Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where a meaning or idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language. Examples of loan words in English include: café, bazaar, and kindergarten. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German term Lehnwort, while the term calque is a loanword from French. Problems with the term 'loanword' Lexical adaptations are frequently in the form of phrases, for which the term "loanword" is less apt, e.g. déjà vu, an English loan from French. For simplicity, adopt/adoption, adapt/adaption, or lexical borrowing are thus used by many linguists. Strictly speaking, the terms borrow and loanword, although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words since something is taken from but nothing is returned to the donor languages. This metaphor is not isolated to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom "to borrow an idea," and even in the mathematical term "borrowing" used in subtraction. Loanwords entering a language Donor language terms frequently enter a recipient language as a technical term in connection with exposure to foreign culture. The specific reference point may be to the foreign culture itself or to a field of activity where the foreign culture has a dominant role. External associations A foreign loanword is arguably still outside the recipient language, and not yet a "loanword" when it is fixed in the local culture. What is "exotic" varies from language to language. Thus, English names for creatures not native to Great Britain are almost always loanwords. Loanwords from a dominant field of activity Examples of loanwords from a dominant field of activity: Arts – Most of the technical vocabulary of classical music is borrowed from Italian, and that of ballet from French. Business – English exports terms to other languages in business and technology. Philosophy – many technical terms, including the term philosophy itself, derive from Greek dominance in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, economic theory and political theory in Roman times. Examples include democracy, theory and so on. Religion – religions may carry with them a large number of technical terms from the language of the originating culture. For example: Arabic – caliph, hajj, jihad, Qur'an Greek – baptisma has entered many languages, e.g. English baptism. Hebrew – Some terms in the Hebrew Bible have been carried into other languages as borrowings rather than translated. For example Hebrew shabbat has been borrowed into most languages in the world: in Greek the word is Σάββατο; Latin sabbatum; Spanish and Portuguese sábado; and in English Sabbath. The major exceptions are languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, where Chinese characters are used and words are often translated rather than transliterated; for example, "Sabbath" is translated as "(peaceful) rest day" rather than transliterated. Latin – missa and communio have entered English as mass and communion. Sanskrit – guru Science – medicine uses a large vocabulary of Latin terms, as a result of medieval advances in medical science being conducted in Latin – even if some of the earliest Latin medical texts were translations from Greek and Arabic. Loanword passing into general use When a loanword loses foreign cultural associations it has passed into general use in the language. This is the case with a vast number of English language terms for which a dictionary entry will show that the etymology is French and not of Anglo-Saxon origin. Loanword-resistant areas By contrast, function words such as pronouns, and words referring to universal concepts, are the most static words within each language. These function words are borrowed only in rare cases such as English they from Old Norse þeir. Sometimes only one word from an opposite pair is borrowed, yielding an unpaired word in the recipient language. 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 representation of these classifications is given below: On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen distinguishes three basic groups of borrowings: “(1) 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. Models that try to integrate borrowing in an overall classification of vocabulary change, or onomasiological change, have recently been proposed by Peter Koch and Joachim Grzega. In English The English language has often borrowed words from other cultures or languages. For example: Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the donor language's phonology, even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. For example, the Hawaiian word ʻaʻā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word, but the English pronunciation, or , contains at most one. In addition, the English spelling usually removes the ʻOkina and macron diacritics. The majority of English affixes, such as un-, -ing, and -ly, were present in older forms in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the agentive suffix -er, which is very prolific, is borrowed ultimately from Latin - arius. The English verbal suffix -ize comes from Greek -ιζειν via Latin -izare. In languages other than English English loanword exports to other languages Direct borrowings, calques, or even grammatical constructions and orthographical conventions from English are called anglicisms. This leads to a virtual pseudo-dialect where language consists of words from two vocabularies. In French, for example, the result of perceived over-use of English words and expressions is called franglais. Some English terms in French include le week-end, le bifteck, and le job or la job. Spanglish is the English influence on the Spanish language, while Denglisch is the English influence on German, and Dunglish is the English influence on the Dutch language. Conversely, words are oftentimes borrowed from other languages by English speakers. For example, a straight clone from Swedish into English – like the word smörgåsbord – is called a sveticism. Loanword 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, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian and Ladino. After the empire fell in 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. This 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, mostly pronounced very similarly. Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications tend to use more Islamic-derived words, left-wing ones use more adopted from Europe, 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 linguisitic traces. Though only a small minority of present-day 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 scientific or technological terminology. One scholar argues that 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words. Cultural aspects In order to provide a more well-rounded understanding of the complexities of loanwords, certain historical and cultural factors must be taken into account. According to Hans Henrich Hock and Brian Joseph, "languages and dialects ... do not exist in a vacuum"—there is always linguistic contact between groups. This contact influences what loanwords are integrated into the lexicon and why certain words are chosen over others. Using the example of Plautdietsch/Mennonite Low German, the influence of many historical and cultural factors can be seen in the loanwords adopted by this unique language. For example, as Mennonites were pushed from the lowlands of Germany into Poland and then on to Russia due to religious persecution, Plautdietsch took vocabulary from Dutch, Frisian, Russian, and Ukrainian and integrated it into their own language. Mennonites also emigrated worldwide, where they took their language with them to four continents and over a dozen countries. Some examples of Plautdietsch loanwords are given below: Loanword transmission patterns Changes in meaning when loaned Words are occasionally imported with a different meaning than that in the donor language. Among the best known examples of this is the German word Handy, which is a borrowing of the English adjective handy, but means mobile phone. Conversely, in English the prefix über-, taken from German, is used in a way that it is rarely used in German. An abundance of borrowed words taking on new meaning can be found in Rioplatense Spanish. For example, the English gerund camping is used in Argentina to refer to a campsite, and the word wok, borrowed from the Cantonese word meaning pan, is used to mean stir-fry. Idiomatic expressions and phrases, sometimes translated word-for-word, can be borrowed, usually from a language that has "prestige" at the time. Often, a borrowed idiom is used as a euphemism for a less polite term in the original language. In English, this has usually been Latinisms from the Latin language and Gallicisms from French. If the phrase is translated word-for-word, it is known as a calque. Changes in spelling when loaned Words taken into different recipient languages are sometimes spelled as in the donor language. Sometimes borrowed words retain original pronunciation, but undergo a spelling change to represent the orthography of the recipient language. Welsh is a language where this is done with some consistency, with words like gêm, cwl, and ded-gifawe. The French expression "cul de sac" is used in English as is, with the same meaning but a spelling pronunciation: the 'l' is mute in French but enunciated in English. Changes in pronunciation when loaned In cases where a new loanword has a very unusual sound, the pronunciation is frequently radically changed, a process sometimes referred to by the archetypal name of the law of Hobson-Jobson; this is particularly noted in words from South Asian and Southeast Asian languages, as in this example. Some languages, such as Jèrriais, have a tendency to apply historical sound-shift patterns to newly introduced words; while Jèrriais speakers would have little difficulty pronouncing "parki", partchi is the word used, displaying the typical Norman ki → tchi shift. Most languages modify foreign words to fit native pronunciation patterns. Whether or not a change in pronunciation occurs depends on multiple factors such as: if the sounds occur in both the original and target languages and the level of contact between cultures. An excellent example is Japanese, which has an enormous number of loanwords. Japanese often denotes gairaigo in the writing system with the use of カタカナ(katakana). There was a massive ancient influx from China, and then a flow of new words came from European languages, particularly from Portuguese, which was spoken by the first European people whom Japanese encountered in the transition from the Middle Ages to Early modern period. Recently, most gairaigo have come from English, though there have been numerous loanwords borrowed from Dutch, German, French and other languages. There are almost always significant pronunciation shifts. Longer gairaigo are often shortened: In some cases, the original meaning shifts considerably through unexpected logical leaps: