Linguistic Borrowing Research Articles

FOREIGN LANGUAGE BORROWINGS OF BIOTECHNOLOGICAL TERMINOLOGY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The article deals with the problem of linguistic borrowings in the English terminology of biotechnology. The purpose of the research is the analysis of borrowings in the biotechnological terminology of the English language and the identification of their main sources, determined by both historical and scientific events in the development of society. The material of the study was a sample consisting of terminological units of the modern English language related to the field of biotechnology, selected from specialized dictionaries, scientific works on the problems of biotechnology, Internet sites dedicated to the creation and production of new modified organisms and products. The article is aimed at researching the etymological and linguistic aspects of borrowed terms, analyzing their origin and adaptation in the field of biotechnology. The etymological analysis highlights those sources that participated in both the formation and development of the modern biotechnological vocabulary of the English language. The study determined that the borrowed terminological units of the English terminology of the field of biotechnology consist of the Greek-Latin, French and German borrowings. The article examines the influence of classical languages, in particular Latin and Greek, on the formation of biotechnological terminology. It is noted that the Greek and Latin languages are considered the main sources of enrichment of the biotechnological terminology. The analysis focuses on the origin, evolution and assimilation of biotechnological terms into the English language. In addition, the paper examines the impact of these borrowings on the relationship between scientific innovation and language evolution. The results of this study expand our understanding of the evolution of biotechnological terminology and the processes of linguistic adaptation and interaction between linguistic and scientific environments in modern biotechnological research.

Čelni napad ili uzmak: hrvatsko vojno nazivlje nasuprot angloameričkomu terminološkom prodoru

With the accession of Croatia to NATO, Croatian military terminology was confronted with a vast and complex terminological pool in English, for which Croatian equivalents had to be developed. This paper aims to address and investigate both latent and conspicuous mirroring of English term-formation patterns at all linguistic levels, as well as calqueing as a mechanism for creating Croatian equivalents. The research was undertaken on a corpus-verified excerpt of terms that were subjected to terminological analysis. Prima facie observations confirmed the efforts of subject matter experts to develop contemporary Croatian military terminology using Croatian language material. However, multiple criteria revealed the sample was debatable, both from the perspective of the standard Croatian language and of terminological principles. The research demonstrated that Croatian (terminological) term formation – as the most desirable method of term formation – is significantly underrepresented and dominated by latent linguistic borrowing (calques) and multiword term units. Because multiword terms constitute the most prevalent subgroup of terms today, they were given additional consideration, especially as Anglo-American structures and patterns are most closely emulated at this level of term formation. Anglo-American formation patterns frequently take priority, typically under the pretext of their alleged precision and transparency, despite the Croatian language substantial inherent term-formation potential. To systematize military terminology and introduce stability into the conceptual system, the author deemed it beneficial to go beyond the merely descriptive level of research and render solutions for terminological gaps or the terminology requiring revision and normative preference by undertaking concrete normative interventions and providing practical paradigmatic models. Finally, the rendered solutions were designed to both catalyze future interventions in Croatian military terminology and revise the current one.

Linguistic Borrowings from English in Spanish Language

Abstract: This study is devoted to the analysis of the concept of linguistic borrowing in Spanish. The main purpose of the work is to determine the semantic areas in which Anglicism is most used, that is, borrowings from the English language, respectively. Within the framework of this study, the following goals are set: to define the term “borrowing”; to identify the reasons for the need for borrowings; to classify lexical borrowings according to the degree of their adaptation to the host language; to give a comparative characteristic of the use of Anglicism in Spanish.

A Study of Vowel Adaptation in Kanuri Loanwords in Pabər/Bura

Abstract: The paper focuses on identifying and studying those linguistic items borrowed from the Kanuri to Pabǝr/Bura language with special attention to the modifications made to the vowels of the source language (Kanuri) before incorporating the loanwords into the target language (Pabǝr/Bura). It is believed that in as much as two or more communities with different linguistic backgrounds came in contact with one another; there is a tendency that linguistic borrowing will take place. Therefore, even though the languages under study belong to different language phyla, there exists linguistic borrowing between them. Because of this, the paper specifically focuses its attention on the adaptation of vowels in borrowed words. The research can establish that the target language (Pabǝr/Bura) employed various phonological processes in incorporating the loan words. More so vowel substitution is found to be the major technique used by the target language in incorporating the borrowed words. However, there are also cases of vowel deletion and insertion. The research employed two distinct sources as methods of data collection. These sources are primary and secondary. The primary source includes unobtrusive observation when discourse is taking place in Pabǝr/Bura language and listening to Pabǝr/Bura radio program broadcast by Yobe Broadcasting Corporation, Damaturu. Similarly, the researchers’ intuition plays a significant role in identifying the loanwords. On the other hand, secondary sources include written records, such as journal articles, dissertations, theses, dictionaries, etc. The paper concludes that Pabǝr/Bura borrowed a good number of lexical items from Kanuri, a Nilo-Saharan language.

