Linguistic scientists frequently talk about “loan words”, as well as about languages “borrowing” words from other languages. This is in spite of the fact that there is never any intention that the borrowed items should be returned to the lender.
What these linguistic terms actually refer to, of course, is the process whereby words from the lexicon of one language are adopted into another language: English is full of such items. Some accounts suggest that about 30% of what are now English words originally came from French, about 30% from Latin, and 6% from Ancient Greek. There are comparatively few loans in English from Old Norse – although borrow and lend both qualify – but many are words which are very frequently used in everyday speech: get, take, time, give, knife, egg.
Only a few of the words I’ve used so far in this column have come down to us from Old English – eg: other and never. Many of the others are from Latin via French, including linguistic, intention and normal.
In some societies, linguistic borrowing of this type might encounter opposition of a type which can be described as puristic. Language purism is a kind of linguistic racism which raises objections to words that do not come from indigenous stock.
Icelandic is one contemporary language where purism has played a historically important role, particularly in connection with the movement to achieve independence for Iceland from Denmark, which was finally achieved in 1944. So there are very few loan words in Icelandic as compared to English.
For example, the English word meteorology, the branch of science dealing with atmospheric phenomena and processes, especially with a view to forecasting the weather, is borrowed from Greek meteorologia and corresponds to French météorologie, Welsh meteoroleg, and meteorologi in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. But Icelandic has rejected this possibility and adopted instead the term veðurfræði, a combination of veður “weather” and fræði “study”.
At the other end of the borrowing-versus-purism spectrum, we find Albanian. Some sources claim that more than 90% of Albanian vocabulary is borrowed from other languages, and while this is probably an exaggeration, philologists were actually very slow to recognise that Albanian was a member of the Indo-European language family, so different did the composition of its vocabulary make it seem from other Indo-European languages.
Another confounding factor was that so many Albanian words had been borrowed from Latin that it seemed to linguists that it must be a Romance language. The Latin loans are of considerable antiquity, with subsequent changes obscuring their origin; this includes words such as mik “friend” from Latin amicus, and mbret “king” from Latin imperator.
But Albanian has also borrowed many words from the language of its neighbour Greece, such as lakër “cabbage” from Modern Greek lakhano; qeveris “to govern” from Greek kyverno; krevet “bed” from krevati; and stafidhe “raisin” from staphida.
Albanian has also borrowed a substantial number of words from the neighbouring South Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian and Macedonian, including Albanian nevojë “need” from Slavic nevolja, and Albanian gati “ready” from gotov.
Albania was under Ottoman rule for over 400 years, so there is unsurprisingly also a rather strong Turkish element in the Albanian lexicon, including words such as penxhere “window” from pencere.
XHOGING
Italy is only about 40 nautical miles from Albania, and over the past century the two major influences on the Albanian lexicon have been Italian and English. For example Italian bagno “bathroom” appears in Albanian as banjë, and Italian tavolino “table” is Albanian tavol. English jogging appears in Albanian as xhoging.
