Loanwords from other languages: test cases

Abstract

Abstract Loanwords from European languages other than French, Latin, and the Scandinavian and Celtic languages are looked at in the first part of the chapter. Particular attention is paid to Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German and High German, Yiddish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, and Russian, because these languages rank highest in the number of loanwords into English in the survey based on OED data in chapter 1. Particular topics looked at include the unusually high contribution from Dutch in Middle English and early modern English; the difficulty of distinguishing between inputs from different Romance languages in Early Modern English; and the light that comparison with this set of test cases sheds on the changing nature of borrowing from French in recent centuries. The second part of the chapter looks at borrowing from languages from outside Europe, focusing again on those languages which figure most prominently in the OED-derived data in chapter 1: Arabic, Hebrew, languages of South Asia, Malay, Chinese, Maori, and Japanese. Issues examined include whose English particular loanwords belong to; how patterns of borrowing reflect patterns of historical contact; connections with the development of World English varieties; transmission of earlier loans via other European languages; and particular semantic categories that are particularly heavily represented, such as the names of traded goods, of types of food and drink, and of newly encountered flora and fauna and other aspects of the natural world.