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word may be traced (e.g. paper ‹ Fr papier ‹ Lat papyrus ‹ Gr
papyrus has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its
origin).
Sometimes the word borrowing is used in a wider sense,
being extended onto the so-called translation-loans (or calques)
and semantic borrowings. Translation-loans are words and
expressions made from the material available in the language after
the patterns characteristic of the given language, but under the
influence of some foreign words and expressions (e.g. mother
tongue ‹ lingua maternal (Latin); wall newspaper ‹ стенгазета
(Russian); the fair sex ‹ la beau sexe (French), etc.)
Semantic borrowing is the appearance of a new meaning due
to the influence of a related word in another language (e.g. the
word bureau entered the political vocabulary, as in Political
bureau, under the influence of Russian) A special distinction
should be made between true borrowings and words formed from
Latin and Greek (e.g. telephone, phonogram, which were never
part of Latin or Greek and they do not reflect any contacts with
speakers of those languages.
Criteria of borrowings
The criteria of borrowings can be divided into phonetical,
grammatical and lexical.
The phonetical criteria are strange sounds (sound
combination, position of stress), its spelling and the correlation
between sounds and letters (e.g. waltz (G.), psychology (GR),
communiqué (Fr)), the initial position of sounds [v], [z] or the
letters x, j, z is a valid sign that the word is borrowed (e.g. volcano
(It.), vaccine (L.), Jungle (Hindi), zinc (G.), etc.)
The morphological structure of the word and its
grammatical forms also indicate that the word is adopted from
another language (e.g. the suffixes in the words neurosis (Gr.),
violoncello (It.); the irregular plural forms bacteria (bacterium,
L.), papyra (papyrus, Gr.), etc.
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