Language contact

7.3.1. Similarities between languages

Regular differences found in large numbers of words can be safely said to originate in the same kind of change in the languages in question (in our present example this change is a reg-ular change from Indo-European */p/ to Germanic /f/) rather than mere coincidence. It is all the more important, since similarities of various kinds can often be found between lan-guages, but similarities are not always the result of genetic relationships. On the contrary, words with similar meaning can have similar phonological forms quite accidentally in any two languages (e.g. Hungarian ki– Italian chi). In this case there in no regular difference and the number of similar words is not likely to be large enough to result from a relationship be-tween the languages. There are other cases, however, when languages apparently share a con-siderable amount of related vocabulary (perhaps even structural features) without being related. In such cases the key to the similarities is LANGUAGE CONTACT.

7.3.2. Bilingualism

Languages do not usually exist in isolation from all other languages but are in contact with the languages surrounding them. This contact is realised through the speakers of the lan-guages, who often feel the necessity to communicate with members of other communities, whose native language is different from their own. This communication is made possible by the bilingualism (or even multilingualism) of a large percentage of the world’s population.

(See Ch. 16 Bilingualism) This means that people often use more than one language. The ability to use two (or more) languages means possessing two (or more) grammars and two (or more) sets of vocabulary. In such cases words, sometimes even grammatical structures may enter one language from another. For example a large percentage of English vocabulary is of French origin (orange, navy, court, etc.) and even the suffix –ableentered the language from French, as a result of intensive language contact. In short, languages in contact influence each other. The intensity of this influence depends on the intensity of the contact.

7.3.3. Lexical borrowing

The process when words from one language begin to be used in another language is called

LEXICAL BORROWING. Such words in the receiving language are called loanwords. For example, szoftveris a loanword in Hungarian from English. Lexical borrowing is an extremely com-mon phenomenon, though certain types of words are borrowed more easily than others. The so-called “content words”, i.e., words with lexical meaning, for example, verbs or nouns, con-stitute an open class in the lexicon of a language, which means that new members (i.e., words) frequently enter the class, while old members may relatively easily disappear. Numerous ex-amples can be found in English, which has borrowed words among others from Latin (school, data), French (letter, veal), Scandinavian (skirt, sky) Italian (soprano, spaghetti), Algonquian

7.3.3. Lexical borrowing

(moose, skunk), Japanese (kimono, samurai) and Hungarian (hussar). These are the words which constitute the majority of lexical borrowing. “Function words”, however, (the closed class of words with grammatical functions rather than lexical meaning) like pronouns or ar-ticles, are less likely to be borrowed: the borrowing of a pronoun indicates closer contact be-tween the languages. An example of the latter is the English pronoun theyborrowed from Scandinavian in Old English times: Old English and Scandinavian were genetically closely related languages and probably mutually intelligible. The necessity to borrow words from other languages may arise from various sources. New objects or new concepts require new words and the solution is often the adoption of a “ready-made” word already existing in an-other language. For example, computer language items in Hungarian have been borrowed from English (e-mail, file, Internet) or sometimes translated (e.g., honlapfrom homepage).

(Such loan translations are called CALQUES.) On other occasions the use of a foreign word (regarded as interesting or original) may be due to stylistic motivations (e.g., when trendyis used in Hungarian instead of divatos); and still another (frequent) situation is when speakers of language A borrow words from language B because language B is spoken by a socially prestigious or dominant community. Numerous examples of the latter can be found in the languages spoken in present-day Russia, which have borrowed words extensively from the Russian language. For example, the word-stock of Erza Mordvin (a Finno-Ugric language) includes loanwords of Russian origin such as, utka‘duck’ and volna‘wave’.

When a foreign word enters a language, it will usually undergo certain changes: if the phoneme inventories of the two languages are not exactly the same (which is typical), the bor-rowed word will have to be pronounced in accordance with the phonology of the receiving language – unless its use remains rather restricted. Thus “foreign” phonemes are substituted by similar “native” phonemes. For example, the English “th” sound is replaced by szin Hun-garian (e.g. in the name Thatcher). At the same time, the loanword may acquire new morpho-logical forms, i.e., it will be inflected according to the morphomorpho-logical rules of the receiving language. For example, the above-mentioned szoftver has received the forms szoftvert, szoftverrel, szoftvereim, etc. in Hungarian.

