Donor Language Research Articles

Crossing languages – crossing discourses

AbstractRecent studies concerned with historical Germanisms have shown that public discourses in other languages often appropriate German loanwords as frames of reference to interpret political realities and influence collective attitudes. This paper intends to contribute to this new strand of research by investigating discursive transpositions of the historical GermanismKulturkampfin the donor language, German, and two host languages, Polish and English. Originally used mainly in reference to government attempts to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church in Prussia/Germany in the 1870s, this term has come to be used in German and other languages to signify conflicts in various political and cultural contexts. Adopting a triangulated and trilateral approach and the method of corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS), this paper examines the use ofKulturkampfin large collections of Internet and newspaper data in German, English and Polish. The results show how the meaning ofKulturkampfhas been discursively re-contextualised and appropriated to perform local ideological work in public discourses in the three different cultural contexts.

Patterns of affix borrowing in a sample of 100 languages

AbstractBorrowing affixes may be rare compared to lexical borrowing, but it is not random. The current study describes regular patterns of affix borrowing in a database containing 649 borrowed affixes, challenging a number of previous claims about relative borrowability, in particular regarding inflectional categories. It is shown that borrowing affixes of all major nominal and verbal inflectional categories, including case markers and argument indexes, is well attested. Borrowing case markers, for instance, appears to be just as common as borrowing plural markers. By factoring in the “availability” for borrowing (i.e. whether a potential donor language has a relevant affix), it can be shown that nominal categories are far more frequently borrowed than verbal categories. Additionally, it is shown that sets of borrowed affixes often consist of interrelated sets of forms, e.g. forming paradigms, rather than being isolated forms from different morphosyntactic systems, in particular for the more tightly integrated inflectional subsystems. The frequency and systematicity by which inflectional affixes are borrowed calls for a reconsideration of the role of inflection in models of language contact.

Заимствования как один из рычагов коммуникации и взаимопроникновения культур

Development of every world language is influenced by many factors, the most important being historic and social ones. These factors inevitably cause penetration into the recipient language of the new elements, borrowed from their neighbors and partners in the process of communication in different spheres. The dialogue of cultures is based on language practice and takes place all the time. Moreover, the donor language and the receiving language may change roles in the process of historic development. The article focuses on the continuous process of enrichment of European languages by means of borrowing certain elements from speech of their neighbors and foes. At the initial stage borrowed words are received as some alien elements and lack understanding on the part of majority of native population. Socially these borrowings enjoy a higher status than native lexis. However, as the time goes, these elements lose their novelty, and are often adapted to the norms of the recipient language and sometimes they undergo radical transformation. Finally they become part and parcel of the local thesaurus. Nowadays due to globalization of world processes and fast development of high technologies and means of communication linguistic borrowing as the logical consequence of international cooperation has greatly increased in scope and is now an organic part of the global transformation process.

Deceptive Similarities between British English and Cameroon Pidgin English: A Lexico-Semantic Investigation

Cameroon Pidgin English has a large stock of words from the English Language, French, Portuguese and Cameroonian local languages. This is as a result of the various historical contacts and economic interactions with these languages. It should, however, be noted that among all these donor languages, the English language tends to be the main lexifier. More than 60% of the words in Cameroon Pidgin English are actually from the English language...

Morphological Adaptation of English Loanwords in Twitter: Educational Implications

The influx of English borrowed items into Kuwait has recently considerably increased, driven by both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, mainly through new electronic media, and direct contact with the donor language. Kuwaitis, especially, the new generation heavily make use of English loanwords in mobile devices applications such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and others. It is significant to note that a recipient language (in this case KA) discloses different morphological and phonological features that affect loan words. This paper investigates the morphological adaptation of English loanwords as used by Kuwaitis in twitter. Results indicate that Kuwaitis heavily use and adapt loan words morphologically in twitter and in everyday speech. Significant educational implications were collected as well from interviewing 50 students.

