🚀 go-pugleaf

This was previously posted to talk.philosophy.misc, sci.philosophy.tech, 
and bit.listserv.words-l.  I didn't know about this group.  Sorry if
you are reading this twice. 
 
I have had a very difficult time finding anything in historical
linguistics esp pertaining to semantics.  

I have to write a paper for an undergraduate course in Hist Ling and I
want to focus on something in historical semantics.  I have narrowed
things down more from the preliminary advice I got---tracked down some
articles and read them and was very impressed with an article by
Charles Li, "Contact-induced semantic change and innovation", which I
found in _Historical Semantics: Historical Word-Formation_ edited by
Jacek Fisiak.  

This semester counts as my first foray into strict linguistics.  For
almost two years now, a number of professors (4-5 depending on the
semester) and a small number of students (4-6 usually; currently 4)
have been looking at various topics in philosophy of language/mind.
We have examined work by Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, John
Searle, Fred Dretske, Hilary Putnam, Keith Donnellan, Gareth Evans,
etc.  Additionally, I have had Ling 100, which was an introductory
course, as well as the dreaded phonology course, and currently am
doing Historical Linguistics (intro, Ling 145 at CSUF).  

So, the thing I wish to do for my historical linguistics paper is to
focus on this type of thing Li describes in his article.  

Briefly: 

Three languages in Central Asia are discussed:  Hui, Baonan, and
Wutun.  The speakers of these languages have been in close contact
with one another, as well as with some other language communities, for
centuries.  The particular thing which piqued my curiosity about these
languages was (I quote here from the article): 

     (3)  Through contact with Hui, the Baonan word /neguder/ [the
     	  'e's should be schwas, but I can't do that in emacs]
     	  'one day' became polysemous (i.e., underwent a semantic
     	  change) and acquired a new meaning 'one thousand'.  
     	  Subsequently a re-analysis of the word /neguder/ [schwas 
     	  again; btw, accent on last /e/] 'one thousand' from
     	  /nege/ + /uder/ [all schwas, accent on last syl for each]
     	  into /negu-der/ results in the birth of a new morpheme
     	  /-der/ [schwa] 'thousand'.   (p. 328) 

The situation was that the Baonan did not have a morpheme for
'thousand'.  The Hui had a word for 'thousand' which was homophonous
with their word for 'day'.  Therefore what the Baonan speakers did is
to make their OWN word for 'day' carry the weight of 'thousand' in
addition; i.e., as Li mentions, it became polysemous.  

I view this as a situation where what was "borrowed" was not a word
(or morpheme), but more like a procedure---a way of treating a word
they already had to make it analogous to what the Hui had (in the
view of the Baonan speakers).  

What I would like to do then, is to find out about other times when
stuff like this has happened, and perhaps write about 'borrowing
strategies' in which morphemes are not directly appropriated, but some
other feature of the donor language has an effect on the semantics of
the borrowing language.  

Any references to such situations would be greatly appreciated. I'm
not picky about the languages involved because a) I'm more interested
in the processes than the languages, and b) beggars can't be
choosers---there probably aren't many articles out there about stuff
like this. 

Thanks for any help you can provide.  And, if you are interested in
any kind of continuing dialogue, so long as you understand that I'm
linguistically unsophisticated, having spent more time on theories of
meaning and truth in philosophy of language studies, then I would be
happy to add you to the growing list of my correspondents. 

Rick Horowitz     CSUF, Philosophy     rhorowit@mondrian.csufresno.edu 
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   The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly", meaning
   "many", and the word "ticks", meaning "blood sucking parasites".