#Loanword

[dracofeb]

Calque & Loanword

Found this. Kind of want to share.

[tcchinese]

The Cantonese variant tone: a tonal suffix

While working on my Masters’ thesis, I had the opportunity to read Silverman’s 1992 paper on Cantonese loanwords, “Multiple scansions in loanword phonology: evidence from Cantonese“. The paper made a finding that in many of the older Cantonese loanwords, the “variant/changed tone” (變音; LSHK: bin3 jam1; Ball: pín꜄ ꜀yam) phenomenon occurs with loanwords from English. An example would be 的士 being pronounced dik1 si*2, with the variant tone instead of the modal pronunciation of “dik1 si6″ (which would otherwise follow tonal rules of loanwords, where epenthetic and unstressed syllables carry low tones*). The variant tone, according to Chao, is also used to distinguish general objects from familiar objects, such as general smoke (jin1) vs cigarette smoke (jin*1).

Silverman mentioned that the variant tone could be summarized into being a morphemic tonal suffix [˥] which attaches itself to the original tone the syllable carries.

This explains how the variant tone for modal tones 4, 5, 6 become phonetically identical to tone 2 on the surface, while the variant tone for modal tone 1 becomes high level. The reason for this is smoothening.

If you consider the starting point of tones 4, 5, 6, they all start low, and after attaching the high tonal suffix, get smoothened to a plain low to high contour tone (i.e. the same as tone 2):

Tone 4 smoothening: [˨˩ + ˥] > [˨˩˥] > [˨˥] > [˦˥]

Tone 5 smoothening: [˩˧ + ˥] > [˩˧˥] > [˩˥] > [˦˥]

As for tone 1, for a lot of speakers today, the high level and high falling tones are no longer distinguished, so it would be hard for speakers of such accents to remember which tone 1 used to be which. However, from this rule, it could be deduced that high falling is the modal tone 1, and that high level is the variant tone 1, because:

Tone 1 smoothening: [˥˧ + ˥] > [˥˧˥] > [˥˥]

Thus, for those interested in studying historical Cantonese phonology, this could be a useful way to remember which tone is which.

Of course, the big takeaway here is that the variant tone could be interpreted as being a tonal suffix [˥].

*: This refers to the 陽 tones, and not Silverman's L tone. The reasoning behind my rejection of Silverman's 3-height tonal classification is because for many speakers, there are 4 level tones, and thus Silverman's 3-level tonal classification is not sufficient in representing all of the Cantonese tones accurately.

[newsagg]

Educatee Loanword: On-line Bill To Undergo Redevelopment In 2020 - http://news24.casa/educatee-loanword-online-bill-to-undergo-redevelopment-in-2020

[betterinpolish]

kształt

Even though it's hard at first for English speakers to pronounce Polish words, one great thing about the language is that once you get the hang of it, it's remarkably phonetic. This can be particularly true for loanwords, such as the word for shape, borrowed from the German Gestalt.

[ilyalemieux]

Transcribe loanwords into Russian? Don't be a wimp and just write them in English as is

Transcribe #loanword into #Russian? Don't be a wimp and just write them in #English as is

OK. I have a confession to make. Time to ‘fess up, so to speak. It’s important…. and embarrassing at the same time. Alright, breathe in breathe out. Ahem Being my native language, Russian is not my forte and never has been. Surely, I can communicate in it, as well as any other native Russian speaker, after all it is this language that I grew up with, but when it comes to writing… That’s where…

[sporadicetymology]

Archer uses so many fun, obscure words.

Examples of calques include 'cookie' from Dutch koekje, 'long time no see' from Cantonese 好耐冇見, and 'loanword' from German Lehnwort.

Yes, you understood that correctly: 'calque' is a loanword and 'loanword' is a calque. I could not make this up.

'Bag End' is also a calque of cul-de-sac.

Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary, Wiktionary, & Wikipedia

[false-cognates]

#37: “Jesus” > “Yorrow”

Hebrew יֵשׁוּעַ ‎(yēšū́aʿ) → PIE *Yēsū́ah₂ > PGmc *Jēzūō > OE Ġārū > ModE Yorrow /ˈjɒɹoʊ/

(Author’s note: I had previously been rejecting loanwords on the basis that there was no way to show the derivation process. However, a solution was recently pointed out to me: simply borrow the word into PIE, and then derive it normally. This may not work well for all words, but will certainly allow for some interesting derivations. As a side note, I will be tagging all such posts #loanword.)

Proto-Indo-European form: The ayin (ע) is a pharyngeal fricative or similar, which is close to the general consensus as to what *h₂ represents. Of course, with such a form, the word would likely be interpreted as a feminine noun.

Proto-Germanic form: Fairly straightforward; since the word takes the form of a feminine noun, there is no problem with inflection class. Additionally, the Hebrew stress accent allows us to correctly apply Verner’s law.

