Can see no empirical evidence for your statement, with respect to modernity, e.g.

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/arabic-english/%D8%AA%D9%84%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B2

Words and language structures are (were) never fully borrowed, but they are made sound and feel 'original'. Very few speakers of modern Hebrew are aware of the fact that they use 'Latin' words, 'Slavic' endings and even 'German' nominalization.

Who has ever heard of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_Mitzvah ?

Or: Fun with Hebrew:

http://www.getamused.com/jokes/abbottcostellolearnhebrew.html

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But, also:

Preprint ANCIENT SEMITIC LINGUISTICS

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The grammar is what makes a language a language, e.g. natural language processing proves that Hebrew and Arabic are very similar.

I am curious about this subject, as a similar tendency can be observed in Mesoamerican languages, where calques (semantic loans without phonetic relation) are the norm.

Dear Professor Wright-Carr,

Thank you very much for your attention to this subject.

I do not know anything about Mesoamerican languages, apart from the fact that they exist. And I find the parallel that you draw between these otherwise completely different languages extremely interesting. I am very grateful to you for attracting my attention to this phenomenon.

Best wishes,

Igor Boichuk

Ademilade Aboginije

Thank you very much for your opinion.

Very best wishes

Dear Igor:

You are welcome. Most of my work in this area is in Castilian (improperly called "Spanish", being but one of several languages spoken in Spain), but I have one paper in English. Here is the link:

Chapter One culture, two languages: what calques tell us about centr...

Best regards,

David

Dear David,

Thank you very much for the link.

Yes, I know that there are a few Romance languages spoken in Spain. And Basque, which is by no means a Romance language.

I am fluent in French and know Latin which allows me to understand to some extent written Castilian. Of course, it depends on the text. If this is a Wikipedia article, I sometimes understand up to about 70%. But it goes without saying that I couldn't say the same about a novel in Castilian. At school, I was interested in the History of Spain (but this is a little beside the point).

I am very interested in your research.

Best regards,

Igor

First of all, it is not quite true. Semitic languages do borrow words and have always done it ever since, say, Akkadian began to borrow hundreds of words from Sumerian. I remind you only of the Sumerian "E.GAL" - 'great house', which became in Akkadian "ekallu", and was further borrowed by both Aramaic and Hebrew, in which we have "hayklā" and "he(y)khal" (respectively) - 'temple'.

Then we have a long period of the impact of Greek on the Western Semitic languages (but later on, also on Arabic), demonstrated for instance by Aramaic (already in the Pre-Christian period) loan "nāmōsā" - 'law' (vocalisation here is Classical Syriac), but the word can also be found in Palmyrene Aramaic. Of what I recall all the substantives regarding musical instruments in Biblical Hebrew are loans from Greek.

In Arabic lots of technical terms including philosophy are loans from Greek. Not to mention the ecclesiastical Christian terminology in both Syriac and Arabic, e.g. Syriac "episqōpā" and in Arabic "usquf" (with the loss of "epi", due to the transmission via Coptic, not directly from Syriac, from which 95 % of Christian terminology in Arabic comes).

The same can be said about Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) where there are lots of Greek Christian vocabulary. One may only point to the phonetic changes that occur when Semitic languages borrow words from Greek, in which consonant clusters in the beginning of the words are possible, whereas the speakers of the (classical) Semitic languages cannot pronounce them, and therefore have to divide them into two syllabs, either via a schwa between the two initial consonants (so often in Syriac) or by a prosthetic 'aleph /'alif /'ālaph, as in the case of Greek "scheema" (monastic attire of a monk) which gives in Syriac 'eskema' and in Ethiopic 'askema'. In Arabic we have this famous example Gr. 'Plato' becoming 'Iflatunu'.

The only difficulty is rather on the intellectual level, well visible in the history of the modern Hebrew, when the Aqademiyah ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit had to - in a rather sophisticated way - adapt the loans to the three-consonantal ideomorphological ("root") structure of the Semitic languages, in this case - Hebrew. The famous example is the totally artificial loan from English: "brush". What was borrowed by the Aqademiyah was only the "root" B-R-SH. Since the nomina instrumenti have in Semitic languages the prefix ma-, or mi-, or the like, so the mi- was prefixed to this new root, and then since most of the early speakers of the Modern Hebrew were Ashkenazim (including Eliezer Ben-Yehuda himself), that is before their Aliya they spoke (in addition to Yiddish) Slavonic languages (Polish and Russian) in which "brush" is feminine (Polish: "szczotka"), so the Aqademiyah added to this particular loan the feminine ending -et. The result is: 'mivreshet' ("v" being the effect of the spirantisation of "b").

So, yes, some intellectual effort had to be applied when making this sort of loans, but in my opinion it does not justify the opinion that the Semitic languages in general have so few loans. To me it seems that they do not have so few of them.

Dear Dr.Witakowski,

Thank you for your very informative post.

What is not quite true? That there are less borrowed words in Hebrew or Arabic than in English or Turkish? I might be wrong in this matter, of course you know better. But I did not say that Semitic languages "do not borrow words". I only said "are relatively reluctant to borrow". I would only like to draw you attention to the word "relatively" that I used twice.

Yes, I am aware of these strata of borrowings in Semitic languages.

Thank you again for having exhausted this subject.

