🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct31.192855.3023@nic.csu.net>, rick@csufres.CSUFresno.EDU (Winky Magoo) writes:
> 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.  

Small wonder.  We historical types have been able to do a lot with
morphology and phonology, damned little with syntax, and essentially
nothing of substance with semantics.  But then, the *synchronic* work 
on semantics isn't exactly awe-inspiring either.  Anyway, see below 
for one of the few relative successes in the field.

[stuff omitted]

> 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.  

Many of the older German loan translations fall in this category.
For instance, German _abhaengen_ is a literal translation of Latin
_dependere_, which literally means 'hang from' but which came to
mean 'depend'.  While we simply borrowed the Latin word, German has
for over a millennium preferred to translate.  Compound verbs form
the largest class of such things, but there are some nouns as well,
notably _Gift_, which used to mean what you'd think it does but,
since it was used to translate Late Latin _dosis_ < Greek _do'sis_
'giving; dose', now means 'poison'.  Any history of the German lan-
guage will add many more such examples.

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

The true etymology is even stranger, since it comes from Gk. _po'lis_
'city' and is hence related to _polite_.  How inappropriate!

--Leo Connolly