Talk: Loanword
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There's so much medieval and Norman French in English that I'm not sure "loanword" is the appropriate term: 40 percent of vocabulary isn't loan words, it's creolization.Vicki Rosenzweig
- I am not sure I would agree. I think English at its core has remained English. A vocabulary by itself does not a language make. English grammar fundamentally and directly derives from its Germanic heritage, and as far as vocabulary goes, in general the most common and basic words (pronouns, and most everyday words) come from Old English. The French loanwords were grafted onto a Germanic language; it wasn't like two languages were fused into some kind of hybrid compromise. soulpatch
- I don't think the definition of loanword can really be extended to include every word in English not of English origin. In addition to the French that seems so interesting to you two, there are thousands and thousands of Greek and Latin words. They can't all be loanwords. I suggest that loanword should be limited to words of recognizable or easily traceable foreign origin and not include virtually every word in the language outside of the most basic vocabulary (and a lot of forgotten Anglo Saxon).
- If general, nonchalant, cinematography, annual, ink, impossible, orphan, concession, et cetera (et cetera, for that matter) are all to be loanwords, then how will we find words like ketchup, garage, corral, buckaroo, kohlrabi, and the like that have genuinely been "lent" and not simply showed up with the rest of the language? Ortolan88
- How do you propose to distinguish these two groups, exactly? --Brion 05:22 Oct 9, 2002 (UTC)
- Surely loanwords are gradually absorbed. -- Tarquin 09:19 Oct 9, 2002 (UTC)
- I was under the impression that a loanword was by definition "absorbed" or nativized at least to some degree. If it weren't, it would simply be a foreign word. No? --Brion 09:45 Oct 9, 2002 (UTC)
- but eventually they are considered part of the language. Otherwise, as said above, all words would be loanwords. Where does "English" start? Is "chocolate" still a loanword? "general"? At some (blurry) point the naturalization is complete. What about "tunnel" and "tennis"? They've been batted back and forth between English and French several times. Who gave what to whom? -- Tarquin
I propose to distinguish them by the criterion I proposed above:
- I suggest that loanword should be limited to English words of recognizable or easily traceable foreign origin
This will require a certain amount of Sprachgefühl, but we are an encyclopedia and that is one of the requirements that is placed on us. Sprachgefühl ("feel for language"), btw, is a Gastworte, that is, a "guest word" from another language that has not turned into a loanword.
Thus, there is a sort of hierarchy:
- Echt English -- father, window, etc, words from the island of Britain
- Normal English -- chimney, ink, locution, forest, words from our source languages - Greek, Latin, and French, etc --that are well and truly normal
- Loanwords that are part of English but still have a flavor of foreigness, at least to the knowledgeable, buckaroo (Spanish), corral (Zulu), ketchup (Maylasian)
- Gastworte -- words that are used in English, but are still considered foreign, czar, sprachgefühl, echt, often italicized
Absorption of words from other languages is one of the glories of our language, and one of the reasons that we have more words than any other language, and also the reason our spelling is such tuff stuff. I'll put some of this in the article after some research. Ortolan88
PS - English as a creole language gave me a good laugh, the equivalent of calling Australia an island instead of a continent.
- Are categories 2 and 3 to be distinguished purely by personal taste, or by time depth, or what? Ketchup is certainly "normal English" to any child in this country (who probably has never even heard of Malaysia), while locution is a Latinate monstrosity I can't imagine a real person ever using without being well aware that it has a Latin origin. --Brion 18:11 Oct 9, 2002 (UTC)
I propose we use judgment. I judge that this article is seriously in need of a rewrite. I'm just off to go camping, but when I get back I'll take a crack at it and then you can judge the results. Ortolan88
An entirely irrelevant aside: in Lojban we created methods for importing names and words from other languages, and originally called them "le'avla", meaning "borrowed words". After some protest, we changed it to "fu'ivla", meaning "taken words", because it was decided that was a more accurate term, since we had no intention of giving them back...
- That is correct; except that "le'avla" means take-word, and "fu'ivla" means copy-words. arj 15:58, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Is "exotic" the current academic term in the West to describe the Arabic, Hebrew, Quechua, and Russian languages? That adjective seems a bit out dated. Kingturtle 17:48 Apr 12, 2003 (UTC)
I think a major problem is defining what is the pure original English. Is it the language of the Angles? Or of the Saxes? Or the combined Anglo-Saxon? What about the Celtic languages in Brittain, that affected the Anglo-Saxon? So words like show are also loanwords then? After all, show came from a Gaelic word, is not even a Germanic one...
Boris (Nomæd) A. 20:14, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- In French, everything that existed before 842 CE is "pure original French" to put it in your words, and everything else is loan. Don't you have something like that in English?? --Valmi 02:49, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Returning the loan
The name is somewhat misleading since the words are very rarely given back.
This is a joke, right? Does this note deserve being mentioned in the first paragraph of this article? mtreinik 12:02, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- I don't get it. It seems a perfectly factual statement from here. -- Smjg 14:25, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Nothing wrong in the statement. To me it just sounded like a pun or a wisecrack to interpret the word 'loan' literally. Something like
- - Would you lend me a hand?
- - No, I want to use it myself.
- In deed, loaning a word is apparently different from ordinary lending of e.g. money or goods:
- a word is rarely given back (as stated in the article)
- borrowing a word doesn't require anything from the part of the lender, for example permission
- the lender of the word can still use it
- English is a foreign language for me, so maybe I am the one who doesn't get it. -- mtreinik 11:30, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- It's a joke alright, how would you "give back" a word? The original word is still in the original language. It's a lot like the idiom "to borrow an idea" -- you're not expected to give the idea back! I'm taking this out. - RedWordSmith 03:33, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)
