Semantic loan

Semantic loan

A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the lending language. Calques, loanwords and semantic loans are often grouped roughly under the phrase "borrowing". Semantic loans often occur when two languages are in close contact.

Examples

One example is the German semantic loan "realisieren". The English verb "to realise" has more than one meaning: it means both "to make something happen/come true" and "to become aware of something". The German verb "realisieren" originally only meant the former: to make something real. However, German later borrowed the other meaning of "to realise" from English, and today, according to DudenDuden - das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 2000] , also means "to become aware of something" (this meaning is still considered by many to be an Anglicism). The word "realisieren" itself already existed before the borrowing took place; the only thing borrowed was this second meaning. (Compare this with a calque, such as "antibody", from the German "Antikörper", where the word "antibody" did not exist in English before it was borrowed.)

A similar example is the German semantic loan "überziehen", which meant only to draw something across, before it took on the additional borrowed meaning of its literal English translation "overdraw" in the financial sense.

Semantic loans may be adopted by many different languages: Hebrew "kokháv", Arabic نجم ("naǧm"), Russian "zvezdá", Polish "gwiazda", Finnish "tähti" and Vietnamese "sao" all originally meant "star" in the astronomical sense, and then went on to adopt the sememe "star", as in a famous pop or film artist, from English. [http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~gz208/english.pdf]

ee also

*Semantics
*Semantic change
*Polysemy

ources

*"Some of this article was translated from its equivalent German wikipedia article of June 2007."

References


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