Loanwords

The borrower may adopt the donor's word along with the object or practice; the new form in the borrower's speech is then a loanword.

The acquisition of a loanword constitutes in itself a lexical change, and probably we should say that it constitutes or entails a semantic change. A shape change is sometimes involved. [...] English acquisition of wiener ['wijnər] involved no such change, since the language already had a morpheme represented by the shape [wijn] and several morphemes represented by suffixed l-ər]. Our acquisition of allegro [ə'legrow], on the other hand, entailed a shape change of the type just described.

Other kinds of phylogenetic change are not directly implied by a single new importation, but they may come about as the result of a whole wave of loanwords from some single source, along the following lines:

1. Grammatical change

ME acquired a large number of Norman-French adjectives containing the derivational suffix which is now -able /-ible: agreeable, excusable, variable, and others. At first, each of these whole words must have functioned in English as a single morpheme. But English has also borrowed some of the verbs which in French underlay the adjectives, and in due time there came to be a large enough number of pairs of borrowed words for the recurrent termination to take on the function of a derivational affix in English. This is shown by the subsequent use of the suffix with native English stems: bearable, eatable, drinkable (the stems tracing back to OE /beran/, /etan/, /drinkan/). [....]

...It is to be noted that the derivational affix was not borrowed as such: it occurred as an integral part of various whole words, and only the latter were actually borrowed. Apparently we can generalize on this point: loanwords are almost always free forms (words or phrases); bound forms are borrowed as such only with extreme rarity. [....]

2. Alternation change

Our learned vocabulary, borrowed directly or indirectly from Latin and Greek, includes a good number of words like datum: data, phenomenon: phenomena, matrix: matrices. What has happened here is that we have borrowed both the singular and the plural forms of the word. [...] Since English already had the inflectional category of number, these importations do not imply any grammatical change, only additional patterns of alternation. In such cases there is usually competition between the imported and native patterns. Most of us tend to use data as a singular "mass-noun", like milk, saying this data is rather than these data are. Doublet plurals in competi­tion are even commoner: matrixes ['mejtriksəz] and matrices ['mejtrə`sijz], automata and automatons, gladioluses and gladioli. One cannot safely predict which alternative in such a case will in the end win out; currently, in English, the imported plural has a more learned connotation than the native one. […]

3. Phonemic and phonetic change

The first few members of a community to use a word from another language, or from a highly divergent dialect of their own, may imitate the pronunciation of the model accurately. Any isolated borrowing which spreads into general usage, however, is unlikely to retain its foreign pronunciation if that in any way goes against the pronunciation habits of the borrowers. […] Some of us pronounce initial [ts] in tsetse fly, tsar;most, however, begin the words with [z]. Even French words like rouge, garage, mirage, probably end more commonly in English with [j] than with [z].

However, it would seem that a great flood of loanwords from some single source, involving many bilinguals as the channel for the borrowings and with a major prestige factor, can have some striking consequences in articulatory habits. The stock example, once again, is the influence of Norman French on English: it was through this influence that English acquired initial [v z j],and, consequently, the phonemic contrast between [v] and [f], [z] and [s]. [...]

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