Phonological analysis of Kĩtigania borrowed words from the Maa Language: An optimality approach

The notion of loanwords in languages that are in a contact situation is a phenomenon that is very common and unavoidable. For languages of the world, language change is remorseless, inevitable and ceaseless. This is because every day there are new innovations, change of ideas and emerging technologies that force language to be dynamic so as to keep up with the changes. Even as languages borrow, linguistic borrowing which entails loan word adaptation is an overwhelmingly phonological process. This phonological analysis has not been adequately examined in Kĩtigania borrowing from the Maa language whereby both are in contact situation. That is why this article did a phonological analysis of Kĩtigania borrowed words from the Maa language using the Optimality Theory’s markedness and faithfulness constraints. Data used in this article was collected using descriptive research design. Purposive sampling was done to select ten Maa and ten Kĩtigania speakers who were neither too old nor too young. These respondents had control over their articulators. Then interviews were conducted with all the respondents to elicit words borrowed to Kĩtigania and their meanings. The findings revealed that when borrowed segments are adapted to Kĩtigania, they undergo sound modification so that those adapted are faithful to those in the source language (Maa Language) and they are present in the Kĩtigania inventory. However, the loans undergo structure modification so as to fit the Kĩtigania syllabic structure. Nevertheless, markedness dominated faithfulness in Kĩtigania borrowing. Therefore, this article concludes that similarity of sounds between two languages brought by shared features as well as a language’s inventory and syllabic structure play a big role in Kĩtigania borrowing. In addition, different repair strategies which result to phonological processes are employed in Kĩtigania borrowing. They include; deletion, substitution and voicing or weakening.

INTERFERENCE OF NON-ARTISTIC LINGUISTICCULTURAL CODES IN ARTISTIC DISCOURSE (NEWSPEAK IN S. WIECHECKI’S AFTER-WAR FEUILLETONS)

The subject matter of the paper is the interference of the Polish variant of Newspeak with wiech, i. e., the Warsaw vernacular as reflected in S. Wiechecki’s after-war feuilletons. The authors show how several Newspeak lexical items occurring in the speech of Wiechecki’s characters are used, besides denoting realities of life in Communistgoverned Poland, also to express a wide range of additional senses and attitudes, from mere playing on officialese to implicit irony and, further, criticism and negation. In doing this, these items change their meaning or otherwise adapt to wiech, serving artistic purposes of satirically portraying, along with other everyday existence paraphernalia, nowomowa itself. The reception and interpretation of these nowomowa entities by wiech are considered a variety of language self-defence (as understood by A.Wierzbicka), with nowomowa used by Wiechecki’s characters mostly in an unorthodox and creative way, notably in parody, burlesque, and even travesty. Generalizing the conceptual and methodological framework in which the study has been carried out and observations made substantiates the authors’ contention that it is both possible and feasible to use the concept of linguistic contacts and interference more broadly, applying it to any theoretically or practically significant instance of such idiom interaction, both interlingual and languageinternal; also, that in researching contacts and interference, one must take into account language entities and their features as well as linguistic-cultural codes to which they belong and functional varieties of discourse realizing these codes, as it is within these specific discursive varieties that language entities actually function, idiom interference takes place, and linguistic borrowings are made.

Najnowsze metodologie badawcze w lingwistyce kontaktu i automatyczna ekscerpcja anglicyzmów

The paper presents the newest research methodologies used in the analysis and description of foreign lexical loans, such as the usage-based approach, experimental set-ups, as well as corpus-assisted research that includes automatic identification and excerption of unassimilated loanwords. The usage-based approach and experimental design spring from the revised perception of linguistic borrowing in contact linguistics, seen now as a social act, in which the recipient language speakers play the main role by fulfilling their nominal and expressive needs through conscious lexical choices. This type of research is also possible due to large electronic corpora equipped with the latest data processing tools that enable the analysis of borrowed material in authentic contexts. Rooted in the onomasiological-cognitive theoretical background and assuming a socio-pragmatic perspective, the presented methodologies allow for the analysis of those areas within linguistic borrowing that in structural and systemic research were neglected or unanalysable

Detecting contact in language trees: a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions—that languages change independently—is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present contacTrees, a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply contacTrees in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that contacTrees correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with contacTrees. The case study confirms that contacTrees reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

Expression of Words and their Adaptation of Sound - Morphological in Arabic the Biography of Ibn Hisham in the past and the Stories of Gharibeh in the Recent Times

The present study investigates the trend of linguistic borrowing in Classical and Modern Arabic in two texts: The Prophet’s Biography by Ibn Hisham (Classical) and the novels of Hashem Gharaibeh (Modern). It aims to highlight the capabilities of Arabic to adapt with other languages and find out the pattern of the morpho- phonological adaptation that applies to the borrowings. In addition, the study aims at figuring out whether the semantic classification of these borrowings is related to a certain style or jargon and identifying the reasons behind linguistic borrowing and its effects on weakening or strengthening the language-specific characteristics of Arabic. To achieve this goal, two types of texts will be examined: The Prophet’s Biography by Ibn Hisham, which represents Arabic in its flourished civilization era; the second is the novels of the Jordanian writer Hashem Gharaibeh, which represents Arabic in a weak civilizational period. It is worth mentioning that both texts are known to have highly eloquent language away from the colloquial. The study concludes that the trend in the past was to fully adapt the borrowings, reproducing them according to Arabic morpho-phonological and semantic rules. As for the modern text, the trend is to keep the borrowing as it was in the source language. The study recommends adapting the borrowing following the rules of the host language in order to preserve the identity and history of Arabic.

Nativized Hispanic Borrowed Words in Cebuano Visayan Editorial “Masanta Nang Badlungon”: A Lexical Analysis

This linguistic study descriptively analyzes the nativized Hispanic borrowed words in Cebuano Visayan. A lexical analysis of the morphemic structures of words is undertaken in order to investigate the language nativization. The textual source of the analysis is the editorial from Superbalita-Cebu with the title: “Masanta nang Badlungon”. The words are examined as to lexical categories, English equivalents, root words, Spanish equivalents, and nativization. After an in-depth lexical analysis of the morphemic structures of words from the textuality as supported by the theory of phylogenetic change through linguistic borrowing, the following are the findings: (1) The Hispanic borrowed words in the Cebuano Visayan editorial are twelve nouns, three verbs, and three adjectives. (2) All twelve nouns borrowed from Spanish exemplify linguistic acculturation through lexical nativization. (3) The three verbs borrowed from Spanish words reveal nativized spellings and all are added with nativized affixes. (4) The three adjectives borrowed from Spanish change their orthography and native Cebuano Visayan affixes are added. Moreover, based on the findings, it concludes that Hispanic words borrowed in Cebuano Visayan are acculturated through lexical nativization. Hence, this study recommends that a historical and exploratory study be made to the nativized Hispanic borrowed words in Cebuano Visayan to trace back on its origin which will give a better insight to why such word is born and continues to be used.

Ghosting, Breadcrumbing, Catfishing: A Corpus Analysis of English Borrowings in the Spanish Speaking World

The study aims to contribute to our understanding of the situation of languages in contact and the phenomenon of linguistic borrowings in the modern online world. The current study investigates the use of English terms borrowed to describe romantic relationships in Spanish. We use a list of terms presented in GQ Spain, a men’s culture, fashion and style magazine, as popular terms in 2020 to describe (a lack of) love in romantic relationships. In order to analyze the actual use of these borrowings in Spanish, we collected data from the Corpus del Español NOW (2012–2019), focusing on the number of occurrences of each English borrowing, level of morphological adaptation, co-occurrence of translations or explanations, date of first use and location of use. Overall, 11 of the 20 terms, such as ghosting, gaslighting or benching, appeared in the corpus. We note the presence of quotation marks, parentheses or uppercase letters in some cases, but it was observed that most examples keep their English form. However, many terms appeared with an explanation or translation, reflecting the novelty of the borrowing. Data regarding dates and countries were collected in order to set the year they were integrated with the new meaning (2013–2019). The country with the highest number of cases was Argentina, and there were a substantial number of cases in other Spanish-speaking countries. Overall, these findings show an increase in the incorporation of these borrowings over the years in the Spanish lexicon.

