Contact Linguistics. Chap

Exercise: The examples above show that English loanwords have been adapted in various ways to Japanese phonology. Describe informally the kinds of change that are involved in this process of adaptation.

Not all cases of borrowing from English into Japanese are as straightforward as these. In many cases, forms from English have been subjected to a variety of other processes, including “truncated compounding” (wa-pro < word processor); innovative compounding (goo sutoppu “traffic light” < go + stop); blending or hybridization (dai-sutoraiku < Japanese “big” + strike), and so on. Many loans have also undergone semantic restriction, extension or shift. For instance, ranchi (< lunch) is used to refer to “restaurant cooking”, while handoru (< handle) refers only to the driving wheel of a car or the handlebar of a bicycle and namba (< number) refers only to the “licensed number plate of a car.” (Loveday 1996; Ishiwata 1986). On the whole, English items “borrowed” into Japanese have been thoroughly “japanized” and integrated into the phonology and morphology of the language.

3. Contact in settings involving “unequal” bilingualism.

So far we have been concerned with cases of relatively limited contact in which quite distinct speech communities borrow lexical items from each other. In cases where speakers of different languages come together within the same general community and bilingualism develops, lexical and other forms of borrowing may be even more common. Some of these situations correspond to what Loveday (1996:20) refers to as settings of “bounded” or “subordinate” bilingualism, where there is more or less restricted contact between a dominant group and a linguistic minority.

This kind of contact may be the result of sociohistorical forces such as immigration, invasion or military conquest, the realignment of national boundaries or the establishment of intergroup contact for purposes of trade, marriage and so on. According to Lewis (1978), some of the factors associated with settings of this type include the following:

3. 
   geographical isolation (e.g. Gaelic speakers in the Scottish Highlands);
   
4. 
   urban segregation (e.g., Hispanics in the United States);
   
5. 
   the persistence of ethnic minority enclaves (e.g., Basques in Southern France)
   
6. 
   a tradition of limited cultural contact (e.g., the Pennsylvania Dutch in the US).
   

The languages of immigrant groups and ethnic minorities absorbed into a larger host community are particularly susceptible to lexical borrowing from the dominant language. Eventually, such minority groups tend to become bilingual, or to shift entirely to the host language. The greater intensity of contact during the phase of bilingualism and shift, as well as the asymmetry in power and prestige of the languages involved, promote borrowing, primarily into the subordinate language. A classic example of such a situation is the contact between Norwegian immigrants and English speakers in the US, as described by Haugen (1953).

Of course, borrowing in the opposite direction, from subordinate to dominant language, also occurs, though not usually to the same degree. American English in particular is replete with borrowings from the languages of immigrant groups who have settled in the United States over the last couple of centuries. Examples of the former type include loanwords such as kosher from Yiddish, taco and margarita from Spanish, sauerkraut from German, sushi from Japanese, and so on.
There are also numerous cases of unequal contact brought about by invasion, colonization and the like. The contact between the European languages that serve official functions and indigenous languages in African, Asia, South America, etc., provides examples of this kind of setting. Two of the most interesting cases, however, involve earlier English and Japanese, both of which were once subject to massive influence from more prestigious external languages – French and Chinese respectively.


3.1. French influence on the lexicon of Middle English.

The history of English offers two excellent examples of contact through invasion - the major incursions into the Danelaw by Norse Vikings and Danes in the 9th and 10th centuries, and the invasion by the Norman French in the 11th century. The resulting contacts had a major influence on the vocabulary and indeed the general character of English. We will consider the Norse Influence on Old English in the next chapter. For the present, let us examine the influence of Norman French on Middle English.

The impact of French on ME was so great that scholars like Bailey & Maroldt (1977) have suggested that ME was in fact a creole or mixed language. However, Thomason & Kaufman (1988:306f) argue that the degree and type of mixture was not similar to that found in creoles, but rather represented a case of category 3 borrowing on their scale.
After French-speaking Normans conquered England between 1066 and 1070 AD, French became established as the language of the court and nobility, the church officials and clergy, and the feudal lords who owned the best agricultural land. For much of the period until the 13th century, English lost its status as a literary and official language, being relegated to the status of a less prestigious vernacular. But it remained the native language of the majority of the population, and within three generations after the conquest, all classes except for the very highest levels of the nobility used English as their mother tongue. French (and Latin) were restricted to the nobility and intellectuals, among whom they enjoyed great prestige. Hence French influence on English was not due to wide-spread bilingualism. The sociolinguistic situation in England in the 11th to 12th centuries was more like one of diglossia, in which the High language was fast losing ground to the Low language (Dalton-Puffer 1996:6-8).
It is interesting to note that borrowing from French into ME was relatively moderate during the period 1066 - 1250 while French was spoken as the first and primary language of the Norman elite and clergy. French speakers made up a small minority of the population, though of course their ratios were higher in some urban centers in the south. During the 13th century, the Normans increasingly shifted to English, and French words began to flow into their newly adopted language. It would appear that, in this early ME period, speakers who were bilingual in French and English (a majority of whom were Norman) were primarily responsible for the introduction of French lexicon into English, whose native speakers imitated their use. The character of the early loans probably reflects this scenario. They tend to be simplex words borrowed from Old Northern French, e.g., carpenter, canon, kennel, etc (the initial /k/ is a clue to their source - Dalton-Puffer 1996:9). Moreover, the number of loans was not huge.
The situation in the later ME period from 1300 on was rather different. When the Norman lords severed their ties with Normandy and opted for allegiance to England, they increasingly abandoned French in favor of English. This process of shift set the stage for the massive influx of French loans into English over the next century or two. The period 1350 - 1450 witnessed the greatest influx, so great that it had repercussions on English morphology, as we shall see. A major cause of the borrowing was the fact that English started regaining various functions it had not had for some two centuries. During this transition, French was still used for official purposes (along with Latin), and also remained the medium of instruction at universities until the mid-15th century. While it is impossible to determine the relative impact of spoken as opposed to written language contact in promoting borrowing, it seems likely that the latter was more influential during this period. This is supported by the nature of the loans, more complex, learned words like acquaintance, adversity, temptation and the like, many with sources in Old Central French.
A great deal of native English vocabulary was also replaced by French borrowings, but the proportion only reached about 7% in the basic vocabulary. The preservation of native lexicon is one reason why English is still classified as a Germanic language, despite the fact that some 65 to 75% of its present vocabulary is of non-Germanic origin. Borrowings from French included many words that are now commonly used, such as atom, engine, finance, machine and nation. Many of these were motivated by need, since the concepts they expressed were new to English culture. Other borrowings seem to have been motivated more by prestige, since English already had native equivalents. Among such loans are dining terms like beef, pork and veal, as well as terms related to areas of administration and the law, e.g., arms, court, justice, legal, royal, etc.
French writing continued to exert influence on Early Modern English, acting as a conduit for the importation of many Latin-derived words in the mid 15th to mid 16th centuries. Extensive borrowing of this sort through the medium of writing has parallels in other situations as well, for instance the introduction of thousands of Chinese borrowings into Japanese during the Middle Ages.


