Semantic loan

Abstract: Since the 1980s there has been a debate among New Testament scholars about the meaning of the Greek word “kephalē” (“head”) in the Pauline epistles. Some scholars defend the traditional view that it means “leader”, while others argue that it should be understood to mean “source”. One result of this debate is that it is now clear that both the traditional and the new interpretation of kephalē have very little support in general Greek usage before the New Testament. This article seeks to advance the debate by showing that the phenomenon of “semantic borrowing” can explain why the meaning “source” is effectively limited to one passage in Herodotus,and the meaning “leader” is only found in Greek works written by bilingual Jews. The passage in Herodotus probably reflects a semantic loan from Old Persian *sar while various places in the Septuagint, Philo, Josephus and Paul reflect a semantic loan from Hebrew “ro’sh” (or Aramaic “re’sh”). Because the latter semantic loan (“head” meaning “leader”) is embedded in the Greek Bible (both in the Septuagint and Paul),the authority and prestige of the latter can account for the fact that the new meaning of kephalē, though unknown in previous pagan Greek writings, gradually became widespread in postbiblical Greek as Christianity spread.

Abstract: ---Lexical borrowing deserves serious professional attention because borrowed words can constitute a major part of the lexicon in a language. Chinese loanwords of English origin can be roughly divided into three groups: transliteration, semantic loan and a combination of the two. This paper gives a brief sketch of the three different kinds of loanwords and goes further to point out that semantic loan or loan translation tends to be the eventual form for words borrowed from English, for the reasons that Chinese is monosyllabic, that the Chinese writing system is morphemic, and that it has little to do with its sound system. Direct replication of the pronunciations of English words is not compatible with the coding structure of Chinese, which is why transliterations tend to be replaced by loan translations or semantic loans. To support this hypothesis, this paper presents a data-based analysis of 55 borrowed lexical items as found in 80 articles from a Chinese newspaper and a magazine. The findings show that the token frequency of transliterated loanwords is lower than that of semantic loans. Key words----loanwords, transliteration, semantic loan, loan translation, integration, constraint

Abstract: Chinese loan words of English origin can be roughly divided into three groups: phonemic loan, semantic loan and combination of the above two. This paper gives a brief sketch of the three different kinds of loanwords and goes a step further to point out that semantic loan tends to be the eventual form of adaptation for words borrowed from English, for the reasons that Chinese is monosyllabic, Chinese writing system is morphemic, and has little to do with its sound system, etc. Therefore, direct replication of the pronunciations of English words (phonemic loan or transliteration in this sense) is not compatible with the coding structure of Chinese. It tends to be replaced by loan translation or semantic loans. To support this hypothesis, this paper presents a data-based analysis of 55 borrowed lexical items as found in 80 articles from a Chinese newspaper and a magazine. The findings show that transliterated loanwords are not as well-accepted as semantic loans in Chinese and usually are replaced by the latter.

Abstract: The paper examines the different ways in which English linguistic material is borrowed and adapted by two varieties of Polish, Standard Polish spoken in Poland and American Polish used by the Polish diaspora in the US. The aim of the study is to compare the factors that determine the type and range of loans in both varieties of Polish. The comparison of the ways in which Standard and American Polishes are influenced and shaped by English embraces three main areas: 1) types of loans as products of the borrowing process (such as loanwords, semantic loans, loan translations, syntactic calques, etc.), 2) adaptation of loanwords with reference to phonological, graphic, morphological and semantic adaptation, and 3) semantic fields that are most heavily affected by the borrowing process. The findings of the analysis help to identify the reasons for the discrepancies in the treatment of the English language material in the two varieties of Polish.