Compounding and Contact

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Brian D. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Source Language ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Language Patterns ◽  
Western European

The behaviour of compounds in language contact situations is examined here through the consideration of case studies involving the influence of Greek on English, of Western European languages, especially English, on Russian, of Western European languages, especially French, on Greek, and of French on English. It is shown that in the borrowing of compounds and compounding structures, languages seem not to engage in adaptation to native language patterns, and that once a new structure enters a language via borrowing it takes on a life of its own, so to speak, and can assume forms that are quite different from their form in the source language. The question of simplification versus complexification under conditions of language contact is also treated against the backdrop of compounds and contact.

Norns and Norms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Western European ◽  
Foreign Text

We often hear that certain words or texts are “untranslatable.” At the root of this judgment lies an exaggerated respect for the native language, which must not be altered by contact with other languages. Against this superstition, it is here argued that translation is one of the great movers of change in language, and accomplishes this precisely through the rendering of difficult and unidiomatic texts. At another level, a purported ethics of translation urges that translations should be “foreignizing” rather than domesticating: this too evidences a normative idea of the integrity of the language and culture of the foreign text. Against such defences of purity, a sense of both language and translation as inherently hybrid, and literary language in particular as macaronic, should open to examination the historical individuality of encounters that every translation records. Examples from Western European languages indicate how this hybridity is to be understood.

The Interaction of Borrowing and Word Formation

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Source Language ◽  
New Name ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Creation

When a new name is necessary for a concept, word formation and borrowing are possible ways to produce one. As such, they are in competition for the creation of neologisms. However, borrowings can also interact with existing word formation rules. The reanalysis of a borrowing can result in its attribution to an existing word formation rule. The reanalysis of a number of formally similar borrowings can even result in a new word formation rule. Word formation and borrowing both have an inherently diachronic component to them. Historically, Latin was an important source language for borrowing. The effects are found in neoclassical word formation and in many internationalisms. Nowadays, anglicisms have become the most frequent kind of borrowings. Word formation rules may be activated to counter the prevalence of borrowing by creating alternative designations, but they may also be used to integrate borrowings into the lexical and grammatical system of the borrowing language. After an introduction with some theoretical background, twelve case studies present particular situations illustrating different types of interaction of word formation and borrowing in a range of European languages. The concluding chapter describes some general trends that emerge from these case studies.

scholarly journals Etumos Apistos, “Truly Doubtful”: Confounding Etyma in Scientific Nomenclature

10.29007/lkss ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Calvo
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Common Reference ◽  
European Languages ◽  
European Science ◽  
Western European ◽  
Early 18Th Century ◽  
Technical Terms

From the early 16th century, Western European science systematically resorted to Latin and Greek, the two fundamental languages of its culture, to construct their terminology. The various Renaissance anatomical atlantes, the early 18th century zoological and botanical taxonomies, the neo-Hellenisms of the late Ancient Régime chemists … scientific nomenclature at large, systematically relied upon the premise of a shared cultural soil, regardless of nation of origin, mother tongue or field of knowledge. The neologism, the neo-Greek and/or neo-Latin construct shall, thus, be a common reference to all Western European languages and, consequently, the eventual linguistic mediator would not have to worry about transmission values except for lesser (spelling, phonetic, morphological, syntactical) adaptations and for fine, even subtle adjustments of the technical or the semi-technical terms. And yet, that confidence does not always turn out to be trustworthy and there are too many instances in which the source language etymon and the target language etymon do not match and the linguistic mediator, the translator or interpreter, is forced to rethink the inferred ‘univocal’ nature and the referential invariability of the terminology that is to be transferred.

Modern Greek V V dvandva compounds: A linguistic innovation in the history of the Indo-European languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Compound Formation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Asian Languages

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.

scholarly journals Two case studies on structural variation in multilingual settings

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 750
Author(s):  
Ariana Bancu
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Structural Properties ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Structural Variation ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
The Other ◽  
Trajectories Of Change ◽  
Induced Variation ◽  
Shed Light

In this article, I report on two analyses of variation in Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered Germanic language in contact with German and Romanian, used in settings predictive of structural influences among languages. My goals are to document the structural properties of the target variables and to evaluate if processes of language contact have an effect on synchronic variation in TrSax. I identified two areas of TrSax that display variation at the morphosyntactic level, and in each case one of the variants has a corresponding structure in German, while the other variant has a corresponding structure in Romanian. To tease apart contact-induced variation from internally motivated variation, I compare data from multilingual speakers with different linguistic profiles and assess the effect of sociolinguistic factors on variation through mixed effects analyses. Variation that patterns similarly across these two groups can provide a clearer account of the structure of TrSax, while differences between the groups can shed light on trajectories of change in TrSax. Furthermore, results of this study have implications for borrowing hierarchies in language contact.