Moreover, even the original meaning of the loanword may change in the receiving language, as in English the word chinareceived the new meaning ‘porcelain’ (cf. chinaware: ‘ware from China’).

7.3.4. Structural borrowing

However, not only the borrowed word may undergo changes in the receiving language but heavy borrowing from another language may also have effects on the structure of the receiv-ing language. Relatively close contact and a high degree of bilreceiv-ingualism in the receivreceiv-ing com-munity may sometimes result in the adoption of a new phoneme (together with a significant number of words containing it) or at least a change in the distribution of an already existing phoneme. For example, the present-day dzsphoneme in Hungarian is the result of 16^th cen-tury Turkish influence. In Old English vwas simply a variant of f, but the introduction of

numerous French loanwords established it as a separate phoneme. New derivational suffixes (e.g., -ableas mentioned above) may also be borrowed: if a considerable number of loanwords contain the same suffix, the use of the suffix may be extended to other words as well. It may also happen that loanwords keep their original inflections (e.g., plural forms, cf. English thesis– theses, of Greek origin), introducing in this way new inflectional affixes, which is cer-tainly an alteration of the morphological system of the receiving language. The above-de-scribed processes are instances of STRUCTURAL BORROWING, which may even extend to the adoption of syntactic characteristics. It must be stressed, however, that structural borrowing requires much closer and more intensive contact than lexical borrowing.

7.3.5. Convergence

Another case when languages in contact influence each other is the situation where several languages in a geographical area develop a series of structural similarities without any strik-ingly heavy lexical borrowing between them. This development is called CONVERGENCEand the geographical area is called a convergence area (or Sprachbund). An example of a conver-gence area is the Balkan Peninsula, with languages like Bulgarian (Slavic), Rumanian (Ro-mance), Albanian, and Greek. These languages happen to be Indo-European ones but representing different subgroups within the family and they show certain similarities which otherwise do not characterise their respective families. One such similarity (among many others) is the definite article following (rather than preceding) the noun in several Balkan lan-guages, including Rumanian and Bulgarian, a phenomenon unknown in other (non-Balkan) Romance or Slavic languages. Though the phonological forms of these articles are different in the various Balkan languages, the structural similarity is obvious. The large number of structural similarities among these languages point to the existence of wide-spread multi-lingualism and extensive interethnic communication in the area. In such a situation, the con-vergent development of originally rather different languages ultimately facilitates the communication between the language communities: The speakers of one language will easily learn the languages of the others, since they may often use the same structures from language to language, simply substituting the vocabulary of one language for that of another.

7.3.6. The sources of historical linguistics

It should be clear that contact with other languages can result in lexical and even structural changes in a language regardless whether the languages in contact are genetically related or not. This means, on the one hand, that genetically non-related languages may show remark-able similarities if they are or wereat an earlier point in their history in contact situation and, on the other hand, that genetically related languages may stay or, in time, get into contact with each other after their separation and, through various degrees of borrowing, may develop further similarities in structure and/or vocabulary. What is more, structural similarities may manifest themselves in totally unrelated and geographically distant languages simply because the choices of a language with regard to a structural item are often very few. For example, the

7.3.6. The sources of historical linguistics

ordering of subject, verb and object will offer a very limited choice in comparison with the large number of the world’s languages, which means that many languages will have the same order quite independent of each other. (Typologists have classified languages from various viewpoints and found surprisingly few types.) As a result, a language historian must be rather cautious when trying to reconstruct the history of a language. The task may be supported by written documents in the earlier language forms, the comparison of related languages or dialects, the study of borrowed elements and the examination of present-day alternations in a language as well as a more general knowledge of what is likely and what is notlikely to hap-pen in a language. In the next section we will see some of the approaches in the history of diachronic research which have had important contributions to the exploration of language history.

7.4. Approaches to language change