Borrowing of verbs vs. nouns? [from LINGUIST list]

[Dave Robertson]

Hi, Liland,

Good observations there.  From my studies of Hindi I recognize the feel of exactly that construction you notice in FH, and moreover we should keep in mind that Hindi/Urdu (the latter literally means "military camp [language]") is a contact language with enormous influence from Persian and some from Turkish.  Perhaps it's more a koine than a creole, but the similarity of situation warrants notice.  The structure for denominalizing all those English nouns (to turn them into verbs) was already in place due to a habit and pattern of borrowing from other foreign languages.

The feel I've got of very highly inflected languages, Slovenian or Hungarian or Salish for instance, is that they have relatively little problem borrowing any category of foreign word.  They simply make very clear the term's grammatical status by adding relevant affixes.

Your Japanese case is interesting in that regard, since it appears as though Japanese "felt" Chinese words to be incapable of meshing with Japanese inflections.

-- Dave

"Liland Brajant Ros'" <lilandbr at hotmail.com> wrote:

>A propos of you query, Dave:
>
>Many languages have a class of verbs consisting of a noun followed by the
>verb "to do". Thus in Japanese "to study" is "benkyou suru" where "benkyou"
>is "study (n)" and "suru" is "to do"; and in Fiji Hindi "shut up" is "cup
>karo" where "cup" is "silence" and "karo" is "do (imp.)" (from "karna" "to
>do").
>
>Note that in Japanese verbs of the type described, the noun portion is
>usually a Chinese-origin etymon, not native Japanese. Occasionally English
>nouns are used, too. This is very common in Fiji Hindi ("stap karna" for "to
>stop", referring to a bus, e.g.).
>
>In both Japanese and Fiji Hindi these are very large and unfossilized
>classes of verbs.
>
>Liland
>
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