scholarly journals Studentification in the postsocialist context: The case of Cracow and the Tri-City (Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot)

Geografie ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Murzyn-Kupisz ◽  
Magdalena Szmytkowska
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Geographic Scope ◽  
Western European

For over a decade, the term studentification has been used to denote the process of urban changes linked with the presence of student populations in urban centres. This text broadens the geographic scope of research into studentification using two Polish metropolitan areas as case studies, analysing and comparing research results to existing findings referring to Western European and Anglo-Saxon settings. Using the example of Cracow and the Tri-City (Trójmiasto), two significant centres of higher education in Poland, the paper presents empirical evidence indicating that while some aspects of students’ impact on Polish cities are similar to trends observed in Western Europe and non-European Anglo-Saxon countries, the colonisation of Polish cities by students nonetheless displays some unique features strongly influenced by the post-socialist context in which such cities and their student populations function.

scholarly journals THE EQUIVALENCE IN TRANSLATION OF PUJA TRI SANDHYA FROM INDONESIAN TO ENGLISH

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Anak Agung Inten Mayuni
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Dynamic Equivalence ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
The World ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
The Government

Puja Tri Sandhya is Hindus prayer known in all countries. The original prayer came in Sanskrit language, but every Hindus believer already translate the prayer into their native language. In 1950, Balinese Hindus used Puja Tri Sandhya to get the recognition from the government allowing Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI)—the major reform movement and Hindus organization in Indonesia—to translate Puja Tri Sandhya into Indonesian. This translation aimed to make every Hindus believer in Indonesia knows about the meaning of the mantras. Besides Indonesian, Puja Tri Sandhya is also translated into the universal language that 20 percent of the world spoke, English. English is believed to give the best medium to other people who want to learn more about Hindus or simply just curious. As a reminder, in this paper Indonesian will be the source language (SL) and English will be the result of the translation so we shall call it target language (TL). In translation, equivalency will be the point to show if the translation is well translated or not. In their book The Theory and Practice of Translation (1959), Nida and Taber state two kinds of equivalency that the translator can use as their reference they are: formal and dynamic equivalence. Here, Puja Tri Sandhya in Indonesian and English versions will be analyzed using 2 kinds of equivalences by Nida and Taber.

scholarly journals Studying Contact without Detailed Studies of the Languages Involved: A Non-Philological Approach to Language Contact

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Mark Donohue
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Data Types ◽  
Database Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Language Data ◽  
The Right ◽  
Detailed Work

<p>Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can allow us to examine large enough samples of languages that we can start to better understand, through calibration against known histories and other non-linguistic data types, likelihoods of different ‘social contact’ scenarios resulting in different kinds of linguistic traces, and also allow for the more targeted investigation of specific areas and language-to-language interactions. I shall describe the method, and illustrate its application in a number of case studies in regions for which we have good samples of language data.</p>

scholarly journals A Needs Assessment for Indigenous African Language-Based Programming Languages

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Ezekiel K. Olatunji ◽  
John B. Oladosu ◽  
Odetunji A. Odejobi ◽  
Stephen O. Olabiyisi
Keyword(s):  
Needs Assessment ◽  
Programming Languages ◽  
Programming Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
African Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
To Come ◽  
High Degree

AbstractThe development of an African native language-based programming language, using Yoruba as a case study, is envisioned. Programming languages based on the lexicons of indigenous African languages are rare to come by unlike those based on Asian and / or European languages. Availability of programming languages based on lexicons of African indigenous language would facilitate comprehension of problem-solving processes using computer by indigenous learners and teachers as confirmed by research results. In order to further assess the relevance, usefulness and needfulness of such a programming language, a preliminary needs assessment survey was carried out. The needs assessment was carried out through design of a structured questionnaire which was administered to 130 stakeholders in computer profession and computer education; including some staffers and learners of some primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions in Oyo and Osun states of Nigeria, Africa. The responses to the questionnaire were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The analysis of the responses to the questionnaire shows that 89% of the respondents to the questionnaire expressed excitement and willingness to program or learn programming in their mother tongue-based programming language, if such a programming language is developed. This result shows the high degree of relevance, usefulness and needfulness of a native language-based programming language as well as the worthwhileness of embarking on development of such a programming language.

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