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January 12, 2009
Loanwords and "Borrowability"
Over the last few months I've been running a Friday series on loanwords that has morphed into series on ancient near eastern cultural words. Saturday Mark Liberman wrote a post for Language Log on Uri Tadmor and Martin Haspelmath's presentation of their ongoing work on "borrowability." This work is abnormally interesting. You can review the presentation slides for yourself. Yesterday, Uri Tadmor, as a guest blogger on Language Log, addressed several of the comments to Liberman's original post.
One finding of the study, which deals only with modern languages, is that "lexical meanings are more often borrowed than grammatical meanings." This seems right but I want to go back through the Akkadian loanwords in Biblical Hebrew and see if it holds for those borrowings. I do wish the study included Arabic but I don't see that it does.
Few of the actual borrowed meanings that Uri Tadmor and Haspelmath and their collaborators are studying reflect directly on the issues I've been dealing with; in antiquity there weren't televisions from which to borrow the meaning "television." But the principles may very well apply. The list of least borrowed meanings may actually have greater and more universal application than the list of the most borrowed meanings. Check them out and see what you think. Also, check out the project website. And there is a presentation from May 2008 that gives more detail about the study itself but Tadmor asks that we disregard the results outlined in this presentation because they are "dated." The researchers hope to have a database of 1464 meanings from forty languages online in the near future.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 12, 2009 2:57 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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