Old English form: Surprisingly, there actually exists a word in Proto-Germanic with the same hiatus: *būą “building” > OE bū (plural apparently bȳ, however—it seems the noun was reanalyzed as a consonant stem?) Thus we can safely say that the OE form, at least in the nominative, would have ended in -ū.

Modern English form: The two usual spellings of -ār- are -oar and -or(e), but neither the form “Yoarow” nor “Yorow” seems especially correct. It is no surprise that there are few examples of polysyllabicwords in -V̄r- that are not simply derivatives of root words. What is surprising is that such examples as do occur show characteristic shortening in Middle English: OE hǣring > ME hering > ModE herring; OE ǣrende > ME erande > ModE errand; OE sāriġ > ME sari > ModE sorry. Therefore, I have constructed Yorrow, which is pronounced like sorry, as well as sorrow and morrow. The final /oʊ/, which usually can be traced back to Middle English -we or -ow (whereas one would expect -ū > -u, assuming unstressed shortening, although this is hardly a certainty), but I have here constructed it—if not on the basis of regular sound change, then on the basis of analogy.

[shogikappa]

Loanwords and spelling

For the purposes of this article, I will divide loanwords into two types: 1. those that retain the spelling of the original language (e.g. Ketchup) and those that use the orthography of the borrowing language to represent the sounds (e.g.   keczup/кетчуп).

The former case may be a factor in contributing to part of the perceived chaoticness of English spelling. As those are words of foreign origin, foreign pronunciation is used, and thus it is not possible to deduce the normal English pronunciation of the word from spelling. This generally only applies to languages that use the same writing script as the lending language. For instance, French loanwords into Russian and Japanese do not experience such problem, as they are written with their own respective scripts, and thus the pronunciation could be deduced from spelling.

This in a way raises a question about the attitude to loanwords - are they foreign words or are they words that are borrowed into your language?

In Hong Kong, the words get1 and mau1 si*2 are commonly used in speech to informally refer to “understanding” and “computer mouse” respectively. (Note that these are not translations of “understand” and “computer mouse”, though) For instance: 你get唔get到呀? (Do you understand). These words are generally perceived as English words and not loanwords into Cantonese by most native speakers, though some linguists classify these as loanwords. Such words may or may not be said to fit into Cantonese phonology. For instance, “mau1″ and “si*2″ are both valid Cantonese syllables, the latter being formed by si6 or si4 shifting to tone 2 at the end of a "linguistic word” (that is, morphemes that combine into a word in the English sense, because in Chinese, every morpheme is its own word). Tones are mandatory in Cantonese and thus tones have been incorporated into those syllables based on how they sound generally to Cantonese speakers. However, it could be said that they do not fit into Cantonese phonology in that -et is not a valid final in Cantonese. Words that end with the vowel [ɛ] (“e”) plus an alveolar consonant generally get pronounced as [ɐ] + the alveolar consonant, e.g. “yes” > [jɐs˥]. In any case, these words are perceived by native speakers to be “English words”, not Cantonese words, so when writing these out, they use the original spellings, but pronounced in a “Cantonized” way, in a similar way to how anglophones approximate the French “café” /kafe/ with /ˈkæfeɪ/.

Then on the other end, you have Hungarian. Loanwords are spelt using Hungarian orthography. For instance, “telescope” is “teleszkóp“, because under Hungarian orthography, the original spelling would be pronounced “te-le-shtso-peh”, and this isn’t the pronunciation of the word. The way I see it is, these words would in effect be regarded as loanwords that are Hungarian words, and no longer English or the languages they’re loaned from, unlike the case with get1 and mau1 si*2. In addition, if you think of the Hungarian alphabet not as the Latin alphabet, but just an alphabet that looks like the Latin script, it justifies spelling in its own orthography, like loanwords into Japanese and Russian. Since it isn’t the alphabet of the original language, but a separate alphabet, it doesn’t need to use the original spelling, like with Russian and Japanese. (If you think about it, Hungarian could have been written just as well with runes, and with that, it wouldn’t have to conform to the original spelling either. So why does a switch to the Latin alphabet mean a switch to using un-Hungarian spellings of the alphabet for loanwords? In the runic alphabet, “Coca Cola” would have been spelt with the rune for k, which makes sense, but if we switch to the Latin alphabet, we have to suddenly change the spelling to C, which makes a “ts” sound, and a direct transliteration from runes to Latin would become impossible.) Obviously this would be impossible for Chinese since Chinese doesn’t use a fully phonetic script, but nevertheless some people propose making new characters for those that are accepted as loanwords, such as lip1 (𨋢), from the English “lift”, made from “車” (signifying transport) and “立” (Middle Chinese: *ljəp; TCC: lip).

