Zompist Bboard Again

I need help determining what kinds of words might be borrowed and even replace native vocabulary in Vrkhazhian.

The loaner language is question is Hussite, spoken by the Hussite peoples. They are long-standing enemies of the Vrkhazhians (been so for ~500 to ~1000 years) and frequently at war with them. That said, peace treaties are sometimes made and there is a fair amount of trade conducted during those times of peace. It is also the case that sometimes a territory is conquered by one party, the inhabitants forced to learn the language, and then reconquered by the original holders after some time.

So, given this rather complicated relationship, I'm not sure what kinds of words might be borrowed. At the moment I have:
Vrkhazhian < Hussite
uśśu-im "arm" < uššu "hand"
amb-um "comb" < amb
ilg-um "fish" < ilig
biğikk-um "hair" < biṟik
miği-um "mouth (of a river)" < miṟī "mouth (anatomy), entrance"
ağann-im "scorpion" < aṟan
saśt-um "tree" < sašta "tree"
But I'm not sure if they would even borrow words like hand/arm, because I'm not sure if they're close enough in contact to replace native vocabulary like that.

At some point in history, France was considered an enemy of Germany. Yet, at that point German had many loanwords from French, mostly relating to culture. I am not sure if this helps, but this was the first thing that came to mind.

Indonesia has been occupied by Japan in the second World War and they have almost no loanwords from Japanese. The Wikipedia list is just really misleading, IMHO.

Hostility is a bit of a red herring. English borrowed massively from French, despite England frequently being at war with France. Spanish borrowed massively from Arabic. Hindi borrowed massively from Persian and English. Hebrew was greatly influenced by Aramaic.

The question I'd have is: who's inventing things? If the Vrkhazhians are creating new technologies, or discovering new things, their words for them are likely to spread. Who's got the good literature and religions? Are Vrkhazhian institutions understood and possibly imitated? With all that war, military terms are likely to be borrowed.

From your list, arm / fish / hair / tree seem very unmotivated as borrowings. English didn't borrow these despite actually being ruled by French speakers for centuries, and English loves borrowing. The others make sense if Vrkhazhian needed the term first (e.g. they invented the comb, or the need to label river deltas).

If you want really large-scale and intimate borrowing, you probably want long-term occupation, or else long-term fringe status (like Japan vis-à-vis China).

I had also come across this:
https://wordsinwartime.wordpress.com/20 ... #more-1693

I am not sure, if then, that hostility is truly a red-herring

Ahzoh wrote: ↑Sat May 08, 2021 5:07 pm I had also come across this:
https://wordsinwartime.wordpress.com/20 ... #more-1693

I am not sure, if then, that hostility is truly a red-herring

Sure, during a modern war people can avoid "enemy" terms. On the other hand, war can motivate borrowings. Your article includes an example, "strafe." WW2 gave us Nazi, blitzkrieg, Panzer, U-boat, Anschluss, Reich, Ubermensch, Führer, Heil, Kristallnacht, Lebenraum, Gestapo.

You could also check the world loan word database for likelihood of borrowing, here.

That's interesting, but do you know if there is a way to get the words to sort by whether they're loans? Coloring by language family isnt helpful, and the map doesnt update at all when I change the list. The site would be much more useful that way.

If you refer to meanings, you can go to meanings > all meanings and then sort by borrowed score.
If you mean a specific word, you can go to the table at the bottom of any page that has it and then filter by borrowed status.
Pages with this table include pages of specific language vocabularies or specific meanings. Pages of specific languages also show a list of borrowed words.
I don't know if the maps work well for anyone.

Okay thank you. It's a free resource, and in fact a free resource authored by the same people who have also given us other free resources, so I hate even bringing it up. But yes, I understand I can filter the list, but I wish the map would update when I did so, and I also wish I could sort the words on the lookup page by their score on the borrowedness chart because it would be interesting to find which terms are least commonly borrowed and then look up which languages needed to borrow a term for them. (though I know sometimes it's not necessarily a "need" .... Japanese for example has a loanword for both the sun and the ocean, terms I doubt were ever unfamiliar to them.)

Still, it's interesting to see a language in west Africa with a native word for snow. Im guessing semantic shift is involved here, since there is absolutely no way they could have ever seen snow in their native homeland. Unless Im being too generous here and the dataset might just have some errors.

I had a problem with the tables not updating when I tried to use a filter. The solution was switching from my phone to my laptop. Might have been a browser problem after all. I did not get the maps to work properly for me though.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 8:15 amStill, it's interesting to see a language in west Africa with a native word for snow.

Which language?

at least two .... Hausa and Kinuri .... though as much as I hate to say it Im pretty sure the database has errors now, since I did some more searching around and found that they classify Dutch pijnboom "pine tree" as a native word, when it's clearly a loanword from the same source as English pine, which they classify as a loan.

I'm sure this is already in a hundred academic papers, but based solely on perusing WOLD:

Words low on the borrowometer include pronouns, demonstratives, and prepositions, of course. Also some adjectives relating to smell/taste and physical dimension. Common verbs of motion, handling, bodily function, and position are in this category as well, along with a handful of verbs of speech or perception. Few nouns show up at this end of the scale, but they mostly relate to body parts, especially facial features, and kinship. There are also some environmental words (fire, rain, stone), time words (winter, midday), plants parts, and indoor insects.

Words high on the borrowometer obviously include modern inventions (telephone, plastic) and plants/animals that have spread through modern trade (coffee, kangaroo). Lots of pre-modern terms show up here, but I can't be sure if they are the result of Westernization or other modern trends (e.g. church and mosque show up here, but is it because of missionaries operating in places that previously had no word for these things?). This probably includes terms like shop, shirt. and oven. The one stand-out is dishes. Plate and bowl are relatively high on the list, despite being common objects among sedentary peoples around the world. I'm not sure why that is, but it stood out to me.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 7:49 am at least two .... Hausa and Kinuri .... though as much as I hate to say it Im pretty sure the database has errors now, since I did some more searching around and found that they classify Dutch pijnboom "pine tree" as a native word, when it's clearly a loanword from the same source as English pine, which they classify as a loan.

The database is based solely on the personal judgements of language-specific experts IIRRC. Usually there is some way to report errors though in clld databases.