Re: Borrowing Words

At 06:56 AM 9/26/03 -0500, you wrote:
>How does one borrow words from another language when that word doesn't fit
>the phonology or has illegal consonant clusters in the target language?
Here are two real-life examples from Kiswahili.  (I learned these somewhere
along the line in school.)

Swahili allows only open syllables.

It borrowed the word for "book" from Arabic "kitab."  The Swahili is
"kitabu."  (I am told that the choice of vowel inserted depends upon the
previous consonant.)

The Swahili word for "traffic roundabout" is borrowed from English.  It is
"kipilefiti" from "keep left."  (British traffic, of course.)

An interesting thing with both of these words is that their plurals are
"vitabu" and "vipilefititi."  This is because, in native Swahili words, the
prefix "ki-" is a noun class marker, and the corresponding noun class (the
plurals of "ki-" nouns) is marked with a "vi-" prefix.  So speakers
interpreted the /ki/ at the beginning of both of those words as a noun
class marker and formed the plurals accordingly.

Isidora

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