Borrowing words - Wordsmith.org

Wordsmith.org

I just found the following differentiation, and don't recall ever seeing the first term before. Do all you language experts use it?
Loantranslation: taking over of words from other languages without major changes in spelling, e. g. boss (Dutch), kindergarten (German)
Loanword: taking over of words from other languages by translating them literally, e. g. superman from (Germ.) Uebermensch, power politics from (Germ.) Machtpolitik, ecology from (Germ.) Oekologie

This is from
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/david.beal/terms.html

I've used both terms Jackie, but the other way round. A loan translation (also called a calque) is translating a compound word or an expression bit by bit to make a new one in your language, while a loanword is a word taken over more or less as is.

So for example I believe an older German word for telephone is fernspreche (fern being a translation of tele and spreche of phone), which makes it a loan translation, while orangutan is a loanword from the Indonesian orang hutan (forest person).

Bingley

I agree with Bingley: a loanword is a borrowing, with the ordinary process of importing the word as is.

A calque is the usual linguistics term for the other, where the pieces are translated separately, then recombined, such as gratte-de-ciel and Wolkenkratzer for skyscraper. This is also what I understand by loan translation.

For heaven's sake--I thought those two def.'s were "off"! Thanks, guys!

Thanks for that URL, Jackie, there's a lot there for me to study, and refer back to often.

What is the proper term for the two words spelled "ear", one meaning hearing organ, and the other the collection of kernels on creal grains? Homonym doen't fit closely enough, it seems.

Homonym is the word, Dr. Bill. Homograph requires that they be spelled the same but not that they be pronounced the same. Homophone requires that they be pronounced the same but not that they be spelled the same. Homonym expects that they be spelled and pronounced the same; they need differ only in meaning.

Thanks. Faldage. My dictionary had weasel word "usually" suggesting there might be an exact word.

My dictionary had weasel word

What I tell ya bout that dictionary, Dr. Bill?

What is PIE, please, Sweetie?

I think PIE (Proto Indo-European) had ceased to be spoken long before the 7-day week reached Europe.

Bingley

This is way too Germanic sounding to be anything but. Any idea what the other day names are?

Google led me to this huge 'names' site (Max, it looks like a good one for your references page!) but I couldn't find Finnish days of the week on it -- even though google tells me they're there. Any takers?

http://jerryhill.tripod.com/

Dear Bingley,

obviously, you are a word maven... the seven day work week is 24/7, 22/7 is a coarse pi.

Max, i loved it![/white}

Here's the days from Monday to Friday per this site:

http://www.hut.fi/~tkvopint/topiusage.html

Maanantai      Monday 
Tiistai        Tuesday 
Keskiviikko    Wednesday 
Torstai        Thursday 
Perjantai      Friday

Wednesday looks like it might be a loan translation from the German Mittwoch. Well, part loan translation part loan word. Who knows where they got that Perjan for Friday!

Keski-viikko is indeed Mid-week. The others look like borrowings near the proto-Germanic stage: cf German Montag, Sonntag. The Finnish words were borrowed from some Germanic stage at which the genitive endings were still present: *Monan-dag, *Sunnan-dag. But probably after the original ending (in *dagaz) had been lost.

Finnish has no F, nor initial clusters, so Perjan- could be from Freyja (or rather her counterpart in whatever Germanic language Old Finnish abutted).

The Finnish for king is kuningas if I recall correctly; this retains the *-az of Germanic (= Greek -os, Latin -us, still preserved in Icelandic -ur) so was presumably borrowed before the day names.

Keski-viikko is indeed Mid-week.

Interesting, given that I found, whil(e,st) searching for the Finnish day names, the datum that German Mittwoch was a Christian reaction to Mercury-day being named after a pagan god. But why just Woden's day and not the others?

The only Western Gemanic language that I know that lost the -g at the end of day is English but one would expect Finnish to have gotten their loans from a Northern Germanic language. How is it in Scandanavian languages?

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea Maxima culpa..

but i've already been called to task... reading in flat mode as do.. i mis-read it, and though my dear Mr. Bingley didn't understand..

so i am twice at fault!

i am going back to the sheep thread.. i wanted to do some knitting anyway..

A "calque" is also a form of semantic extension whereby the multiple meanings of a word in one language are assigned to a word with one of those meanings in another.

Thus, kosmos in Greek refers to both a woman's cosmetics and to the universe, distinguished from khaos (the root of both is kosm-, to make or be orderly). In Latin, rather than borrow kosmos from Greek or create a neologism, the meaning "universe" was assigned, by a calque, to mundus (cosmetics).