As such, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing script actually plays an important part in how loanwords are written, and if both the borrowing and the lending languages use the same writing script, there’s a high chance that the words will not have a regular pronunciation when you read them as if they were words from your own language. However, when the two languages do not share the same writing script, this would not be a problem, as the words would often be spelt using the orthography of the borrowing language. A reason it is not, may be because they are still considered foreign words and not words in your language yet. However, if the borrowed words can be respelt using the orthography of your own language, then what stops you from regarding the orthography of your language as different even when both of you use the Latin script?

P.S. I’m pretty tired when I’m typing this but I hope you guys could understand what I’m trying to say.

[lepambusier]

No~~~~~ I thought I'm American, but I'm just as Asian as Cantonese. #Chinese#loanword

[linguisten]

Kangaroos encore

Regarding these two posts (via black-australia and waitingforturnips) on "kangaroo", I am reminded of another cute loanword story. 

Aboriginal people in Arnhem land have been in contact with traders from the Indonesian archipelago, mostly Malays and Bugis, for centuries. One of their encounters that left linguistic traces involved Yolngu-Matha and/or Gumatj people who must have watched the bewildered Malays who saw red kangaroos for the first time and called them 'funny, cute'. The Malay word for that is lucu, and according to Walker & Zorc that word made it into the Aboriginal languages as a loanword lutju. Of course the Yolngu and Gumatj had a word for that animal before, so the reason to borrow this one appears to be meta-amusement. I am convinced there must have been a lot of laughing involved.

Source: Walker, Alan and Zorc, R. David (1981): "Austronesian Loanwords in Yolngu-Matha of Northeast Arnhem Land". In: Aboriginal History 5, 109–134.

[ilyalemieux]

🇺🇸 When a Loanword Gets to You Real Bad. Analytic and Synthetic Languages

#English #loanword in #Russian when loanwords get to you real bad

Ordinarily, we tend to save the best for last. This goes for meals, surprises, bad news and what have you, fill in the blank as you see fit. I will make an exception to this natural preponderance of ours to shed some light on the weirdest phrase I’ve ever come across in Russian. The weirdest to date, bar none. Stuff like this stopped being funny 100 loanwords ago. Yes, I know, I know. In the last…

[randomgatherings]

to be honest americans you cant handle the word smorgasbord.

[indonesian-words]

Salam

['salam]

1 (noun) A greeting.

2  (verb) To greet.

origin: Arabic

[archerisms]

Archer: Coyote, which is español for "people smuggler". And also for coyote, it turns out. It's a calque, or is it a loanword.

The More You Know : Calque and Loanword

I've been saving this one. It's my favorite fact I've learned since I started doing this. Ok, so a calque is something we translate and use in our language, like the phrase "that goes without saying" (cela va sans dire) & the flower Forget-me-not (ne m'oubliez mye) from French, and the saying paper tiger (zhǐlǎohǔ) from Chinese. A loanword is when another language says it best so we leave it in it's original form like schadenfreude & doppleganger from German and déjà vu & ennui from French. Here's my favorite part: In English, calque is a loanword and loanword is a calque of the original lehnwort. Grammatically spooky.

BTW: I'm gonna call coyote a loanword. It is a calque in Spanish having come from the Aztec word for trickster, cóyotl.

[nepalgo]

Vocabulary: Western Loanwords

Nepali is full of loan words. Words such as 'Radio' are relatively new. Most words today are borrowed from Sanskrit. It is easy to guess a word's meaning if it's a loanword. But a note is that, English speakers might expect english words to sound, english. That's not the case! You have say it with Nepali Accent! In western Loanwords, we look at loan words borrowed from Western Languages. Also, these are the spellings of the time when it was borrowed. So, modern spelling might be different now. Example, Doctor is actually spelt 'Daak-ter' in Nepali.

  ENGLISH

Radio: रेडियो (redio)

Coat: कोट (kot)

Doctor: डाक्टर (daaktar)

Motor: मोटर (motar)

School: स्कुल (skul)

Cancer: क्यान्सर (kyansar)

Bag: ब्याग (byaag)

Ticket: टिकट (tikat)

Cinema: सिनेमा (sinemaa)

Photo:  फोटो (photo)

Telephone: टेलिफोन (teliphon)  

Camera: क्यामेरा (kyamera)

Computer: कम्प्युटर (kampyutar)

PORTUGUESE

Shirt: कमेज (kamej)

Flower Pot: गमला (gamalaa)

Coffee: कफी (kaphi)

Soap: साबुन (saabun)

Pickle: अचार (achaar)

Godown: गोदाम (godaam)

Curfew: कर्फ्यु (karphyu)

Key: चाबी (Chabi)

Towel: तौलिया (tauliya)

FRENCH

College: कलेज (kalej)

Police: पुलिस (pulis)

Engineer: इन्जिनियर (injiniyar) 

Tourist: टुरिस्ट (turist)

LATIN

Calendar: क्यालेन्डर (kyalendar)

Quota: कोटा (kotaa)

Campus: क्याम्पस (kyampus)

Studio: स्टुडियो (studiyo)