Analogy and Borrowing

Now [...] it will be worthwhile to mention briefly certain ways in which analogy operates in conjunction with borrowing.

The most obvious instance is in loan-translations. The operation of analogy in this case cuts across from one language (or dialect) to another, about as follows:

French English

mariage marriage

de of

convenance convenience

mariage de convenance X.

The bilingual, solving the proportion, finds that X is mariage of convenience.

Analogy comes into play, secondly, when a regular fashion for the reshaping of words borrowed from some single donor has become established:

Latin English

actionem action

afflictionem affliction

separationem separation

procrastinationem X.

The first three forms are the accusatives of Latin nouns, [...] which obviously parallel the already existent English words on the right. [...] All of the cross-language patterns participate in determining what X shall be: procrastination.

When a suffix or other bound form common to a number of borrowings from a single source is cut off and becomes productive (§ 48.2), we again have the operation of analogy, but in this case the words have already been assimilated, and the analogy involved does not cut across from one language to another. [...]

1. How does the author understand the process of borrowing?

2. What difference does he see between dialect borrowing and language borrowing?

3. What does a single act of borrowing affect?

4. What is the accepted understanding of the expression 'single borrowing' in historical linguistics?

5. What conditions must in the author's opinion be met for a borrowing to occur?

6. What motives for borrowing does the author distinguish?

7. What does the author mean by the prestige motive? Under what conditions is it operative?

8. What is understood by the need-filling motive?

9. What kinds of loans does the author discern?

10. What is understood by the term "loanword"?

11. What kinds of phylogenetic change come about as a result of a single borrowing and as a result of a whole wave of loanwords from some single source?

12. In what way do loanshifts arise?

13. How are loan-translations created?

14. What kinds of phylogenetic change do loanshifts involve?

15. What kind of borrowing does the author name loanblends?

16. What is meant by pronunciation-borrowing?

17. What does the author say about grammatical borrowing?

18. What modification is the shape of an incoming word subject to during the period of importation?

19. What does the author mean by the "development of a fashion of adaptation"?

20. How does the author characterize the general impact of borrowing on the English language?

21. What is the term "foreign vocabulary" applied to in the text? What is the relation between the terms "loanwords" and "foreign words" in the author's understanding?

22. How does analogy operate in conjunction with borrowing?

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