Phono-semantic matching

Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus, the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression (the PSM) in the target language may sound native.
Phono-semantic matching is distinct from calquing, which includes (semantic) translation but does not include phonetic matching (i.e. retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existent word or morpheme in the target language). At the same time, phono-semantic matching is also distinct from homophonic translation, which retains the sound of a word but not the meaning.
History.
The term "phono-semantic matching" was introduced by linguist and revivalist Ghil'ad Zuckermann. It challenged Einar Haugen's classic typology of lexical borrowing (loanwords). While Haugen categorized borrowing into either substitution or importation, camouflaged borrowing in the form of PSM is a case of "simultaneous substitution and importation." Zuckermann proposed a new classification of multisourced neologisms, words deriving from two or more sources at the same time. Examples of such mechanisms are phonetic matching, semanticized phonetic matching and phono-semantic matching.
Zuckermann concludes that language planners, for example members of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, employ the very same techniques used in folk etymology by laymen, as well as by religious leaders. He urges lexicographers and etymologists to recognize the widespread phenomena of camouflaged borrowing and multisourced neologization and not to force one source on multi-parental lexical items.
Examples.
Arabic.
Zuckermann analyses the evolution of the word "artichoke". Beginning in Arabic () "the artichoke", it was adapted into Andalusian Arabic "alxarshofa", then Old Spanish "alcarchofa", then Italian "alcarcioffo", then Northern Italian "arcicioffo" > "arciciocco" > "articiocco", then phonetically realised in English as "artichoke". The word was eventually "phono-semantically matched" back into colloquial Levantine Arabic (for example in Syria, Lebanon and Israel) as (), consisting of () "earthly" and () "thorny".
Arabic has made use of phono-semantic matching to replace blatantly imported new terminology with a word derived from an existing triliteral root. Examples are:
Dutch.
A number of PSMs exist in Dutch as well. One notable example is "hangmat" ("hammock"), which is a modification of Spanish "hamaca", also the source of the English word. Natively, the word is transparently analysed as a "hang-mat", which aptly describes the object. Similarly:
English.
A few PSMs exist in English. The French word ("Carthusian monastery") was translated to the English "charterhouse". The French word , itself an adaptation of the Choctaw name for the bowfin, has likewise been Anglicized as , although it is unrelated to the pikes. The French name for the Osage orange, "" ( "bow-wood"), is sometimes rendered as "bowdark".
The second part of the word "muskrat" was altered to match "rat", replacing the original form "", which derives from an Algonquian (possibly Powhatan) word, "muscascus" (literally "it is red"), or from the Abenaki native word "mòskwas".
The Prayer Book's "runagates" in Psalm 68 derive from phono-semantic matching between Latin "renegatus" and English "run agate".
Finnish.
The Finnish compound word for "jealous" "mustasukkainen" literally means "black-socked" ("musta" "black" and "sukka" "sock"). However, the word is a case of a misunderstood loan translation from Swedish "svartsjuk" "black-sick". The Finnish word "sukka" fit with a close phonological equivalent to the Swedish "sjuk". Similar cases are "työmyyrä" "hardworking person", literally "work mole", from "arbetsmyra" "work ant", matching "myra" "ant" to "myyrä" "mole", and "liikavarvas" "clavus", literally "extra toe", from "liktå" < "liktorn" "dead thorn" , matching "liika" "extra" to "lik" "dead (archaic)" and "varvas" "toe" to "tå" < "torn" "thorn".
German.
 "applies the concepts of multisourced neologisation and, more generally, camouflaged borrowing, as established by to Modern German, pursuing a twofold aim, namely to underline the significance of multisourced neologisation for language contact theory and secondly to demonstrate that together with other forms of camouflaged borrowing it remains an important borrowing mechanism in contemporary German."
Icelandic.
 demonstrate how Icelandic camouflages many English words by means of phono-semantic matching. For example, the Icelandic-looking word "eyðni", meaning "AIDS", is a PSM of the English acronym "AIDS", using the pre-existent Icelandic verb "eyða", meaning "to destroy", and the Icelandic nominal suffix "-ni". Similarly, the Icelandic word "tækni", meaning "technology, technique", derives from "tæki", meaning "tool", combined with the nominal suffix "-ni", but is, in fact, a PSM of the Danish (or international) "teknik", meaning "technology, technique". "Tækni" was coined in 1912 by Dr Björn Bjarnarson from Viðfjörður in the East of Iceland. It had been in little use until the 1940s, but has ever since become highly common, as a lexeme and as an element in new formations, such as "raftækni", lit. "electrical technics", i.e. "electronics", "tæknilegur" "technical" and "tæknir" "technician". Other PSMs discussed in the article are "beygla", "bifra" "bifrari", "brokkál", "dapur" "dapurleiki" - "depurð", "fjárfesta" - "fjárfesting", "heila", "guðspjall", "ímynd", "júgurð", "korréttur", "Létt og laggott", "musl", "pallborð" "pallborðsumræður", "páfagaukur", "ratsjá", "setur", "staða", "staðall" "staðla" "stöðlun", "toga" "togari", "uppi" and "veira".
Japanese.
In modern Japanese, loanwords are generally represented phonetically via katakana. However, in earlier times loanwords were often represented by kanji (Chinese characters), a process called "ateji" when used for phonetic matching, or "jukujikun" when used for semantic matching. Some of these continue to be used; the characters chosen may correspond to the sound, the meaning, or both.
In most cases the characters used were chosen only for their matching sound or only for their matching meaning. For example, in the word (sushi), the two characters are respectively read as "su" and "shi", but the character means "one's natural life span" and means "to administer", neither of which has anything to do with the food this is "ateji". Conversely, in the word ("tabako") for "tobacco", the individual kanji respectively mean "smoke" and "herb", which corresponds to the meaning, while none of their possible readings have a phonetic relationship to the word "tabako" this is "jukujikun".
