Borrowing verbs [was: Basque <ibili>]

[Ante Aikio]

[I wrote:]
>>  Saami has a huge amount of
>>  verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are
>>  quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to
>>  the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new
>>  borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically
>>  nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to
>>  it quite regularly.

[Larry Trask:]
> Very interesting, and I thank you for the information.

> I presume, though, that the inflectional pattern of Saami is such that a
> foreign verb-stem can be readily absorbed and inflected.  In many other
> cases, the two languages involved have such different verbal morphologies
> that there is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed
> verb-stem.  Arabic loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no
> earthly way that an internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled
> within the purely suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires
> verb-stems to contain vowels.

The case of Arabic > Turkish is rather extreme, since Arabic roots are
non-continuous. But even great differences in phonotactic structure
(e.g. between Norwegian and Saami) do not hinder borrowing, if the roots
in both languages have a relatively consistent form throughout the
paradigm (i.e., they are not e.g. infixed, as in the case of Arabic).

Saami has complex morphophonemic alterations in its verb paradigms, but
even this is not a hindrance to borrowing verbs. Bisyllabic verb stems
borrowed from Finnish are usually nativized into Saami inflectional class
one, which has both qualitative and quantitative alterations affecting
first and second syllable vowels and medial consonants / consonant
clusters. On the other hand, Scandianvian loan verbs are often (but not
always) nativized into inflectional class three, which has no alterations.

You originally mentioned cases where verbs are borrowed as non-finite
forms and used with native auxiliaries. This kind of borrowing is not
even theoretically possible for Saami, since Saami has only one genuine
auxiliary (the negative verb) and one semi-auxiliary (leat 'to be, have,
exist etc.') whose syntactic use is limited in such a way that it cannot
be used to build constructions with borrowed non-finite verbal elements.

A perhaps interesting case of verb borrowing is found in Finnish, which
has lots of Proto-Scandinavian / Swedish loan verbs. Since borrowing
non-finite forms is not possible for Finnish either, Finnish has generally
nativized the verbs by adding a "verbalizing" suffix -a-/-ä- to the
stem: e.g. Swedish måla 'to paint' > Finnish maala-a-. The suffix goes
back to the PU factititve / causative dx *-ta- / *-tä-, but from a
synchronical point of view Finnish -a-/-ä- is hardly more than a kind of
verb marker.

 Regards,

 Ante Aikio