I have written an article on word formation processes in the past and the topic has been always close to my heart. I recently tried to do a little research on borrowings and particularly English borrowings in the Polish language. Although I haven’t yet finished, here’s a few points I made so far.
Borrowings assimilate in new languages on phonological, graphic, morphological and semantic levels. The first question that came to mind was: Why is it that borrowings are mainly nouns, verbs to a lesser extent and relatively few adjectives, prepositions and other parts of speech? Is it because there are more nouns than other parts of speech in total? Or is it because we only borrow words we can't do without - the ones that are therefore essential and often arbitrary? We didn’t have, for instance, a word anywhere close to
joystick in Polish so we borrowed the term from English. As I am wondering about it on Twitter, @talkclouds suggests:
The book I'm reading on vocabulary learning also says that nouns are easier to remember, too. Plus we import STUFF more. We don't import actions and ideas as much.
Manfred Gorlach asserts in
A Dictionary of European Anglicisms: A Usage Dictionary of Anglicisms in Sixteen European Languages that modern borrowings from English aren’t assimilated into European languages on the morphological level. That certainly isn't true, not in Polish anyway. Practically all the nouns in Polish borrowed from English are assigned the grammatical gender and are declinated AND take Polish marker of plurality so... what on Earth do I get confused here? Take the aforementioned
joystick. We have in Polish plural form from masculine
joystick -
joysticki and appropriate declinated forms:
joysticka, joystickowi, joystickiem, joysticku. Gorlach’s book is available on Amazon for £33. Money well spent… I think not!
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