Borrowings

[Particles the Greek]

Is there a list or resource of common things-which-are-borrowed?

If not, it might be a useful project for board members to get together and make one for the L&L museum.

[CaesarVincens]

Assuming you mean words, new technologies are high on the list.

Even the Hittites and Akkadians borrowed their word for clay tablets from the Sumerians.

Although it seems like some languages prefer calques or might calque along with a borrowing, with or without an official language body deciding on a calque.

[vokzhen]

Technology, as said. Local flora and fauna. Local geography and activities, if they were not relevant in a language's previous geographic location (the sea- and boat-related words in Germanic is what I'm thinking of; presumably other regions have similar borrowings). Political and religious terms.

[CatDoom]

Terms related to trade and for common trade goods can be a big one. Relatives of the word "wine" seem to have been so widely borrowed in western Eurasia that it's hard to pin down just where they originated. In California, words for "dog", "bow," "arrow," "salt," the names of bird species with valuable feathers, and terms for basket designs were commonly borrowed. So too were terms relating to measurement and valuation, and even basic numerals, again apparently transmitted in the context of trade.

Incidentally, which Germanic nautical terms are borrowings? A quick look on Wiktionary shows that the words for "boat," "rudder," "sea," "ship," "wave," "tide," and "to row" are all regularly derived from Proto-Indo-European roots (albeit ones with somewhat indirectly related meanings in some cases), while the etymologies for "sail" and "oar" go back at least as far as Proto-Germanic.

[linguoboy]

Borrowing is so culture-dependent I'm not really sure how much use some sort of laundry list would be. Some languages are extremely resistant to borrowing. Siouan languages, for instance. I think there are literally three lexical items in the entire Osage language which are known to have been borrowed. On the other hand, you have mixed languages where the contents of entire lexical categories have been adopted wholesale.

[Trebor]

Technology, as said. Local flora and fauna. Local geography and activities, if they were not relevant in a language's previous geographic location (the sea- and boat-related words in Germanic is what I'm thinking of; presumably other regions have similar borrowings). Political and religious terms.

It would be interesting to conduct a study of how oral cultures in Africa and the Americas obtained their words for "to read", "to write", "book", "letter", etc. Borrowing and neologizing, presumably--but, in the latter case, what strategies?

As I've read, Kinyarwanda loaned "to read" from Swahili ("gusoma"), and it obtained "book" and "plate" clearly from Swahili/Arabic ("igitabo", "isahani") and "table" evidently from Portuguese ("ameza").

[linguoboy]

A quick perusal of my bookshelf finds no obvious borrowings and a couple instances of neologism. All the other expressions were formed by means of semantic extension. Lakota and Sm'algyax both expanded the meaning of a verb meaning "to count". In Osage, the original meaning of ðaacé is "to call by name". (ðaa- is a form of the Siouan instrumental prefix "by mouth" also found in Lakota yawa.) From this, it has been extended to cover "pronounce" and thence "read" (reading originally having been done aloud in most cultures). Chickasaw ittimanompoli is derived from imanompoli "talk to" with the addition of a reflexive prefix. An alternative neologism has the literal meaning "interpret writing".

[kuroda]

Max Planck Gesellschaft's World Loanword Database, maybe?

http://wold.clld.org/

[hwhatting]

Thanks for that link!

[Dewrad]

I kind of spoke about this in my Proto-Wenetic thread.

[hwhatting]

I kind of spoke about this in my Proto-Wenetic thread.

As you mention it, how's Proto-Wenetic doing?

[Ketumak]

In Western Europe, compass point directions seem to have a common origin (more recent than PIE, I mean).

[hwhatting]

In Western Europe, compass point directions seem to have a common origin (more recent than PIE, I mean).

You mean the fact that the major literary Romance languages all loaned them from Germanic?

[Ketumak]

Yes. A Germanic source would figure, given Germanic exploration and navigation at sea around the 5th to 10th centuries.