Linguistic Borrowing of English Words and Utterances among Philippine’s Generation Z in Cebuano Visayan

This descriptive-qualitative study investigates the English-borrowed words in the Cebuano Visayan vocabularies uttered by the select Generation Z in the Southern part of Cebu in the Philippines. The validated self-made matrix from 15 live recorded role-plays of the 80 participants involved in this study. It was analysed in 3 phases; Phase one for Code-mixing in words, Phase two for Code-Switching in utterances, and phase three for monograph construction out from the data-gathering procedure of the study. This study is anchored on the phylogenetic change proposed by Hockett (2008) and the Borrowing Transfer Theory by Odlin (1989). These theories magnify that modification of one or both languages may occur whenever two languages come into contact. The phylogenetic change focuses on language switching and mixing in a specific speaking community. The study's findings showed that most Cebuano Visayan affixes occur in words under verbs. The affixes of the Cebuano Visayan language under adjectives do not significantly influence the meaning of the word but function as an auxiliary in the English word mixed in it. The majority of the content words are in complex grammatical form. Among the three types of code-switching, intrasentential codeswitching is mainly applied. Therefore, it is concluded that Cebuano Visayan uses linguistic borrowing from English through code-mixing in words and code-mixing in utterances. Because these phenomena augment genuine knowledge acquisition, it is recommended that Language Teachers allow the students to use more than one code in oral classroom participation through code-mixing and code-switching.

Linguistic borrowings, lexic equivalences and uses of Spanish and Maya in notarial documents from the XVI to the XIX centuries in Yucatan

Linguistic borrowings, lexic equivalences and uses of Spanish and Maya in notarial documents from the XVI to the XIX centuries in Yucatan

Linguistic borrowings, lexic equivalences and uses of Spanish and Maya in notarial documents from the XVI to the XIX centuries in Yucatan

Linguistic borrowings, lexic equivalences and uses of Spanish and Maya in notarial documents from the XVI to the XIX centuries in Yucatan

Phonological Processes in Ekegusii Borrowing: A Constraint-based Approach

Phonological processes are at the heart of linguistic borrowing as it has varied phonological systems. It could be seen that the loan words entering the loan language from the source language can hardly be separated from the phonological process because they must be modified to suit the phonology of the loan language. This article analysed the phonological processes realized in Ekegusii borrowing from English using Optimality Theory’s constraint approach. Since this was a phonological study, descriptive linguistic fieldwork was used. The data used in this article was extracted from Mose’s doctoral study, whereby purposive sampling was used to obtain two hundred borrowed segments from the Ekegusii dictionary, then supplemented by introspection. Further, three adult native proficient Ekegusii speakers who were neither too young nor too old and had all their teeth were purposively sampled. The two hundred tokens were then subjected to the sampled speakers through interviews to realize the sound patterns in the Ekegusii borrowing process overtly. The findings revealed that Ekegusii phonological constraints defined the well-formedness of the loanwords by repairing the illicit structures. To fix, various phonological processes were realized. They included: epenthesis, deletion, devoicing/strengthening, voicing/ weakening, re-syllabification, substitution, monophthongization, and lenition. The article concludes that borrowing across languages (related or unrelated) reports similar if not the same phonological processes only that the processes attested in one language are a subset of the universally exhibited phonological processes.

Bohemizm czy rutenizm – o wyrazie huba, hubka 1. bot. ‘grzyb na drzewach, Polyporus’, 2. ‘wysuszona huba do rozniecania ognia’, 3. ‘grzyby’

The text is a lexical mini-monograph in the context of issues related to linguis­tic borderland and linguistic borrowings. The word under consideration is huba, hubka 1. botany ‘fungus on trees, Polyporus’, 2. ‘dried Polyporus fungus for kin­dling fire, amadou’, 3. ‘fungi’, which in the Polish language is considered either a Bohemism or a Ruthenism. In the light of the linguistic data presented, it can be concluded that the former infrequently attested Bohemian influence was forgot­ten, and that under the influence of the Ruthenian languages the forms of huba, hubka were only later popularized in the Polish general language. On the oth­er hand, the influence of the Czech (and Slovak) language can be observed in the southern dialects, while in the east and in the Polish dialects of the southern Eastern Borderlands, Ukrainian influences were marked. It should be additionally noted that the spreading of these forms in dialects was under a strong impact of the Polish literary language.

