English semantic loans in Romanian

Abstract

1 IntroductionOne of the first aspects of the study of words borrowed from one language into another which engaged the attention of writers in the field was their classification. Treffers-Daller (2000: 2) shows that this special interest in the formal aspects of borrowings was motivated by the fact that, in the early stages of language contact study, the emphasis was mainly on the products of borrowing, rather than on the process in itself. It was also a consequence of the complex character of the borrowing process, which leads to the existence of a whole array of combinational patterns between native and foreign material. These underlying linguistic realities formed the backdrop against which various proposals for classification emerged, some of which are still in use today.A very comprehensive taxonomy of borrowings was developed by Haugen (1950), based on the analysis of the speech of Norwegian immigrants into the United States. Underlying Haugen's terminological framework is the idea that borrowing results from two main mechanisms, importation and substitution. Depending on the way in which importation and combine in the borrowing process, the outcomes of this process can range on a form-meaning continuum from foreign forms being borrowed together with their meanings (loanwords), to meanings entering a language on their own (loanshifts). Loanwords and loanshifts can be further subdivided into other subcategories.While loanwords morphemic importation without substitution (Haugen 1950: 214) (i.e. a language borrows both the form and the meaning of a foreign word), loanshifts are words which show complete morphemic without importation, or words in which the meaning is imported without the form. They can result from extending the meaning of a word in the recipient language so as to correspond to that of a word in the source language (semantic loans or semantic extensions) or from the importation of a morpheme arrangement from this language (loan translations or calques).According to Haugen, semantic loans can be further subdivided into loan homonyms and loan synonyms. Loan homonyms appear when a new meaning is added to a native form, but has nothing in common with the old existing meaning of this word. For example, American Portuguese borrowed the meaning of the English grocery and added it to the native word grosseria meaning 'a rude remark', with the result that in the end this word had two different, completely unrelated meanings (Haugen 1953: 400). German- English bilinguals in Australia have taken the German word magasin meaning 'storeroom', and have extended its meaning to that of the English word magasine (Clyne 1967: 61). Weinreich (1968: 49) presents the case of the American Italian word fattoria, which originally meant 'a farm', but whose meaning was later extended to that of the English factory.Although not explicitly stated by Haugen, from the examples he uses as well as from other similar examples presented in the literature it can be inferred that this type of semantic loan involves the borrowing of meanings in order to designate novel concepts, being akin to cultural loanwords. Such examples of loan homonyms have been reported in the Romanian language contact literature, too. For example, Avram (1997: 18-19) shows that, on the English model, the Romanian a aplica as 'to put into operation or effect' has also come to mean 'to make a request or appeal', atasament as 'strong feeling of affection' has also received the meaning 'document you send to someone by email', abstract as 'general, not particular' has also come to mean 'a short piece of writing, contain ing the main ideas in the document'.Loan synonyms lead to the creation of synonymy and, Haugen warns, even confusion in the recipient language. For example, he shows that American Portuguese substituted the native livraria ('bookstore') for library, although the Portuguese word for it is biblioteca, the result being not only synonymy between livraria and biblioteca, but also difficulty in distinguishing between the two meanings of the first word (Haugen 1953: 401). …