Grammar
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:
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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Grammar
Both a borrower and a lender be
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.
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- Polyglots Or Polygloats?
Not so long ago I wrote an article What do you understand by fluency in which I criticise the pseudo-polyglots, as I like to refer to them. There were two people in particular I had in mind when I penned this short piece; however, I didn’t reveal their...
- So You Think Polish Is Hard?
The truth must finally come out. I’ve heard enough of this utter rubbish about how difficult Polish is. If you’ve tried to learn Polish and failed to achieve decent levels of communication and understanding this means you're either not trying...
- Second Language Acquisition
Children who are exposed to two different languages at once are indeed able to acquire both of them simultaneously but certainly the majority of people have only one native language they learnt in this process of "sponging". Furthermore, the foreign...
- Why English?
I was asked on Twitter the other day how come I decided to study English. The question struck me as practically impossible to answer as I can hardly remember how/why I started. That doesn’t mean I’ve been learning English for a very long time, quite...
- Mastering Negativity
Learners of English face a formidable task. Certain areas of the language seem to have very few rules that you can learn. Instead you have to memorise all of the various different exceptions. One of these areas is forming the negatives (opposites) of...