language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where

a meaning or idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of

the host language. Examples of loan words in English include:

café, bazaar, and kindergarten. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German

term Lehnwort, while the term calque is a loanword from French.

Problems with the term 'loanword' Lexical adaptations are frequently in the

form of phrases, for which the term "loanword" is less apt, e.g. déjà vu, an English loan

from French. For simplicity, adopt/adoption, adapt/adaption, or lexical borrowing are thus

used by many linguists. Strictly speaking, the terms borrow and loanword,

although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words since something is

taken from but nothing is returned to the donor languages. This metaphor is not isolated

to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom "to borrow an idea," and even

in the mathematical term "borrowing" used in subtraction.

Loanwords entering a language Donor language terms frequently enter a recipient

language as a technical term in connection with exposure to foreign culture. The specific

reference point may be to the foreign culture itself or to a field of activity where the

foreign culture has a dominant role. External associations

A foreign loanword is arguably still outside the recipient language, and not yet a "loanword"

when it is fixed in the local culture. What is "exotic" varies from language to language.

Thus, English names for creatures not native to Great Britain are almost always loanwords.

Loanwords from a dominant field of activity Examples of loanwords from a dominant field

of activity: Arts – Most of the technical vocabulary

of classical music is borrowed from Italian, and that of ballet from French.

Business – English exports terms to other languages in business and technology.

Philosophy – many technical terms, including the term philosophy itself, derive from Greek

dominance in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, economic theory and political theory in Roman

times. Examples include democracy, theory and so on.

Religion – religions may carry with them a large number of technical terms from the

language of the originating culture. For example: Arabic – caliph, hajj, jihad, Qur'an

Greek – baptisma has entered many languages, e.g. English baptism.

Hebrew – Some terms in the Hebrew Bible have been carried into other languages as

borrowings rather than translated. For example Hebrew shabbat has been borrowed into most

languages in the world: in Greek the word is Σάββατο; Latin sabbatum; Spanish

and Portuguese sábado; and in English Sabbath. The major exceptions are languages like Chinese,

Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, where Chinese characters are used and words are often translated

rather than transliterated; for example, "Sabbath" is translated as "(peaceful) rest day" rather

than transliterated. Latin – missa and communio have entered

English as mass and communion. Sanskrit – guru

Science – medicine uses a large vocabulary of Latin terms, as a result of medieval advances

in medical science being conducted in Latin – even if some of the earliest Latin medical

texts were translations from Greek and Arabic. Loanword passing into general use

When a loanword loses foreign cultural associations it has passed into general use in the language.

This is the case with a vast number of English language terms for which a dictionary entry

will show that the etymology is French and not of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Loanword-resistant areas By contrast, function words such as pronouns,

and words referring to universal concepts, are the most static words within each language.

These function words are borrowed only in rare cases such as English they from Old Norse

þeir. Sometimes only one word from an opposite pair is borrowed, yielding an unpaired word

in the recipient language. Linguistic classification

The studies by Werner Betz, Einar Haugen, and Uriel Weinreich are regarded as the classical

theoretical works on loan influence. The basic theoretical statements all take Betz’s nomenclature

as their starting point. Duckworth enlarges Betz’s scheme by the type “partial substitution”

and supplements the system with English terms. A schematic representation of these classifications

is given below:

On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen distinguishes three basic

groups of borrowings: “(1) Loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution.

[. . .]. Loanblends show morphemic substitution as well as importation. [. . .]. Loanshifts

show morphemic substitution without importation”. Haugen later refined his model in a review

of Gneuss’s book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one

by Betz again. Weinreich differentiates between two mechanisms

of lexical interference, namely those initiated by simple words and those initiated by compound

words and phrases. Weinreich defines simple words “from the point of view of the bilinguals

who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly,

the category ‘simple’ words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalysed

form”. After this general classification, Weinreich then resorts to Betz’s terminology.

Models that try to integrate borrowing in an overall classification of vocabulary change,

or onomasiological change, have recently been proposed by Peter Koch and Joachim Grzega.

