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December 5, 2008
Friday Loanword: What is a Loanword?
Over the last few months, I've been writing about words that appear to be borrowed into Biblical Hebrew from Akkadian. I haven't posted on nearly all of them, but I have cited most of the uncontroversial ones that fairly clearly didn't come into Hebrew via some third language like Aramaic. In large measure, I've taken my examples and a good deal of my discussion from Mankowski's book on Akkadian loanwords in Biblical Hebrew.
Today I will try to do what I should have done at the beginning of this series, define what I mean by "loanword." Let's start with a couple of examples in English. I will take a few examples from those words generally thought to have come into English from French after 1650. If we think about them, words like "solon," "saloon," "garage," and "grotesque" have a somewhat foreign flavor but we generally treat them as if they were English words even though they all came into English rather recently. But words and phrases like faux pas, nom de plume, and "bayonet" seem distinctly foreign to native English speakers. Linguists tend to call the first group Lehnwörter (loanwords proper) and the second Fremdwörter (foreign words). The exact boundary between Lehnwörter and Fremdwörter is blurry. Some linguists have proposed other, more complex, ways of categorizing loanwords but these two groups are all we really need for our purposes here. What both groups have in common is that they contain words that bypassed significant portions of the history of English with most of their etymological history occurring within some other language, French in the case of my examples.
There are several ways to look at loanwords. As I indicated, one way is to look at them as having their origin in a different, source, language and bypassing some significant part of the history of the borrowing, target, language. Another way is to ask, can we identify a source language and a time that the target language borrowed a given work? If we can it is a loanword. To put it simply, perhaps too simply, a loanword is a word taken from one language and used in another contemporary language, without translation, while maintaining with minimal modification the meaning it had in the source language. Of course, once borrowed, a loanword's meaning may evolve just like any other word in a language.
One of the problems in identifying loanwords from Akkadian into Hebrew is that both linguistic traditions share a very large number of cognates from the stew that scholars call Proto-Semitic. So, one must look for positive markers of borrowing. The most certain marker is an indication of foreign phonetic development, foreign etymology. The vowel pattern of the first word I discussed in this series, אֲסֻפִּים, is a good example of this kind of marker. כִּיּוּן is another example. Here the intervocalic m>w in Neo-Babylonian is a sure sign of borrowing. Sometimes one must look for markers of borrowing within a larger linguistic and even cultural context. זְכֹוכִית, for example, might well be from the Hebrew root זכא. But as we saw, there are two arguments against this. First, there is strong evidence that glass making developed earlier in Mesopotamia than in Palestine and technical terms tend to migrate with their technology. Second, there is rather decisive phonetic evidence that zakakatu was borrowed by Aramaic from the Akkadian. And sometimes the best evidence for a loanword is when the Hebrew text glosses the word with a native Hebrew word. פּוּר is glossed by הַגּוֹרָ֜ל in Esther 3:7. The author or someone in the textual tradition of Esther wanted to be sure that readers understood the Fremdwört.
There is another set of words, some of which are a subset of loanwords, both Lehnwörter and Fremdwörter, that I haven't take-up as yet. These are culture words, Kulturwörter for those who prefer you linguistics in German. The words "ballet" and "microcomputer" are examples of culture words in many modern languages. Culture words are words that are often borrowed from one language but used with about the same meaning in several culturally related but not necessarily cognate languages. Sometimes, particularly when working with ancient examples, their exact etymological origin is unknown or even unknowable. Mankowski, 7-8, gives a somewhat restrictive but useful definition of culture words in the context of ancient languages,
In this study "culture word" is used of those nouns which belong to the semantic categories mentioned above ["concrete, physical, palpable objects" (p. 6)] and which cannot be assigned a more definite linguistic provenance; that is to call a word a culture word is to make a claim that is syntactically and semantically positive and etymologically negative.
Over the next few weeks, I'll post in several culture words found in the Biblical Hebrew that meet Mankowski's definition. But unlike the loanwords I wrote about, not all my examples of culture words will come from Mankowski. In fact, Mankowski does not discuss the one I will begin with next Friday.
While I don't plan to post on them anytime soon, Biblical Hebrew borrowed words from several languages in addition to Akkadian. For example, Egyptian and particularly Aramaic words often appear in Biblical Hebrew as loans.
References
Posted by Duane Smith at December 5, 2008 3:12 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
Now it all makes sense...
Posted by: Aydin at December 6, 2008 5:21 AM
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