The “hamburger” story; or on Anglicisms in Polish

Abstract The paper makes an attempt to analyse the forms of co-functioning of world languages, taking into account the fact that popular prestigious languages exert influence upon a number of less popular ones, thereby dictating the forms of their further development. Thus, the thesis that media-favoured languages used by politically salient super-powers effectively influence the expressions accepted in a number of “less successful” languages is identified, evidenced and diagnosed. Furthermore, the latter part of the paper stresses the issues concerning the observation that English, recognized as the most prominent donor language, creates many forms of description generally used in many other languages to denote and define similar forms of experiences. Research aimed at discovering the ways in which English influences recipient languages, in this case Polish, was carried out. Our principal assumption was that there exist at least two types of numerous contacts between a donor and recipient language: ones that can be called external (when the donor language mostly influences the recipient one) and ones possibly labelled as internal (when various, normally observed forms of co-operation between the two languages can be traced). As in both cases some semantic bonds can be found, the subsequent research describes said bonds, naming them and uncovering the nature of such co-existence. The results of the research indicate clear forms of semantic co-existence showing that numerous borrowings and loanwords found in the recipient language are widely verbalized and deeply ingrained in the cultural linguistic interdependencies.

Speech recognition for under-resourced languages: Data sharing in hidden Markov model systems


 
 
 For purposes of automated speech recognition in under-resourced environments, techniques used to share acoustic data between closely related or similar languages become important. Donor languages with abundant resources can potentially be used to increase the recognition accuracy of speech systems developed in the resource poor target language. The assumption is that adding more data will increase the robustness of the statistical estimations captured by the acoustic models. In this study we investigated data sharing between Afrikaans and Flemish – an under-resourced and well-resourced language, respectively. Our approach was focused on the exploration of model adaptation and refinement techniques associated with hidden Markov model based speech recognition systems to improve the benefit of sharing data. Specifically, we focused on the use of currently available techniques, some possible combinations and the exact utilisation of the techniques during the acoustic model development process. Our findings show that simply using normal approaches to adaptation and refinement does not result in any benefits when adding Flemish data to the Afrikaans training pool. The only observed improvement was achieved when developing acoustic models on all available data but estimating model refinements and adaptations on the target data only.
 
 
 
 
 Significance: 
 
 
 
 Acoustic modelling for under-resourced languages
 Automatic speech recognition for Afrikaans
 Data sharing between Flemish and Afrikaans to improve acoustic modelling for Afrikaans
 
 
 

Politeness shifts in English-Greek political science discourse: translation as a language change situation

AbstractTranslation practice is a code interaction situation (Schäffner and Adab 1997; Cronin 2003; Heine and Kuteva 2005; House 2006), which can bring about change in target linguistic systems through the cumulative effect of hegemonic donor languages on reception ones.The study traces development of politeness-related features in English-Greek samples of translated political science discourse. A pilot study first identifies a set of shift types between the English and Greek versions of John Stuart Mill’s essay

Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European languages.

BackgroundCurious parallels between the processes of species and language evolution have been observed by many researchers. Retracing the evolution of Indo-European (IE) languages remains one of the most intriguing intellectual challenges in historical linguistics. Most of the IE language studies use the traditional phylogenetic tree model to represent the evolution of natural languages, thus not taking into account reticulate evolutionary events, such as language hybridization and word borrowing which can be associated with species hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, respectively. More recently, implicit evolutionary networks, such as split graphs and minimal lateral networks, have been used to account for reticulate evolution in linguistics.ResultsStriking parallels existing between the evolution of species and natural languages allowed us to apply three computational biology methods for reconstruction of phylogenetic networks to model the evolution of IE languages. We show how the transfer of methods between the two disciplines can be achieved, making necessary methodological adaptations. Considering basic vocabulary data from the well-known Dyen’s lexical database, which contains word forms in 84 IE languages for the meanings of a 200-meaning Swadesh list, we adapt a recently developed computational biology algorithm for building explicit hybridization networks to study the evolution of IE languages and compare our findings to the results provided by the split graph and galled network methods.ConclusionWe conclude that explicit phylogenetic networks can be successfully used to identify donors and recipients of lexical material as well as the degree of influence of each donor language on the corresponding recipient languages. We show that our algorithm is well suited to detect reticulate relationships among languages, and present some historical and linguistic justification for the results obtained. Our findings could be further refined if relevant syntactic, phonological and morphological data could be analyzed along with the available lexical data.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-016-0745-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Pronunciación extranjera en importaciones léxicas: convencionalización puntual en español bonaerense

