[Corpora-List] foreign words in German

[maxwell]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:38:52 +0200, Harald Hammarström <harald at bombo.se>
wrote:
> 2011/9/28 maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>
> 
>> On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:10:55 -0400, chris brew <cbrew at acm.org> wrote:
>> > This is all ridiculously hard. There are not many words in any
>> > language which are solidly native.
>>
>> I can think of one language--Waorani (Auca), of Ecuador--which had
>> nothing
>> *but* native words until the mid-1960s.  That's right, not one
>> identifiable
>> loan word.  Unfortunately, most of us aren't doing annotation in Wao...
>>
> 
> Could you justify this claim? according to Peeke (1973:4)  there were
two
> "obvious" loan words in pre-contact Waorani, implying that there were
two
> of them and possibly more, less obvious, loan words. In addition,
> documentation of the eastern neighbour Tequiraka is so scant that if
there 
> are Tequiraka borrowings in the non-basic vocabulary of Waorani, there's

> no way to know.

Well, obviously there could be cognates and/or loanwords in *any* language
from some unattested language.  What I meant was that there were no *known*
loanwords, particularly from languages spoken nearby.  But see below:

> *  p 4 "Isolation was so complete that only two obvious loanwords were
> found upon initial entrance into the area in 1958"
> 
> Peeke, Catherine. (1973) Preliminary Grammar of Auca (Summer Institute
of
> Linguistics: Publications in Linguistics 39). The Summer Institute of
> Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.

Looks like I was (mis-)remembering a statement in the para preceding the
one you quoted, to whit:
   No cognates are apparent in extensive published wordlists.
At any rate, I stand corrected--there were apparently (at least) two
loanwords.  Catherine would have picked up later on any more loan words
from Zaparo or lowland Quichua, I think, since she had previously studied
those languages.  Unfortunately, I don't think she's contactable any more,
to find out what those two loanwords were.  I'll ask around and see if I
can find out.

   Mike Maxwell

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