Borrowed verbs (Was: Basque <ibili>)
Jim Rader
jrader at m-w.com
Wed Mar 1 13:51:51 UTC 2000
> 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
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