OOO! Akatsukami is a keeper! rather than borrow kosmos from Greek or create a neologism, the meaningng "universe" was assigned, by a calque, to mundus (cosmetics).

Welcome aboard-- that is just the sort of trivial word knowledge i love to know!

and do you know more greek? (alas, greek is greek to me!)
i sort of know that Galexy is from the greek for milk, making "milky way galexy" redundent..but is not quite the same word a milk.. so what does galexy mean??(in greek, that is!)

welcome, welcome, welcome--

and what is the meaning of akatsukami- it sounds japanese.

The only Western Gemanic language that I know that lost the -g at the end of day is English but one would expect Finnish to have gotten their loans from a Northern Germanic language.

In early Germanic medial -g- was a fricative. It retained this valued in Norse (dagr). In Old English some inflectional forms had front vowels, so it had the value -j- in such words: daeges. This was given the spelling -y in Middle English, so day.

Modern Finnish has no G (except in NG, which is a mutation of NK). There's a softening mutation of consonants between vowels when starting a closed syllable: T becomes D, P becomes V, and K disappears (and double TT PP KK become single). So in older Finnish there would have been a fricative GH that K turned into.

My guess (and only a guess) is that the -tai of the Finnish day names is not a borrowing from a Germanic *-dai, but a development within Finnish from *-tagh borrowed from *-dagh.

I have an idea that Germanic and Finnic directly abutted in what is now Poland, before Slavs spread into the area.

Welcome aBoard, Akatsukami.

Please tell me more � I had thought that mundus simply meant �world�, giving us other words like mundane and the other Romanace languages words like mondiale etc ... but that could be just because I got thrown out of Latin classes for hurling suasages at the teacher)

Oh, do you know if english as any make up/cosmetic type words that have the old latin mundus as a root? i can't think of any.

--Kohl-- a type of eye make up comes to english from Arabic, and is related to the word alcohol.. the eye make up was made by fermenting certain fruits/berries, the juice was then thickened and use as eye lid coloring..

Nicholas, while we have your attention ...

I remember hearing (or reading) somewhere, as I do in my magpie way, that Finnish is unrelated to other European languages, and that it has more in common with Japanese than its neighbouring language groups. Is this correct?

I also remember seeing an American documentary on TV in Zild which portrayed the Finns as a pretty joyless lot, illustrated by their love of the tango, which they seem to dance in droves without any obvious sign of pleasure.

The same documentary stated that male Finns have one of the highest (if not the highest) suicide rates in the world. I suppose that this could be true, given the number of Finns who drive very quickly on very bad roads for a living ...

CK
Finnish is related to Hungarian--not to any other language groups in europe..

it might be related to other language groups else where too, idunno, and i think the similarity was that the Finnish language group and Japenese both use post postitions, not prepostions (or something of that nature)

I'm not a Greek speaker, although I know a few roots and a little grammar.

"Galaxy" is indeed Greek; not surprisingly, the ancient Greeks called the strip of dense stars part of the galactic plane the "Milky Circle". Of course, they did so in Greek: galaxias kuklos. (Greek gala, "milk" is probably non-IE, possibly Old Mediterranean).

Akatsukami is in fact an archaic Japanese word meaning "incarnate deity" (used to refer the tenno (emperor)); in modern parlance, I believe one would say aramikami. How it to be applied to me is an only marginally interesting story involving a na�ve young financial analyst and a guy who wanted to pose as a C programmer.

Frankly, I can't think of any reflexes of mundus in English save "mundane".

and it shows up again in galactose, a milk sugar-- and changed (both as a word and chemical compound,) as lactose (an other milk sugar. Medically, many problems with nursing have galaand galac as part of the word form. but the more common in English is the lac/lacto form--

and for what its worth, my dictionary says it does go back to IE.. *glak

I can't think of any reflexes of mundus in English save "mundane"
Coda
Mondayne?

The lac- root is derived from Latin lac, probably related to Greek gala (the oblique forms of the latter are galakto- or galakso-).

A proto-form *g(a)lak- has been hypothesized; however, most other IE words related to "milk" seem to stem from a root *melg-. This is often interpreted to mean the "milk" word in both Latin and Greek was replaced by *g(a)lak- (there are other cases where both Latin and Greek have reflexes of a non-IE loan word); this explnation, however, is not universally accepted.

this explnation, however, is not universally accepted.

LOL!

not universally accepted.

Are any?