[An-lang] about loan words

Tue Jul 7 11:00:18 UTC 2015

A footnote on final glottal stops in Malay, prompted by Waruno's message:

Waruno is right to say that it's complicated!  Inferences concerning the 
donor dialect for Malay borrowings into Tagalog are further complicated 
by (at least) the following four factors:

(1) Final glottals tend to be under-reported by researchers.

(2) Final glottals are considerably more widespread than in Brunei Malay 
and Banjarese.  For example, in Jakarta Indonesian, they are present for 
most lexical items with historical final vowel, as well as, for some 
speakers, in recent borrowings such as "Messi" and "Ronaldo".  In many 
other varieties, they occur with specific lexical items, e.g. in many 
Sumatran varieties of Malay and Indonesian with words such as "minta" 
(request) and "buka" (open).

(3) In many varieties, the presence of final glottals is conditioned by 
phrasal phonological factors.  For example, when counting to 3 in 
Jakarta Indonesian, one often hears [satu dua tigaʔ], the presence of 
the glottal marking phrase-final as opposed to phrase-medial position.

(4) It is not at all clear that the current distribution of final 
glottals in today's dialects can be used as a reliable indicator for 
their distribution several centuries ago.

David

On 07/07/2015 18:59, Waruno Mahdi wrote:
> Dear Piers,
>
> Sorry to be so slow to respond.
> With regard to borrowings into Tagalog from Malay, and also from
> Sanskrit and Arabic (presumably also Tamil and Persian), the
> situation may be much more complicated than first meets the eye.
>
> Borrowing from Malay continued over a period of one millennium or
> more (since around the 8th century), during which time various
> Malay dialects acted as donor. The most conspicuous effect is the
> postglottalisation of originally final vowels (typically -a).
> This is a feature of Banjarese and Brunei Malay and suggests that
> at least some of the borrowings exhibiting such postglottalisation
> took place during Brunei paramountcy over parts of the Philippines.
>
> With regard to borrowings from Sanskrit (also Tamil, Arabic, Persian),
> the greater majority was borrowed via Malay, i.e. these are actually
> borrowings from Malay as well. Here again, some will have post-
> glottalised final vowels, others not, depending on the final donor
> dialect. This too is a simplification, because within Malay too,
> there was significant inter-dialectal borrowing.
>
> This is apparent amongst others from a postglottalised final vowel in
> a non-postglottalising dialect. Thus, in Standard Malay _datuk_
> "chief",
> final -k of the spelling denotes glottal stop. The Old Malay form of
> the word is _datu_ "ruler". The second component in _barat-daya_
> "southwest" and the word _Dayak_ 'hinterland inhabitant of Kalimantan"
> are cognate, deriving from the same Proto-Austronesian *daya "interior,
> upriver".
>
> Borrowings from Chinese apparently were not mediated by Malay, but I am
> not informed about whether they were all borrowed from the same Chinese
> dialect. I rather doubt that. Furthermore, during a significant period
> there was an Archipelagian dialect of Chinese, spoken in Chinese
> trader settlements in presentday Indonesia. Their word for "clove", was
> even borrowed into standard Indonesian Malay as _cengkéh_, replacing
> the
> older original Malay word (_lawang_. which presently means "mace, skin
> of the nutmeg kernl"). It seems likely that some Chinese borrowings in
> Tagalog too originated from the Archipelagian Chinese.
>
> Will try to look up bibliographic references and let you know later.
>
> Aloha,
> Waruno
>
>
> On 2015-07-07 04:49, Piers Kelly wrote:
>> Thanks all for your responses.
>>
>> I have managed to consult Panganibans _Diksyunaryo_ of 1972 which
>> includes the following statement:
>>
>> "This Diksyunaryu-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles has 27,069 main word
>> entries
>> accompanied by almost 217,500 lexical items distributed among [...]
>> 12,000 loan words (Sp., Eng., Ch., Ind.-European languages);"
>>
>> However, in his Introduction to Leo James Englishs_ English–Tagalog
>> dictionary_ (1965), he is more specific and writes, "The present
>> Tagalog-based Pilipino is estimated as having around 30,000
>> root-words
>> and around 700 affixes. Of the root-words, the recognizable loans at
>> this time are, in round numbers, 5,000 from Spanish, 3,200 from
>> Malayo-Indonesian, 1,500 from Chinese, 1,500 from English, 300 from
>> Sanskrit, 250 from Arabaic and a few hundred altogether from Mexican,
>> persian, Japanese, Russian and other languages." n.d.
>>
>> The other suggested sources that I have been able to consult tend to
>> describe loans without quantifying them, although some (eg, Gloria
>> Chan-Yap) break down loans by semantic domain. Ill see how I go with
>> Manuel sources too.
>>
>> Thanks again!
>>
>> Piers
>>
>> ......<SNIP>
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-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550333
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

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