ni I value from Spanish valora-r (Matras, 2009) Indirect insertion is another strategy to adopt loan verbs into a new language. Languages applying indirect insertion use generally use an affix to accommodate new loans. Many European languages use a loan-verb affix. For example, Germanic languages such a German, Danish and Dutch use a cognate suffix to accommodate French and Latin loan verbs. Indirect insertion is more widely used than direct insertion. Some examples of indirect insertion are (Wichmann & Wolgemuth, 2008): a. Meyah: belajar to learn, from Indonesian belajar Di- ebe-belajar 1SG-LV-to learn I am learning

b. Manange: bolai to call, from Nepali bolai Bolai-ti lmi ro Call-LV EVD REP He called (for the frog) As it is seen in the example (a), Mehay language applies a loan verb prefix ebe to accommodate loan verbs. In the second example (b), we can see that Manange applies a suffix ti to accommodate loan verbs. In some dialects of Romani, transitive/causative affixes are used as loan verb affixes. For example, in western varieties of Sinti (German Romani), the suffix ev is attached to loan
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verbs from German: denkevel to think from German denken. The same suffix is also used in Romani to make intransitive verbs into transitive verbs. Light verb strategy includes adding actual verbs such as to be or to do to loan verbs. To do is used to accommodate transitive loans and to be is used to accommodate intransitive loans. This strategy is used widely in the area stretching from Caucasus and all the way to south Asia. Japanese adds the verb suru to do: sain suru to sign, esuk pu suru to play truant. In some languages, syntactic transitivity is not quite clear in the semantic distinction between the two light verbs, but they show the role of the subject as an agent or experiencer. Turkish has, for example, kabul etmek to accept from Arabic qub l acceptance, and ahit olmak to witness from Arabic hid a witness. The first etmek indicates that the subject is

an agentive role and in the second example olmak indicates that the subject has an experiencer role. Hindi has taqs m karn to divide from Arabic/Persian taqs m division and Hindi karn to do. Domari which is an Indo-Aryan language that has been in intense contact with Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic which belong to different language families is in the process of grammaticalising its light verbs into affixes or augments. The same process is valid in Turkish as well. Ke fetmek to discover, for example includes a light verbs from Turkish and there are many examples like this which show us that etmek and olmak has started to be a suffix for loan verbs. The interesting point is that Turkish started to apply this light verb strategy to its own inherited verbs as well. For example, Turkish has a verb like bekleme yapmak to wait which literally means something like doing waiting. Light verb strategy is commonly used by bilinguals. Kurdish-Turkish bilinguals frequently use structures like anlam kirin to understand, based on the participle-like, 3SG past tense evidential form of the Turkish verb in imi . Turkish immigrant in Europe are frequently use yapmak to make instead of the older etmek to do as a light verb, in conjunction with the

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infinitive form of the donor language: unterschreiben yapmak to sign from German unterschreiben. As the last strategy of verb integration, we have paradigm transfer. This strategy means treating borrowed verb merely as lexical labels. In some cases, the donor morphology maintains its function in the recipient language. Even in some cases, code-switching and paradigm transfer may be confused. Incipient licensing of original verb inflectional with loan verbs can be observed in Romani dialects of Greece, as well as Russian Romani. In the Romani dialect of Parakalamos in the district of Epirus in northwestern Greece, speakers tend to employ Greek morphology with spontaneous insertion of Greek lexical verbs, as with jiriz-o I return Epirus Romani:
Ther-av Have-1SG kati buti ja te some work in order to ker-av akate prin te do-1SG here before COMP jiriz-o to kher return-1SG to Home

Borrowing of modals is another phenomenon in verb borrowing. Many examples can be given for the borrowing of modals: Turkish gerek must in Kurmanji, Arabic l zim must in Domari, Spanish tiene que must in the Pacific language Rapanui, Spanish derived nisisata need in the Pacific language Chamorro. We can say that Arabic modals have been borrowed widely by many languages such as Turkish, Swahili, Urdu, Persian and Domari. Modals are generally borrowed as impersonal forms, which replicate a default third-person singular present tense inflection of the donor language. The Greek Romani dialect of Kalamata replicates the 3SG Greek tense and person inflection in both prepi must and eprepe had to. Gurbet Romani in Serbia replicates alongside the Serbian 3SG form mora must also the Serbian 1SG moram I must and 2SG mora you must.

