Re: [tied] Gothic prestige and borrowing

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12939
Date: 2002-03-29

Dear Steve,
 
"Prestige" is a vague notion and perhaps not satisfactory by itself as an explanation for the directionality of borrowing, note however, that your English example does not falsify the traditional view. English borrowed most freely from French and Latin when they were regarded as languages of learning and high literature. In recent times, American English has borrowed "wildly" not from adstrate languages but mostly from the numerous immigrant substrates of America (Spanish, German, Italian, Yiddish, etc.). English is in contact simultaneously with a vast number of other languages, hence the cumulative effect of "massive" borrowing. But take any _single_ language, say, Polish. Despite the fact that some 9 million Americans claim Polish ancestry, the number of Polish loans in English is insignificant. By contrast, there are loans from English on almost every page of any dictionary of Polish -- especially in fields like science, technology and popular culture. The fact that English is a global lingua franca is surely an important part of its prestige.
 
Consider the following pairs:
 
Polish : German (during the Middle Ages)
Hungarian : German (in the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
English : Welsh (in Britain)
Lithuanian : Russian (in Soviet times)
Latin : Albanian (in late Antiquity)
 
The prevailing direction of borrowing is easy to predict in each case.
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: x99lynx@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 4:06 PM
Subject: [tied] Gothic prestige and borrowing

Just as a sidebar, I have to mention something about the "low-prestige language" explanation for these loans, which I understand to be the traditional one.

This all goes completely against my experience as an English-speaker and whatever I know about the history of that language, particularly with regard to law, technology and popular culture.

English has for a long time inhaled new elements from other languages without blinking an eye.  Whether it had prestige or not at any particular point, English has shown that it will pick up and use practically anything that looks half-way useful.  And American English certainly hasn't borrowed as wildly as it has because of low prestige.

Whatever a language's value as a marker of status or ethnic identity, it would still be pretty useless without its primary value as a tool of communication and information transmittal.  That was the power of early Greek and English in my mind, the ability to adapt to a changing world and input new information.

From that perspective, it simply looks like there was something wrong with Gothic and that Slavic was coming on strong.  (And with hindsight that Gothic would end up a dead language and Slavic would spread like it did.)

And, of course, Ulfila's Goths are not described as being in a particularly prestigious position by Jordanes (I think he calls them poor cow herders) or within the roman concept of civitas.  Again I wonder if we are not catching the Gothic lexicon when it is attested in some kind of restoration phase, when it is grasping to maintain its identity in a formal exposition like the New Testament.  Perhaps Ulfila was trying to demonstrate that the language was unique and distinctively foreign to the powers in Constantinople and Rome by minimizing the use of loans, in order to justify using the vernacular. Perhaps he was making it consciously archaic in order to give the authority of time and tradition to the new religion.  Gothic just could not have been that immune to the world around it and still remain functional.  (Or perhaps that was its demise.)