In English

The English language has often borrowed words from other cultures or languages. For example:

Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the donor language's phonology, even though

a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. For example,

the Hawaiian word ʻaʻā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick,

chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the

English pronunciation, or , contains at most one. In addition, the English spelling usually

removes the ʻOkina and macron diacritics. The majority of English affixes, such as un-,

-ing, and -ly, were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes

are borrowed. For example, the agentive suffix -er, which is very prolific, is borrowed ultimately

from Latin - arius. The English verbal suffix -ize comes from Greek -ιζειν via Latin

-izare. In languages other than English

English loanword exports to other languages Direct borrowings, calques, or even grammatical

constructions and orthographical conventions from English are called anglicisms. This leads

to a virtual pseudo-dialect where language consists of words from two vocabularies. In

French, for example, the result of perceived over-use of English words and expressions

is called franglais. Some English terms in French include le week-end, le bifteck, and

le job or la job. Spanglish is the English influence on the Spanish language, while Denglisch

is the English influence on German, and Dunglish is the English influence on the Dutch language.

Conversely, words are oftentimes borrowed from other languages by English speakers.

For example, a straight clone from Swedish into English – like the word smörgåsbord

– is called a sveticism. Loanword transmission in the Ottoman Empire

During more than 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and administrative language

of the empire was Turkish, with many Persian, and Arabic loanwords, called Ottoman Turkish,

considerably differing from the everyday spoken Turkish of the time. Many such words were

exported to other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek,

Hungarian and Ladino. After the empire fell in World War I and the Republic of Turkey

was founded, the Turkish language underwent an extensive language reform led by the newly

founded Turkish Language Association, during which many adopted words were replaced with

new formations derived from Turkic roots. This was part of the ongoing cultural reform

of the time, in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms, which also

included the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet. Turkish also has taken many words

from French, such as pantolon for trousers and komik for funny, mostly pronounced very

similarly. Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications

tend to use more Islamic-derived words, left-wing ones use more adopted from Europe, while centrist

ones use more native Turkish root words. Dutch words in Indonesian

Almost 350 years of Dutch presence in what is now Indonesia have left significant linguisitic

traces. Though only a small minority of present-day Indonesians have a fluent knowledge of Dutch,

the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch, both in words for everyday life,

and as well in scientific or technological terminology. One scholar argues that 20% of

Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words.

Cultural aspects In order to provide a more well-rounded understanding

of the complexities of loanwords, certain historical and cultural factors must be taken

into account. According to Hans Henrich Hock and Brian Joseph, "languages and dialects

... do not exist in a vacuum"—there is always linguistic contact between groups. This contact

influences what loanwords are integrated into the lexicon and why certain words are chosen

over others. Using the example of Plautdietsch/Mennonite Low German, the influence of many historical

and cultural factors can be seen in the loanwords adopted by this unique language. For example,

as Mennonites were pushed from the lowlands of Germany into Poland and then on to Russia

due to religious persecution, Plautdietsch took vocabulary from Dutch, Frisian, Russian,

and Ukrainian and integrated it into their own language. Mennonites also emigrated worldwide,

where they took their language with them to four continents and over a dozen countries.

Some examples of Plautdietsch loanwords are given below:

Loanword transmission patterns Changes in meaning when loaned

Words are occasionally imported with a different meaning than that in the donor language. Among

the best known examples of this is the German word Handy, which is a borrowing of the English

adjective handy, but means mobile phone. Conversely, in English the prefix über-, taken from German,

is used in a way that it is rarely used in German. An abundance of borrowed words taking

on new meaning can be found in Rioplatense Spanish. For example, the English gerund camping

is used in Argentina to refer to a campsite, and the word wok, borrowed from the Cantonese

word meaning pan, is used to mean stir-fry. Idiomatic expressions and phrases, sometimes

translated word-for-word, can be borrowed, usually from a language that has "prestige"

at the time. Often, a borrowed idiom is used as a euphemism for a less polite term in the

original language. In English, this has usually been Latinisms from the Latin language and

Gallicisms from French. If the phrase is translated word-for-word, it is known as a calque.