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4 Adjectives and Lexical Adverbs

The borrowability of the adjectives is less than the borrowability of the nouns. There are many reasons behind this difference. One of them is that adjectives form a very small class in many languages. The second reason is that in some languages the existence of adjectives as a separate word is debated. The statistics and percentages show the proportion of the adjectives among the total loanwords in the languages. For example; of the total of 1430 adjectives, %42 are loan words in Selice Romani. Maltese borrows only two adjectives correct and straight from Italian.

Colors are an effective measure in the investigation of the borrowing features. According to Berlin and Kay (1996) there is a hierarchy in the borrowing of the colors. The order starts with black and white. These colors have the least borrowability than the other colors. After black and white, red, yellow or green, blue come in this order. Blue has the highest borrowability among the colors. The languages that borrow adjectives change the structure and usage of the adjective according to their own morphological and syntactical rules. The borrowed adjectives undergo some derivational adjustments and they are appointed to a specific inflection class. For Example; German borrows the adjective cool and in sentences the adjective is added agreement inflection as cool-er or cool-en. Some languages do not have the adjectival inflection and when these languages borrow an adjective from an inflectional language, they do not carry out the inflection. They change the inflectional structure. Investigations about the borrowing of comparative and superlative forms of the adjectives are an important area for the understanding of interactions in borrowing situations. In most
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languages this derivational change of the adjective is done with an affix, specialized particle or through suppletion like bad worse in English. In the situation of contact, the weaker language may borrow the derivational form of the adjectives. The weaker language take the comparative and superlative forms as in the target language and use these forms as the original forms in the targeted language. It is concluded that the borrowability of the forms of derivational adjectives is a hierarchy in itself from the samples of Elsik and Matras (2006) and Matras (2007b). The samples show greater borrowability of superlative markers over comparative markers. Adverbs are a different category in the investigation of the borrowings. The special features of adverbs in every language differentiate the investigation of the borrowability of the adverbs. The position of the adverbs in the sentences differs from one language to the other language and adverbs have many functions in the sentences. In order to understand the statistics about borrowability of the adverbs, a general observation of the different functions of adverbs is required to be investigated. Words like place deixis, indefinites, focus particles and phrasal adverbs are investigated under the category of adverbs. In most languages the adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding some particles. For example: The English adverbs commonly and comfortably are derived from French adjectives common and comfortable. English do not borrow the adverb forms of the adjectives but take the adjectives and add its own suffix ly to make the French adjectives English adverbs. Some adverbs qualifying the statement of the speakers have high borrowaability. For example; Turkish borrow such kind of adverbs from Arabic Maalesef unfortunately, mesela for example, belki perhaps. These adverbs qualify the whole statement and they are used as separate words without fixes in the sentences. This feature makes such adverbs easily borrowable.

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In this essay we have tried to explain some facts about borrowing of nouns, verbs, adjectives and lexical adverbs. We mentioned that borrowing of verbs a little bit more complex than the borrowing nouns, because inflections may affect the process of borrowing. In verb borrowing issue, one striking point was that the light verb strategy is so widely used that some language have started to apply it to its inherited verbs. Our essay tries to show that lexical borrowing area is a rich area to investigate and to give some examples to encourage those who are willing to make research on the area.

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5 References
Brown, C. (1999). Lexical Acculturation of Native American Languages. New York: Oxford university Press . In: Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elsik, V. (In Press). Loanwords in Selice Romani. In: Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Field, F. (2002). Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. In: Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rebuck, M. (2002). The Function of English Loanwords in Japanese. In: Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wichmann, S., & Wolgemuth, J. (2008). Loan Verbs in a Typological Perspective. In: Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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