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aspect of linguistic change
Languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens when some new object or institution is developed for which the borrowing language has no word of its own. For example, the large number of words denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed from Italian by the other western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies to the importance of the Italian...
The Altaic languages have been highly receptive to borrowings from other languages, both Altaic and non-Altaic, but the core vocabulary and grammatical markers remain native. Languages of the three branches occur in close proximity throughout the eastern part of the Altaic-speaking world and, facilitated by similarities of structure, have borrowed freely from each other in all periods; for...
...of the state, arose in parts of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra during the first few centuries of the Christian era and somewhat later in Java. As a result of these contact influences, Sanskrit loanwords entered Malay and Javanese in large numbers. Many Philippine languages also contain substantial numbers of Sanskrit loans, even though no part of the Philippines was ever Indianized. It is...
The Baltic languages have loanwords from the Slavic languages (e.g., Old Prussian curtis “hunting dog,” Lithuanian kùrtas, Latvian kur̃ts come from Slavic [compare Polish chart]; Lithuanian muĩlas “soap” [compare Russian mylo]; Latvian suods “punishment, penalty” [compare Russian...
Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey’ and ‘lion,’ and probably also ‘horse,’ ‘dog,’ and ‘goose,’ are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian...
Greenlandic contains four loanwords from medieval Norse; from the colonial period after 1721 there have been surprisingly few borrowings until the mid-20th century. In Aleut and in the Yupik of former Russian Alaska there are many borrowings from Russian, and there are several in Siberian Eskimo from English, and many from Chukchi, a Paleo-Siberian language. Notable Eskimo contributions to the...
...ties to North Sea Germanic. Only after the consonant shift is there justification in speaking of a “(High) German” language distinct from the rest of South Germanic. The spread of early loans from Latin throughout all Germanic languages indicates that, at the time of their borrowing, a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects must still have existed, though differences between...
...in the history of Japanese is the acquisition of the nativized writing systems that took place between the 8th and the 10th centuries. The Japanese vocabulary has been constantly enriched by loanwords—from Chinese in earlier times and from European languages in more recent history.
Loanwords other than those constituting the stratum of Sino-Japanese words are lumped together as gairai-go, literally ‘foreign-coming words.’ In the contemporary Japanese vocabulary, English words dominate this category, with slightly more than 80 percent. Also evident are the linguistic legacies of 16th-century Portuguese, Spanish, and, in particular, Dutch missionaries and...
...language could hardly be said to have changed at all, using its own resources to describe anything new. In a second stage, beginning about 1540 or 1545 and lasting for nearly 100 years, Nahuatl borrowed many hundreds of Spanish words, each representing a cultural loan as well. But all were grammatically nouns; other innovations in the language were minimal. This was a time of change in a...
North Caucasian languages
...languages has been fairly well preserved in the modern languages, although many words have been borrowed from Arabic (through Islām), the Turkic languages, and Persian. There are also loanwords that have been taken from the neighbouring languages (Georgian, Ossetic). Russian, which was a major influence from the late 19th century, was for decades the main source for new words,...
In addition to the stock of native words inherited from its ancestral language, each Paleo-Siberian language also has numerous loanwords, some of which are recent and from adjacent or recently adjacent languages and others of which are ancient and from languages with which it no longer has contact. Some of the loanwords from ancient times are consequently more difficult to identify and trace to...
The basic vocabularies (the most frequently used lexical items) of all the Romance languages are in the main directly inherited from Latin. This applies equally to “function” words, such as de ‘of, from’ (Romanian de, Italian di, Rhaetian da, French de, Spanish de, Portuguese de), as to common lexical items, such as...
...either compounds and derivatives of the simpler words or else borrowings from other languages—mostly of a scientific and cultural nature. At the end of the 20th century, the chief source of loanwords in the North Germanic languages was English.
The original vocabulary of general terms common to Baltic and Slavic is still retained in most of the Slavic languages. In prehistoric times Proto-Slavic borrowed a number of important social and religious terms from Iranian (e.g., bogŭ ‘god,’ mirŭ ‘peace’). Later, special terms were borrowed by East Slavic and South Slavic from eastern languages...
South American Indian languages
Indian languages vary significantly in the number of loanwords from Spanish and Portuguese. Massive borrowing has taken place in areas where languages have been in intense and continued contact with Spanish or Portuguese, especially where groups are economically dependent on the national life of the country and there is a considerable number of bilingual persons, as in Quechuan, or where no...
...three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) are still differentiated. Swedish has a tone or pitch accent, described by many speakers of English as a singsong rhythm. The vocabulary contains many loanwords, especially from Low German and High German and, in more recent times, from French and English.
...to resemble forms in other languages, such as Chinese or Indonesian, and they have given rise to different interpretations of the relationship of the Tai languages to other linguistic families. Loanwords in later periods from the Khmer and Indic languages (Sanskrit and Pali) are particularly common in Thai and Lao, and loans from Chinese are abundant in the Central and the Northern...
In the Yiddish vocabulary, words and word elements borrowed from a number of different languages occur together and often combine freely in a manner unfamiliar to the languages from which they derive. Furthermore, when words borrowed from different languages are partially alike, one of them may be analyzed and inflected in terms historically appropriate to the other, thereby yielding blends of...
significance to languages
...is matched by a similar use of Sanskrit words for certain parts of learned vocabulary in some modern Indian languages (Sanskrit being the classical language of India). Such phenomena are examples of loanwords, one of the readiest sources for vocabulary extension.
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