Borrowed verbs (Was: Basque <ibili>)

[Jim Rader]

> At 09:46 AM 2/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote:
>> 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.

>[Stanley Friesen:]
> Umm, what will get borrowed into Turkish is one of the "expanded" variants
> *with* its vowels, which will then be treated as a Turkish verb stem, and
> inflected according to the Turkish rules.

But this isn't what happens in Turkic, at least in Anatolian Turkish,
and I believe pretty much the same situation pertains in other,
particularly western Turkic languages, if to a lesser degree.  What
Anatolian Turkish does is combine a borrowed Perso-Arabic noun with
the verb <ed->, "do, make," which in these collocations is a
semantically empty auxiliary.  Hence, from <hareket> "motion,"
<hareket etmek> "to move"; <seyahat> "journey,"  <seyahat etmek> "to
travel," etc.  The same is done with nouns of European origin, e.g.,
<telefon etmek> "to phone, call on the telephone."  Turkish is almost
the paradigm of a language that does not borrow verbs.

On the other hand, I don't think I'd want to go as far as Larry Trask
in claiming that languages don't borrow verbs directly.  A
surprising number of Celtic and Germanic loans into French can only
be regarded as directly borrowed verbs, e.g., <briser> on the Celtic
side and <garder> and <garnir> on the Germanic side.  I once made a
list of other examples, but it's doubtless long lost....

Jim Rader