Hungarian cultural and linguistic borrowings in the folk tradition of Burgenland Croats in Hungary and Slovakia

Abstract The work which forms the bulk of the present study was carried out on the basis of numerous pieces of field material collected by means of an ethnolinguistic questionnaire in villages inhabited by Burgenland Croats in Western Hungary and Southern Slovakia (where part of the Hungarian territory was annexed after World War II). The field data contain a number of latent and obvious borrowings from Hungarian folk culture. By latent borrowings we mean cultural phenomena that were initially feebly expressed in a particular tradition (and tended to be lost), but during long coexistence with a neighboring heterogeneous tradition they were eventually maintained due to the developed state of the similar phenomena in the neighboring population. We also include here cultural phenomena that are typical of both traditions and have deep roots in the universal model of the naive world view. Analyzing the popular culture and dialects of enclave villages of Burgenland Croats in Hungary and Slovakia, we show that traditional folk culture with the corresponding vocabulary nevertheless acts as an important marker of identity for the population living in a foreign language environment.

The Nollywood cultural effect in Zimbabwe: manifestation of Nigerian lingo in everyday discourses

ABSTRACT The Nollywood films, Nigeria’s greatest cultural export, have had phenomenal cultural impact in Zimbabwe. Deploying a theoretical gaze grounded in the social learning theory and notions of linguistic diffusion, lexical and pragmatic borrowing, this article explores the manifestation of lexis, accents, semantic and pragmatic elements of Nigerian linguistic and cultural heritage in Zimbabwe’s everyday discourses, as well as cultural productions. The corpus of Nigerian lingo was developed using a combination of qualitative methods that included personal interviews, focus groups and observation methods. The diffusion and use of Nigerian lingo in Zimbabwe proves films’ expediency in extemporaneous foreign language learning. The language acquisition process is induced by the cultural appeal of Nollywood films and the idolisation of people and culture depicted in the films. The adoption and adaptation of Nigerian lingo in Zimbabwe as a result of exposure to Nollywood movies is a significant contribution to discourses of multiculturalism.

Linguistic Diffusion in the Development of Hausa Language

The purpose of this paper is to prove that intercultural relationship and sufficient contact between Hausa and other languages result in linguistic diffusion or borrowing. The study adopts both the historical and descriptive survey research design, predicated on the need for a brief history of Hausa and the donor languages, and descriptive design to facilitate the use of secondary data generated from textbooks, theses, dissertations, seminar and conference papers. The study traces the location of Hausa people in order to vividly comprehend the nature of contact with the donor languages which effectively bears on the objective nature of the borrowed words. It is in this light that three types of language relationship emerged: genetic, typological and cultural. The intercultural relationship can be unidirectional (English and Hausa) or bi-directional (Hausa and Yoruba). The work provides concrete examples from Tuareg, Fulfulde, Kanuri, Yoruba, Nupe, Arabic and English languages to demonstrate the long contact with the Hausa language. The study finally observes suppressive interference on the structures of Hausa especially from Arabic and English, which have attained second language status in Hausa society, which, again, does not make the language lose its originality.

„SORRY“ DOESN’T SEEM TO BE THE HARDEST WORD: PRAGMATIC ADAPTATION OF ENGLISH SORRY IN SERBIAN

The pragmatic approach to linguistic borrowing focuses on the use of loanwords and cultural, social, communicative and cognitive factors that affect it. In a qualitative corpus-based analysis, this article examines the anglicism sorry (and the orthographically adapted sori) in Serbian, following the theoretical framework of pragmatic, functional adaptation (Andersen 2014). In the process of functional adaptation, sori loses and changes some of the grammatical and illocutionary potential of English sorry, but also develops some new discourse functions in Serbian, primarily related to the discourse type, register and style, sociolinguistic characteristics and motivations of the speakers, and specific communicative nuances. Compared to Serbian izvini(te), as the most general pragmatic marker of the apology speech act, sori has not only a narrower range of pragmatic meaning but a more restricted use, limited to colloquial urban style and the medium of spoken language, social networks and tabloid media.