3.2. Chinese influence on the Japanese lexicon.

The influence of French on Middle English is far surpassed by the massive influence of Chinese on Japanese between the 7^th and 12^th centuries AD. During this period, Chinese became the main source of the technological and cultural innovations that promoted this earlier phase of Japanese modernization. There had been limited and distant contact between the two languages over the 4^th to 6^th centuries. This introduced a number of loans in areas such as silk and rice cultivation, metalwork, weaving, etc. Borrowings such as uma “horse”, shio “salt” and ine “rice” date from this period (Loveday 1996:30).

But contact was greatly increased after AD 594 when Japan adopted Chinese Buddhism and launched a program of sinicization. The contact setting involved into a case of diglossia with restricted bilingualism within Japan in the 8^th century. Chinese functioned as a High language, acquired via exclusive schooling and employed in domains of administration, law, literature, religion, science and technology and the like. The most significant impetus to this development was the wholesale adoption of the Chinese writing system by the Japanese, who had none of their own. As Loveday (1996:31) notes, this meant that Japan was forced to adopt the Chinese language along with its writing system. As a result, there was a proliferation of borrowings from Chinese, at first primarily in “higher” spheres. The parallel with French influence on Middle English is strong. In time, Chinese loanwords filtered down from those higher domains into the “lower” spheres of spoken and written Japanese. The result of this long process of influence was that Chinese contributed no less than 48% of the lexicon of modern Japanese. These borrowings include 1^st person pronouns such as boku “I” (for males) and the imperial “I”, chin, reserved for the emperor. Such “intimate” borrowings testify further to the strength of the Chinese influence.


4. Lexical borrowing in equal bilingual situations.

In the cases of bilingual contact examined so far, the power and prestige differences between the (speakers of the) languages involved played an important role in promoting lexical borrowing from the High to the Low language. We would expect, then, that in cases of more or less equal bilingualism, this effect would be mitigated, and borrowing would be both more limited and more bi-directional. To some extent, this turns out to be true. For instance, Treffers-Daller (2000) reports on the low rate of lexical borrowing in two situations – Flemish-French contact in Brussels, and French-Alsatian contact in Strasbourg (Gardner-Chloros 1991). Based on a count of all tokens, she finds that in both cases the proportion of French borrowings into the other language is only around 2 to 2.5%, while borrowings in the other direction make up only about 0.29% of all words in her corpus. The differences reflect the higher status of French in both situations, but the low rate of borrowing indicates a high degree of language loyalty to the minority language. Interesting questions arise here as to why borrowing is so extensive in cases of “distant” contact or in diglossic situations, while it is so limited in cases of “equal” bilingualism. To understand this, we need to examine the social motivations for lexical borrowing.

5. Social motivations for lexical borrowing.

The motivations for and extent of lexical borrowing depend on a range of social factors that vary from one contact situation to another. Two factors that have been frequently mentioned are “need” and “prestige.” Most of the borrowing associated with “distant” contact seems to be motivated by "the need to designate new things, persons, places and concepts" (Weinreich 1953:56). This is especially true in cases where a community is exposed to new areas of cultural knowledge and experience through contact with others.

For instance, all speech communities have experienced the need to modernize and keep abreast of developments in science, technology, etc. This is what motivated much of the borrowing from Chinese into Japanese in the Middle Ages, and from French, Latin and Greek into English in the early Modern English period. Similarly, the instrumentalization of modern vernaculars as official and national languages has prompted elaboration of their lexicons to meet the new demands placed on them. Through borrowing, they can fill gaps in the lexicon, or introduce finer distinctions of meaning not available in native words. For example, Indonesian did not clearly differentiate related nouns and adjectives by morphological means, as English does. Hence it created noun-adjective pairs based on English words such as doktor vs doktoral and norma vs normal (Moeliono 1994:383).