CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute
From: | John Cowan <jcowan@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, September 4, 2002, 14:45 |
There seems to be some evidence that for speakers of a language, there is
some other specific language that all foreign words are assumed to be in.
For English, it's French.
A lot more on this at http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/6/6-555.html#1
ObConlang: how do people's conlangs handle foreign words? Lojban has an
elaborate mechanism for borrowing (the Lojban idiom is "taking" -- they
aren't returned) foreign words and applying native prefixes that both make
them fit Lojban's morphology and give a clue to Lojban-speakers who don't
recognize the foreign word what it might be about. Thus cidjrspageti
is spaghetti, but the prefix "cidj-" reflects Lojban *cidja* 'food'.
Gua\spi does something similar, as in this nice example (: is glottal stop):
^:i \dlau -fn -borneo /juo \xr -bror -fn -:ma-ka-gani
Mahogany trees live on the island of Borneo
(more literally:
The island Borneo is the habitat of typical mahogany trees)
The funky punctuation symbols are tone marks, and -fn means that a
foreign word follows.
Kartyr Djim comments:
# An educated human knows what a Borneo is, but a naive listener,
# particularly [a] mechanical [one], needs the assistance of *dlau* 'island'.
--
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