We deal, in this article, with the oral treatment of lexical imports from prestigious international languages in Buenos Aires Spanish. We focus particularly on the extension, verified in that treatment, of graphemic-phonological correspondences which are different from those typical to the recipient linguistic variety, and mimetic regarding the donor languages; because of the referred extension, and specially because of their creative application, these correspondences can be considered conventionalized. We provide evidence of their emancipation of complete oral configurations that can be conventionalized for particular lexical imports, on the basis of data obtained through systematic observation of non-induced uses and experimental corroboration.

The Semantic Development of Nineteenth-Century French Cookery Terms in English: Tendencies of Borrowings Relating to Dishes, Desserts and Confectionary

French has long served English as the donor language par excellence in the field of cookery. A considerable number of culinary terms have been adopted into English down the ages (e.g. Chirol, 1973). Since cuisine is a field where France excels, the strong influx of borrowings from this area is by no means surprising. In the nineteenth century, too, French has been the source of a significant proportion of words and meanings which reflect the refinement of French gastronomy. The focus of this paper is on the culinary vocabulary borrowed from French in the nineteenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth oed) the term gastronomy itself, the art of preparing fine food, is a nineteenth-century borrowing which was adapted from the French gastronomie. The present study provides an analysis of the sense developments of the various borrowings from their earliest recorded uses in English to the present day in comparison with their equivalents in French. It will be interesting to see whether a) a particular meaning a borrowing assumes after its adoption is taken over from French (due to the continuing impact of French on English) or b) whether it represents an independent semantic change within English. Such a detailed investigation of the semantics of the culinary words of French provenance is missing in existing studies.

Anglicisms in Online German Newspapers and Magazines. A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Articles in ‘Die Welt’, ‘Der Spiegel’, and ‘Der Stern’ in February 2016

Abstract Needless to say, words originating in English largely influence other languages. As postulated by Plümer [2000, p. 28], since the nineteenth century English has become the main donor language for German and due to the ongoing influx of Anglicisms used in German both in Fachsprache, i.e. German for specific purposes and on a daily basis, lexical interference between the two languages increases. Some linguists oppose the excessive use of words originating in English postulating that as a consequence, German may become a peripheral language, whereas others posit that it indicates openness to world and language development. The study focuses on the application of Anglicisms in German newspapers in February 2016. The corpus encompasses 90 articles in online versions of three newspapers, viz. Die Welt, Der Spiegel and Der Stern, structured into three categories, be it Beauty, Politics, and IT. Every category covered thirty parallel topics, in order to arrive at a succinct yet comprehensive summary of the total ratio of Anglicisms. The article was divided into four main categories, i.e. theoretical framework, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and concluding remarks.

