Semantic loan

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A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the lending language. Calques, loanwords and semantic loans are often grouped roughly under the phrase "borrowing". Semantic loans often occur when two languages are in close contact, and they take various forms. The source and target word may be cognates, which may or may not share any contemporary meaning in common; they may be an existing loan translation or parallel construction (compound of corresponding words); or they may be unrelated words that share an existing meaning.

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Examples

A typical example is the French word souris, which means "mouse" (the animal). After the English word mouse acquired the additional sense of "computer mouse", when French speakers began speaking of computer mice, they did so by extending the meaning of their own word souris by analogy with how English speakers had extended the meaning of mouse. (Had French speakers started using the word mouse, that would have been a borrowing; had they created a new lexeme out of multiple French morphemes, as with disque dur for "hard disk", that would have been a calque.)

Another example, in this case propelled by speakers of the source language, is the English word already. The Yiddish word for the literal senses of "already" is שויןshoyn, which is also used as a tag to express impatience. Yiddish speakers who also spoke English began using the English word already to express this additional sense in English, and this usage came to be adopted in the larger English-speaking community (as in Enough already or Would you hurry up already?) This sense of already is therefore a semantic borrowing of that sense of shoyn.

Some examples arise from reborrowing. For example, English pioneer was borrowed from Middle French in the sense of "digger, foot soldier, pedestrian", then acquired the sense of "early colonist, innovator" in English, which was reborrowed into French, adding to the senses of the word pionnier. [1]

Typical semantic loans also include the German realisieren. The English verb "to realise" has more than one meaning: it means both "to make something happen/come true" and "to become aware of something". The German verb realisieren originally only meant the former: to make something real. However, German later borrowed the other meaning of "to realise" from English, and today, according to Duden, [2] also means "to become aware of something" (this meaning is still considered by many to be an Anglicism). The word realisieren itself already existed before the borrowing took place; the only thing borrowed was this second meaning. (Compare this with a calque, such as antibody , from the German Antikörper, where the word "antibody" did not exist in English before it was borrowed.)

A similar example is the German verb überziehen, which meant only to draw something across, before it took on the additional borrowed meaning of its literal English translation overdraw in the financial sense. [2] Note that the first halves of the terms are cognate (über/over), but the second halves are not (ziehen/draw).

Semantic loans may be adopted by many different languages: Hebrew כוכבkokháv, Russian звездаzvezdá, Polish gwiazda, Finnish tähti, and Vietnamese sao all originally meant "star" in the astronomical sense, and then went on to adopt the sememe "star", as in a famous entertainer, from English. [3] In this case the words are unrelated (save for the Russian and Polish words), but share a base meaning, here extended metaphorically.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loanword</span> Word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language

A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language into another language, through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Synonym</span> Words or phrases of the same meaning

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In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example, German: Wolkenkratzer, Portuguese: Arranha-céu, Turkish: Gökdelen, Swedish: Skyskrapa. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies, was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

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Reborrowing is the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning. This path is indicated by A → B → A, where A is the originating language, and can take many forms. A reborrowed word is sometimes called a Rückwanderer.

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In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon.

Canadian French is the French language as it is spoken in Canada. It includes multiple varieties, the most prominent of which is Québécois. Formerly Canadian French referred solely to Quebec French and the closely related varieties of Ontario (Franco-Ontarian) and Western Canada—in contrast with Acadian French, which is spoken by Acadians in New Brunswick and some areas of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland & Labrador.

Present-day Irish has numerous loanwords from English. The native term for these is béarlachas, from Béarla, the Irish word for the English language. It is a result of language contact and bilingualism within a society where there is a dominant, superstrate language and a minority substrate language with few or no monolingual speakers and a perceived "lesser" status.

References

  1. ↑ Durkinb, Philip (7 July 2011). "5. Lexical borrowing, 5.1 Basic concepts and terminology". The Oxford Guide to Etymology. OUP Oxford. pp. 212–215. ISBN   978-0-19-161878-9.
  2. 1 2 Duden – das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 2000
  3. ↑ Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (July 2003). "Language Contact and Globalisation: The camouflaged influence of English on the world's languages—with special attention to Israeli (sic) and Mandarin" (PDF). Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 16 (2). ISSN   1474-449X. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2007-02-05. Retrieved 2007-07-02.
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