Changes in spelling when loaned Words taken into different recipient languages

are sometimes spelled as in the donor language. Sometimes borrowed words retain original pronunciation,

but undergo a spelling change to represent the orthography of the recipient language.

Welsh is a language where this is done with some consistency, with words like gêm, cwl,

and ded-gifawe. The French expression "cul de sac" is used in English as is, with the

same meaning but a spelling pronunciation: the 'l' is mute in French but enunciated in

English. Changes in pronunciation when loaned

In cases where a new loanword has a very unusual sound, the pronunciation is frequently radically

changed, a process sometimes referred to by the archetypal name of the law of Hobson-Jobson;

this is particularly noted in words from South Asian and Southeast Asian languages, as in

this example. Some languages, such as Jèrriais, have a tendency to apply historical sound-shift

patterns to newly introduced words; while Jèrriais speakers would have little difficulty

pronouncing "parki", partchi is the word used, displaying the typical Norman ki → tchi

shift. Most languages modify foreign words to fit

native pronunciation patterns. Whether or not a change in pronunciation occurs depends

on multiple factors such as: if the sounds occur in both the original and target languages

and the level of contact between cultures. An excellent example is Japanese, which has

an enormous number of loanwords. Japanese often denotes gairaigo in the writing system

with the use of カタカナ(katakana). There was a massive ancient influx from China, and

then a flow of new words came from European languages, particularly from Portuguese, which

was spoken by the first European people whom Japanese encountered in the transition from

the Middle Ages to Early modern period. Recently, most gairaigo have come from English, though

there have been numerous loanwords borrowed from Dutch, German, French and other languages.

There are almost always significant pronunciation shifts.

Longer gairaigo are often shortened:

In some cases, the original meaning shifts considerably through unexpected logical leaps:

buffet → バイキング baikingu: derived from the name of the restaurant "Imperial

Viking", the first restaurant in Japan which offered buffet style meals.

dress shirt → ワイシャツ waishatsu: derived from the words white shirt and shortened.

There are other cases where words are borrowed, seemingly at random, and used in totally inexplicable

contexts. This is often the case in the names of small businesses and in anime and manga

series such as Bubblegum Crisis. Gairaigo is so large a part of the modern Japanese

vocabulary that there are specialized dictionaries for it.

Reborrowing

It is possible for a word to travel from the recipient language to another and then back

to the original donor language in a different form, a process called reborrowing. Some examples

are:

See also Cognate

Hybrid word Inkhorn debate

Language contact Semantic loan

Notes

References Betz, Werner: Deutsch und Lateinisch: Die

Lehnbildungen der althochdeutschen Benediktinerregel. Bonn: Bouvier.

Betz, Werner: “Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Vor- und Frühdeutschen”. In: Maurer,

Friedrich / Stroh, Friedrich: Deutsche Wortgeschichte. 2nd ed. Berlin: Schmidt, vol. 1, 127–147.

Bloom, Dan: "What's That Pho?". French Loan Words in Vietnam Today; Taipei Times, [1]

Cannon, Garland: “Problems in studying loans”, Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley

Linguistics Society 25, 326–336. Duckworth, David: “Zur terminologischen

und systematischen Grundlage der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der englisch-deutschen Interferenz:

Kritische Übersicht und neuer Vorschlag”. In: Kolb, Herbert / Lauffer, Hartmut: Sprachliche

Interferenz: Festschrift für Werner Betz zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 36–56.

Gneuss, Helmut: Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen. Berlin: Schmidt.

Grzega, Joachim: “Borrowing as a Word-Finding Process in Cognitive Historical Onomasiology”,

Onomasiology Online 4, 22–42. Grzega, Joachim: Bezeichnungswandel: Wie,

Warum, Wozu? Heidelberg: Winter. Haugen, Einar: “The analysis of linguistic

borrowing”. Language 26, 210–231. Haugen, Einar: “Review of Gneuss 1955”.

Language 32, 761–766. Hitchings, Henry, The Secret Life of Words:

How English Became English, London: John Murray, ISBN 978-0-7195-6454-3 .

Hayakawa, Isamu, A Historical Dictionary of Japanese Words Used in English, Revised and