Loanword
A loanword is a word adopted from one language and incorporated into another language without translation. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin, and calques, which involve translation.
Examples and related terms
A loanword is distinguished from a calque, which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by word-for-word translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.Examples of loanwords in the English language include café, bazaar, and kindergarten.
In a bit of involutionally heterological irony, the word calque is a loanword from the French noun calque ; while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are calques of the German nouns Lehnwort and Lehnübersetzung.
Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.
Strictly speaking, the term loanword conflicts with the ordinary meaning of loan in that something is taken from the donor language without it being something that is possible to return.
The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language.
From the arts
Most of the technical vocabulary of classical music is borrowed from Italian, and that of ballet from French.Linguistic classification
The studies by Werner Betz, Einar Haugen, and Uriel Weinreich are regarded as the classical theoretical works on loan influence. The basic theoretical statements all take Betz's nomenclature as their starting point. Duckworth enlarges Betz's scheme by the type "partial substitution" and supplements the system with English terms. A schematic illustration of these classifications is given below.The phrase "foreign word" used in the image below is a mistranslation of the German Fremdwort, which refers to loanwords whose pronunciation, spelling, inflection or gender have not been adapted to the new language such that they no longer seem foreign. Such a separation of loanwords into two distinct categories is not used by linguists in English in talking about any language. Basing such a separation mainly on spelling is not common except amongst German linguists, and only when talking about German and sometimes other languages that tend to adapt foreign spellings, which is rare in English unless the word has been widely used for a long time.
According to the linguist Suzanne Kemmer, the expression "foreign word" can be defined as follows in English: "hen most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant, mutatis mutandis, and Schadenfreude." This is however not how the term is used in this illustration:
On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen distinguishes three basic groups of borrowings: “ Loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution.... Loanblends show morphemic substitution as well as importation.... Loanshifts show morphemic substitution without importation”. Haugen later refined his model in a review of Gneuss's book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one by Betz again.
Weinreich differentiates between two mechanisms of lexical interference, namely those initiated by simple words and those initiated by compound words and phrases. Weinreich defines simple words “from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category ‘simple’ words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalysed form”. After this general classification, Weinreich then resorts to Betz's terminology.
Terms
Popular loanwords are spread orally.Learned loanwords are first used in written language, often for scholarly, scientific, or literary purposes.
In English
The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicization.Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. For example, the Hawaiian word aā is used by geologists to specify lava that is thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the English pronunciation,, contains at most one. The English spelling usually removes the ʻokina and macron diacritics.
Most English affixes, such as un-, -ing, and -ly, were used in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the verbal suffix -ize or ise comes from Greek -ιζειν through Latin -izare.
Languages other than English
Transmission in the Ottoman Empire
During more than 600 years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and administrative language of the empire was Turkish, with many Persian, and Arabic loanwords, called Ottoman Turkish, considerably differing from the everyday spoken Turkish of the time. Many such words were exported to other languages of the empire, such as Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Ladino, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. After the empire fell after World War I and the Republic of Turkey was founded, the Turkish language underwent an extensive language reform led by the newly founded Turkish Language Association, during which many adopted words were replaced with new formations derived from Turkic roots. That was part of the ongoing cultural reform of the time, in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms, which also included the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet.Turkish also has taken many words from French, such as pantolon for trousers and komik for funny, most of them pronounced very similarly. Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications tend to use more Arabic or Persian originated words, left-wing ones use more adopted from European languages, while centrist ones use more native Turkish root words.
Dutch words in Indonesian
Almost 350 years of Dutch presence in what is now Indonesia have left significant linguistic traces. Though very few Indonesians have a fluent knowledge of Dutch, the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch, both in words for everyday life and as well in administrative, scientific or technological terminology. One scholar argues that roughly 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words.Dutch words in Russian
In the late 17th century, the Dutch Republic had a leading position in shipbuilding. Czar Peter the Great, eager to improve his navy, studied shipbuilding in Zaandam and Amsterdam. Many Dutch naval terms have been incorporated in the Russian vocabulary, such as from Dutch bramzeil for the topgallant sail, from Dutch ' for jack, and from Dutch ' for sailor.Loan words in Japanese
Loan words in Indian languages
Romance languages
A large percentage of the lexicon of Romance languages, themselves descended from Vulgar Latin, consists of loanwords from Latin. These words can be distinguished by lack of typical sound changes and other transformations found in descended words, or by meanings taken directly from Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin that did not evolve or change over time as expected; in addition, there are also semi-learned terms which were adapted partially to the Romance language's character. Latin borrowings can be known by several names in Romance languages: in Spanish, for example, they are usually referred to as "cultismos", and in Italian as "latinismi".Latin is usually the most common source of loanwords in these languages, such as in Italian, Spanish, French, etc., and in some cases the total number of loans may even outnumber inherited terms. This has led to many cases of etymological doublets in these languages.
For most Romance languages, these loans were initiated by scholars, clergy, or other learned people and occurred in Medieval times, peaking in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance era- in Italian, the 14th century had the highest number of loans. In the case of Romanian, the language underwent a "re-Latinization" process later than the others, in the 18th and 19th centuries, partially using French and Italian words as intermediaries, in an effort to modernize the language, often adding concepts that did not exist until then, or replacing words of other origins. These common borrowings and features also essentially serve to raise mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages, particularly in academic/scholarly, literary, technical, and scientific domains. Many of these same words are also found in English and other European languages.
In addition to Latin loanwords, many words of Ancient Greek origin were also borrowed into Romance languages, often in part through scholarly Latin intermediates, and these also often pertained to academic, scientific, literary, and technical topics. Furthermore, to a lesser extent, Romance languages borrowed from a variety of other languages; in particular English has become an important source in more recent times. The study of the origin of these words and their function and context within the language can illuminate some important aspects and characteristics of the language, and it can reveal insights on the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in linguistics as a method of enriching a language.