Linguistic Borrowings

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, in today's world of information, it is very common for borrowed words, such as Japanese "sushi" or American-English "supermarket", to be adopted as a part of the lexicon of several languages. Every language, the author explains, borrows words because of either the lack of lexical items in the recipient language or the desire for prestige of the dominant donor language. The paper describes and analyzes the Thai language for linguistic features such as not only lexical borrowed items but also certain sound patterns, morphemes, syntactic structures, semantic meanings and orthography.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Lexical Borrowing in Thai
Table: Some Characteristics of Thai Lexicon
Phonological Borrowing
Figure: Two-Way Models of Phonological Borrowing
Morphological Borrowing
Syntactic Borrowing
Semantic Borrowing
Orthographic Borrowing
Figure: Thai Consonant Symbols
Figure: Thai Vowel Symbols
Figure: Thai Tone Marks
Figure: Thai Special Diacritics
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"As I have introduced earlier, when words are borrowed, the pronunciation also changes. It is remodeled to the conventions of the borrowing language; this process is called by Campbell "adaptation", a foreign sound in borrowed words which does not exist in the receiving language will be replaced by the nearest phonetic equivalent to it in the borrowing language. In the case of Thai language, we can obviously see that a lot of foreign loanwords in Thai have gone through the adaptation process. And there are several results come out of the process."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Campbell, Lyle. 1998. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Cetina, Claudia M.C. and Ballester M Teresa G. 2008. A semantic overview of Anglo- Indian borrowing: linguistic areas and contact effects. [online] http://mural.uv.es/mgaba/Anglo-Indian%20borrowing.pdf. (accessed 20/08/08)
• Clyne, Michael. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Crystal, David. 1991. Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• "------- ------" . 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

More papers on Linguistic Borrowings:

• Term Paper # 141898 : "Borrowing and Loanwords Found in English and Chinese"
• Article Review # 101245 : "Theories of Speech"
• Term Paper # 146748 : "Societies in the Classical Period"

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