Language dominance as a factor in loanword phonology

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of language dominance in loanword phonology. It is investigated how onset clusters in loanwords are integrated into Turkish by two groups: English-Turkish bilinguals in Turkey and Swedish-Turkish bilinguals in Sweden. It is hypothesised that the bilinguals in Sweden will display significantly higher rates of cluster adoption because Turkish is not the dominant language there. The data were collected through an oral loanword elicitation task, a text recitation task in the second languages and a questionnaire on language proficiency and use. The study had 53 participants (24 in Turkey and 29 in Sweden). The material consisted of 29 loanwords from English and French, and of 50 structurally comparable words in the bilinguals’ second languages. The data were analysed auditively by the author and subjected to an interrater reliability test. The results confirmed the hypothesis as the bilinguals in Sweden displayed significantly higher cluster adoption rates. The difference between the groups’ medians was 36.5 percentage points. Furthermore, it was shown that in individual speakers the combination of accurate second-language pronunciation, and clearly higher proficiency in the second language (corresponding to the donor language) compared to the L1 (i.e. the recipient language) guaranteed very high cluster adoption rates. This paper provides the first rigorous quantitative proof for the theoretical assumption that accurate pronunciation is not sufficient for structural adoption in loanword phonology but needs to be complemented with sociolinguistic variables. Furthermore, it demonstrates in greater detail than before how societal and individual dominance are connected and through which channels they impact loanword integration. Self-reported relative proficiency in the donor language was shown to be a powerful predictor of the sociolinguistic incentive to adopt and could therefore be used as a quick and reliable alternative to elaborate and time-consuming attitude investigations in loanword phonology.

From Colombo to Athens: Areal and Universalist Perspectives on Bilingual Compound Verbs

Most or all bilingual varieties of the languages spoken in the area between Sri Lanka and Greece have bilingual compound verbs, consisting of a lexical content verb from a donor language and a helping verb from the matrix language. In this paper, these verbs are described and analyzed, and the question is raised whether this widespread occurrence is specifically an areal feature, or a universally available pattern and a question of typological poise—the possibility of a construction arising due to propitious typological circumstances. Pleading for the areal perspective, it is concluded there is the fact that two large and important language families—Turkic and Indo-Iranian—either rapidly developed or already had a productive [noun + verb] construction. On the universalist side, it is clear that native [noun + verb] constructions very easily develop into [verb + verb] constructions in bilingual settings, though not in monolingual settings. This is a cross-generational change that is a contact phenomenon; that is to say, this development does not occur in monolingual, non-contact language settings.

Borrowing, the Outcome of Language Contact

This study which entitles “Borrowing, the Outcome of Language Contact” tackles one aspect of the current sociolinguistic phenomenon, which borrowing words by Kurdish speakers as the result of language contact.
 Due to the development of technology, globalization, and easiness of transportation among different countries, languages come into contact, as the result words are borrowed from one language to another and especially from the donor language to the recipient one.
 Since Kurdish language (as one of the world languages) is also been affected by the new trend of language contact, accordingly many words have been borrowed into all aspects of life.
 For this purpose, the researcher tries to define borrowing or loan words, classify them depending on literature and identifies the major factors on borrowing words, finally, the researcher presents a number of tables within which she represents a vast number of borrowed words from English, adapted from a study that she has done on English loan words used by Kurdish people at visual media.

Cross-Lingual Bridges with Models of Lexical Borrowing

Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a “donor” language to a “recipient” language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and—in contrast to cognate relationships—borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated languages (for example, about 40% of Swahili’s vocabulary is borrowed from the unrelated language Arabic). In this work, we develop a model of morpho-phonological transformations across languages. Its features are based on universal constraints from Optimality Theory (OT), and we show that compared to several standard—but linguistically more naïve—baselines, our OT-inspired model obtains good performance at predicting donor forms from borrowed forms with only a few dozen training examples, making this a cost-effective strategy for sharing lexical information across languages. We demonstrate applications of the lexical borrowing model in machine translation, using resource-rich donor language to obtain translations of out-of-vocabulary loanwords in a lower resource language. Our framework obtains substantial improvements (up to 1.6 BLEU) over standard baselines.