In some cases, however, the kanji were chosen for both their semantic and phonetic values, a form of phono-semantic matching. A stock example is ("kurabu") for "club", where the characters can be interpreted loosely in sequence as "together-fun-place" (which has since been borrowed into Chinese during the early 20th century with the same meaning, including the individual characters, but with a pronunciation that differs considerably from the original English and the Japanese, "jùlèbù"). Another example is ("kappa") for the Portuguese "capa", a kind of raincoat. The characters can mean "wings coming together", as the pointed "capa" resembles a bird with wings folded together.
Mandarin Chinese.
PSM is frequently used in Mandarin borrowings.
An example is the Taiwanese Mandarin word "wēi'érgāng" (wei'ergang), which literally means "powerful and hard" and refers to Viagra, the drug for treating impotence in men, manufactured by Pfizer.
Another example is the Mandarin form of World Wide Web, which is "wàn wéi wǎng" (), which satisfies "www" and literally means "myriad dimensional net". The English word "hacker" has been borrowed into Mandarin as ("hēikè", "dark/wicked visitor").
Modern Standard Chinese / "shēngnà" "sonar" uses the characters / "shēng" "sound" and / "nà" "receive, accept". The pronunciations "shēng" and "nà" are phonetically somewhat similar to the two syllables of the English word. Chinese has a large number of homo/heterotonal homophonous morphemes, which would have been a better phonetic fit than "shēng", but not nearly as good semantically consider the syllable ' (cf. "sòng" 'deliver, carry, give (as a present)', "sōng" 'pine; loose, slack', / "sǒng" 'tower; alarm, attract' etc.), ' (cf. "sōu" 'search', "sŏu" 'old man', / "sōu" 'sour, spoiled' and many others) or "" (cf. "shōu" 'receive, accept', "shòu" 'receive, accept', "shǒu" 'hand', "shǒu" 'head', / "shòu" 'beast', "shòu" 'thin' and so forth).
According to Zuckermann, PSM in Mandarin is common in:
From a monolingual Chinese view, Mandarin PSM is the 'lesser evil' compared with Latin script (in digraphic writing) or code-switching (in speech). Zuckermann's exploration of PSM in Standard Chinese and Meiji-period Japanese concludes that the Chinese writing system is multifunctional: pleremic ("full" of meaning, e.g. logographic), cenemic ("empty" of meaning, e.g. phonographic - like a syllabary) and simultaneously cenemic and pleremic (phono-logographic). Zuckermann argues that Leonard Bloomfield's assertion that "a language is the same no matter what system of writing may be used" is inaccurate. "If Chinese had been written using roman letters, thousands of Chinese words would not have been coined, or would have been coined with completely different forms".
Modern Hebrew.
Often in phono-semantic matching, the source-language determines both the root word and the noun-pattern. This makes it difficult to determine the source language's influence on the target-language morphology. For example, "the phono-semantic matcher of English "dock" with Israeli Hebrew "mivdók" could have used after deliberately choosing the phonetically and semantically suitable root "" meaning 'check' (Rabbinic) or 'repair' (Biblical) the noun-patterns "mi⌂⌂a⌂á", "ma⌂⌂e⌂á", "mi⌂⌂é⌂et", "mi⌂⌂a⌂áim" etc. (each ⌂ represents a slot where a radical is inserted). Instead, "mi⌂⌂ó⌂", which was not highly productive, was chosen because its [o] makes the final syllable of "mivdók" sound like English "dock"."
Miscellaneous.
The Hebrew name ("Yərūšālayim") for Jerusalem is rendered as ("Hierosóluma") in, e.g., . The first part corresponds to the Ancient Greek prefix ("hiero-"), meaning "sacred, holy".
Old High German "widarlōn" ("repayment of a loan") was rendered as "widerdonum" ("reward") in Medieval Latin. The last part corresponds to the Latin "donum" ("gift").
"Viagra", a brand name which was suggested by Interbrand Wood (the consultancy firm hired by Pfizer), is itself a multisourced neologism, based on Sanskrit "" ("tiger") but enhanced by the words "vigour" (i.e. strength) and "Niagara" (i.e. free/forceful flow).
Motivations.
According to Zuckermann, PSM has various advantages from the point of view of a puristic language planner:
Other motivations for PSM include the following:
Expressive loan.
An expressive loan is a loanword incorporated into the expressive system of the borrowing language, making it resemble native words or onomatopoeia. Expressive loanwords are hard to identify, and by definition, they follow the common phonetic sound change patterns poorly. Likewise, there is a continuum between "pure" loanwords and "expressive" loanwords. The difference to a folk etymology is that a folk etymology or eggcorn is based on misunderstanding, whereas an expressive loan is changed on purpose, the speaker taking the loanword knowing full well that the descriptive quality is different from the original sound and meaning.
South-eastern Finnish, for example, has many expressive loans. The main source language, Russian, does not use the front rounded vowels 'y', 'ä' or 'ö' [y æ ø]. Thus, it is common to add these to redescriptivized loans to remove the degree of foreignness that the loanword would otherwise have. For example, "tytinä" "brawn" means "wobblyness", and superficially it looks like a native construction, originating from the verb "tutista" "to wobble" added with a front vowel sound in the vowel harmony. However, it is expressivized from "tyyteni" (which is a confusing word as "-ni" is a possessive suffix), which in turn is a loanword from Russian "stúden' ". A somewhat more obvious example is "tökötti" "sticky, tarry goo", which could be mistaken as a derivation from the onomatopoetic word "tök" (cf. the verb "tökkiä" "to poke"). However, it is an expressive loan of Russian "d'ogot' " "tar".