Loanwords vs relics

Abstract

Abstract One of the major issues in historical and contact linguistics is how to distinguish between inherited and acquired vocabulary in a given language: both traditional historical linguistics and modern contact linguistics are in this respect eventually forced to resort to inferences. The aim of this paper is to propose a diagnostic test to aid in the identification of putative substratum relics in the lexicon. The method for this test consists in juxtaposing and comparing word families in the source and recipient language. We use the example of Yiddish-Slavic language contact, in which contact-induced changes are still relatively transparent. We employ wordnets – digital networks of lexical entities connected by lexico-semantic relations – in order to visually “map” lexical and semantic relations of transferred lexemes within the recipient language onto the source language. The method allows us to combine contemporary empirical data with historical analysis.