To finally decide whether there are fewer borrowed words in Semitic languages than, for example, in English or Turkish (as representatives of Germanic and Turkic languages), all these borrowings need to be calculated and their number compared. Perhaps such calculations have been made, but even if so, how accurate are they? Processes of borrowing are ongoing. In addition, the Arabic language has many dialects. The Semitic languages are numerous. Some of them are extinct. Besides, it is obviously correct to compare languages with languages, not languages with language branches. Diachronic and synchronic approaches can be used. And the list could be continued. So this is actually a daunting task.

Dear Igor,

I'm sorry I did not respond earlier (had to finish a paper).

Well, my first sentence in the original comment was probably an effect of my misunderstanding of your question. You may be right when saying that the Semitic languages are "relatively reluctant to borrow". I do not know.

I reacted the way I did since, as I see it, the Semitic languages borrow quite a lot, both in modern epoch (which is natural, given the technical development that draws lots of new words that simply have to be borrowed from English) as well as in the past. Akkadian is full of Sumerian loans, as are the Christian Semitic languages (Syriac, Ge'ez) of Greek. When I learned Hebrew in the 1960s we used to get bulletins of the Hebrew Academy of Language with monthly lists of new words of which some were adapted from Biblical language with new meaning (e.g. ḥašmal) but also based on loans. Modern Syriac (Kthåbånåyå) borrows lots all the time, particularly in diaspora. And I guess the same could be said about modern Arabic languages/dialects (but that's not my cup of tea).

But you may be right that in comparison with Turkish (that I am not competent in) the Semitic languages may be less prone to borrow.

If you venture a project of "comparative study of the proneness to borrow" - I wish you good luck.

Cntd:

One note of caution, though. I do not think that the inclination to borrow is common to entire language families, as it seems from your expression "English or Turkish (as representatives of Germanic and Turkic languages)".

I think such inclination is rather caused (at least in modern times) by cultural factors, such as the strength of the linguistic traditionalists and purists, that has come to surface for instance in German (so they have "Fernsehen" instead of the entire world's "television"). Then, the purist tendencies occurred in Icelandic too, but NOT in other Germanic languages, like Swedish and other Nordic languages.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the purists worked hard (some time ago) to keep Hungarian free from loans, but that is definitely NOT the case with Finnish (which is the member of the same language family as Hungarian). The Finns borrowed freely from Swedish, even though you cannot see it not being prepared, because of the incompatibility of Finnish phonetics with that of Swedish: for instance Finnish does not tolerate consonantal clusters (not only at the beginning of the words, the phenomenon also known to occur in the Semitic languages) but also at the end, e.g. Finnish "panki" from Swedish "bank", and "Stockholm" in Finnish is "Tukuolma".

Dear Professor Witakowski,

I am very happy to hear from you. My question was probably not formulated clearly enough.

Of course, I do not know for sure whether there are fewer borrowed words in SL than in other branches. As I wrote in my previous post, one can only be certain of it after a whole series of the most thorough and meticulous counts. Indeed, that would be too ambitious a task.

I am very grateful to you for your feedback, because your opinion is very authoritative for me and your responses detailed and especially informative.

The only Semitic language with which I am familiar is Hebrew. I have only a smattering of Arabic. And I know all the other SL only in theory. However, I found out that Arabic did not borrow many words before, but they write that now it collects English words by the hundreds, especially IT terms.

As for Turkish, as far as I know, it has more than 10 % of words from French in it. And there are borrowings from other languages as well, although less numerous. As far as the English language is concerned, it is well known that about 55% of the vocabulary is borrowed.

I would be very interesting to venture such a project. Certainly food for thought.

Thank you very much again for sharing your great expertise so generously.

Very best wishes,

Igor Boichuk

Dear Professor Witakowski,

Thank you for your note of caution. I just noticed it.

I am afraid you misunderstood me again. I am very far from the idea that you ascribe to me. Perhaps this is just an awkward expression, nothing more. Really, it would be preposterous of me to assume that "the inclination to borrow is common to entire language families".

Yes, I am perfectly aware of these facts. This is my area of special interest, so I should know this. For example, the late Professor V. P. Berkov speaks in detail about borrowings in modern Germanic languages (including Icelandic, Swedish and even Swedo-Finnish or finlandssvensk ). And I studied borrowings in both Hungarian and Finnish. And also in Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Polish and some other languages.

Regards

Can see no empirical evidence for your statement, with respect to modernity, e.g.

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/arabic-english/%D8%AA%D9%84%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B2

Words and language structures are (were) never fully borrowed, but they are made sound and feel 'original'. Very few speakers of modern Hebrew are aware of the fact that they use 'Latin' words, 'Slavic' endings and even 'German' nominalization.

Who has ever heard of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_Mitzvah ?

Or: Fun with Hebrew:

http://www.getamused.com/jokes/abbottcostellolearnhebrew.html

___________________________________________________________________

But, also:

Preprint ANCIENT SEMITIC LINGUISTICS

____________________________________________

The grammar is what makes a language a language, e.g. natural language processing proves that Hebrew and Arabic are very similar.

Dear Dr. Stephen I. Ternyik ,

Many thanks indeed for such an excellent post. I agree with all you say in it. Yes, I am sure that, for example, the word בלינציס comes from Russian, or, perhaps, Ukrainian. Both כירורג and קרדיולוג, to name but a few, most probably come from the same source. And, you are absolutely right, it is doubtful that all the speakers of modern Hebrew are aware of that.

But I am also especially grateful for the links. It is very funny, for a long I didn't laugh like that (I mean about the lesson).

Best regards.

Dear Igor Boichuk : Spacibo and let us stay creative, in terms of logos and humor.