[Lingtyp] Borrowability of prepositions

[Jesse P. Gates]

Hi Sergey,

I'm not sure if you are limiting yourself to prepositions or including all
adpositions (like postpositions). Here is an example of a postposition
being borrowed in Stau (Sino-Tibetan). This is from my PhD dissertation
(Gates, Jesse P. 2021. *A grammar of Mazur Stau. *EHESS dissertation), page
235:

The postposition *pærmæ* ‘middle, while’ is borrowed from the Tibetan
བར་མ་barma (also borrowed into Geshiza, Honkasalo 2019: p. 339) examples of
which can be seen in (207) and (208). The postposition *pærmæ* ‘middle,
while’ can be used in a temporal sense in some limited contexts, as in
(207), in which the context is the middle day between two days.


 (207) tɕhəɡɛ thi                        pærmæ ætɕhə pi   tə-mdʑu=stɛ
   zɑmɑ nɡə mə-ŋe-ɡə                     ŋə-rə
           then   DEM.DIST.PREN middle   what   like PFV-hungry=also food
 eat  NEG.IPFV-okay-IPFV COP-SENS

Then in the middle (day) you still cannot eat no matter how hungry you are.


   1.

   (208) thiɣne pærmæ ɡɛ spənchɛr=ɣə vɮɛ=khæ ndjæ-ɡə ɟi-rə
   2.

            3DU middle LNK frog=ERG tongue=INSTR lick-IPFVEXIST.ANIM-SENS

   The frog licks with his tongue in the middle of the two.


On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 10:59 PM Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> My Neo-Babylonian corpus (an Akkadian variety of 8-7 centuries BC) has a
> preposition *la *‘to(wards)’, obviously borrowed from the contemporary
> Aramaic. Since Neo-Babylonian was an administrative language of the time,
> while Aramaic had no official standing, the borrowing of a preposition
> might look weird. What do we know about the ways prepositions are borrowed,
> and in particular about linguistic situations that favour this kind of
> borrowing? (Note that this was the time of Akkadian-Aramaic bilingualism in
> Mesopotamia)
>
>  Thank you very much,
>
> Sergey
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