An Optimality-Theoretic Account of English Loanwords in Hawaiian

The purpose of this paper is to provide an Optimality-Theoretic (henceforth OT) account of the linguistic phenomenon of borrowing. In particular, it examines English loanwords in Hawaiian from a constraint-based analysis as opposed to a rule-based analysis. Data necessary for this study consisted of some randomly selected Hawaiian words. These loanwords were carefully examined as to realize their phonological changes and how they can be accounted for from an OT standpoint. Several phonological changes, mainly those of the syllable structure of Hawaiian, were examined along with accompanying phonological processes (e.g., epenthesis, degemination, etc.) where applicable. The proposed ranking hierarchy that, the argument goes, could account for all English loanwords in Hawaiian is like this: ∑{NO CODA >> MAX-IO >> *CC >> DEP-IO}, a state of affairs which confirmed our intuition that the syllable structure of the borrowing language (Hawaiian) prevails over the syllable structure of the donor language (English). In order to establish the ranking argument, comparative tableaux are used. Violations tableaux are also used to demonstrate how the winning configuration beats competitive candidate forms.

Using Weighted Model Averaging in Distributed Multilingual DNNs to Improve Low Resource ASR

Multilingual Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been successfully used to leverage out-of-language data to boost the performance of a low resource ASR. However, the mismatch between auxiliary source languages and the target language can leave a negative effect on acoustic modeling for the target language. Thus, a key challenge in multilingual DNNs is to exploit acoustic data from multiple donor languages to improve on ASR performance while mitigating the problem of language mismatch. In this paper, we propose to employ weighted model averaging in the framework of distributed multilingual DNN which allows the target language or similar languages to take higher weights during the multilingual DNN training, and consequently shift the parameters towards the acoustic space of target data. Furthermore, we utilize the same strategy in the adaptation phase where a conventional multilingual DNN is the starting point and retraining is applied using all languages with different weights. The experiments with four languages from the GlobalPhone dataset show that the recognition performances in both scenarios are improved. The latter, moreover, provides a low-cost and efficient methodology for multilingual DNNs.

Transferencja italianizmów i wenecjanizmów w chorwackich gwarach czakawskich Dalmacji

The borrowing process of Italianisms and Venecianisms in Croatian Čakavian local languages of DalmatiaItalian and Venetian loanwords in the territory of Dalmatia were the result of complex, lengthy and intensive contacts, first Croatian-Romanian and later Croatian-Italian. In Dalmatia these are the Roman languages which have clearly indicated their presence in vocabulary and numerous works of linguists and dialectologists were devoted to this phenomenon. Apart from linguistic sources, also the historical ones inform us about multiculturalism and bilingualism, which developed in the Dalmatian cities. The outcomes of language contacts are numerous linguistic borrowings from Italian and Venetian dialect in Čakavian lexical system. The adaptation process of Venetian and Italian borrowings occurs at the phonological, morphological and semantic level. This article describes only the adaptation at the morphological and linguistic level in the language system of Čakavian dialect. It should be noted, however, that a linguistic borrowing is adapted at the phonological level first. As it is clear from the material discussed, a linguistic borrowing goes through three phases of transmorphemisation. At the formative level, Čakavian lexical system was enriched by new suffixes. At the semantic level, we can see that a borrowing in the recipient language retains the original meaning, there is also an expansion or a narrowing of the meaning compared to the one of the donor language. The most productive class of borrowed words are nouns, verbs are more rarely borrowed, as well as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and interjections. It seems that the cause of the advantage of nouns borrowed over other parts of speech lies in their semantics.

Direct and indirect affix borrowing

A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loanwords within the recipient language. This article suggests that direct borrowing can also be the only or primary process leading to productive loan affixes. Criteria are provided to assess instances of direct and indirect borrowing on the basis of the distribution of borrowed affixes across complex loanwords and hybrid formations. These are applied to corpora of various languages. A scale of directness of affix borrowing is proposed, based on the extent to which speakers of the recipient language rely (i) on their knowledge of the donor language (direct borrowing) and (ii) on complex loanwords within their native language (indirect borrowing).