query

[curt fredric woolhiser]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This type of borrowing is dealt with by Ghil'ad Zuckermann in his
DPhil Thesis "Camouflaged Borrowing: 'Folk-Etymological Nativization'
in the Service of Puristic Language Engineering." He finds that what
he calls 'folk-etymological nativization' is particularly common in
'reinvented' languages like modern Hebrew (an example he cites is
"deme" < English dummy, which makes use of the Hebrew root d.m.h
'seem alike') and revolutionized Turkish, languages with a
phono-logographic script like Chinese and Japanese, and minority
languages like Yiddish and Romany.


Curt Woolhiser

========================================
Curt F. Woolhiser
Dept. of Slavic Languages
and Literatures
Calhoun 415
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78713-7217 USA

Tel. (512) 232-9133, (512) 471-3607
Fax: (512) 471-6710
Email: cfwoolhiser at mail.utexas.edu
Slavic Department Home Page:
http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/slavic/
========================================




>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I know that Chinese is full of this sort of stuff. In Italian also there are
> some examples:
>
>baco for (computer) bug. Baco is typically the silk worm or a worm in an apple
> or a cherry. The millennium bug thus was commonly translated as il
>baco del millennio.
>
>scannare jokingly as a translation of scanning. Scannare is cutting a pig's
> throat for killing it, and by extension a very expressive word for
>killing a person by slicing his throat. Some people also
> say scannare un documento for scanning it, otherwise a more common
>term is scannerizzare.
>
>I agree that there is no common term for this kind of borrowing.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Giorgio Banti
>Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli
>
>Original Message:
>-----------------
>From: Robert R. Ratcliffe ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp
>Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 09:03:50 EST
>To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU
>Subject: query
>
>
>I've recently had my attention draw to a process in borrowing and I
>wonder if there is a name for it:
>
>When a concept is borrowed, rather than borrowing the word, or calquing
>it, a word which sounds similar to the original with related semantics
>is extended, or a compound is made which sounds close to the original
>and is semantically plausible.
>
>For example "index" becomes in Chinese inde (formed from /in/ "pull",
>/de/ "find") [source: student paper, so correct me if I'm wrong.]
>
>This is very common in East Asian languages, I believe. But I've come
>across examples elsewhere. For example in Morocco the Arabic word /silk/
>"thread" is used to translate the Frence "cycle" /sikl/ as an academic
>term, rather than the usual Arabic word for cycle /daura/.
>
>It is sort of the opposite of a calque-- in the sense of borrowing the
>sound without the meaning-- but I don't know what to call it. By the way
>does anyone have other examples?
>____________________________________
>*NEW E-mail address: ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp*
>
>Robert R. Ratcliffe
>Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics
>Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
>Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan
>
>
>
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