Re: Gothic prestige and borrowing

Piotr wrote:
<"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.>

Please understand that I'm not accepting a basic assumption here. I don't
believe that prestige is a particularly strong motive for borrowing. (It may
be for learning or adopting a new language, but not for borrowing.)

The reason I believe that is because I believe that communication is
substantially more important to a language than social status. Prestige
isn't worth a fig if it ruins your ability to communicate, and it is just a
growth plan for a language. It's dysfunctional.

I'll say it again. Language's prime function is communication. If you
borrow a whole bunch of foreign words and nobody understands you, those words
should have no promise of being adopted by other speakers of your language.

Borrowed words that ARE functional, and do aid communication, don't hurt a
language but actually help it. They allow you to import concepts or even
simpler references without much bother.

You wrote:
<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.>

But that means prestige is an after-effect. The reason English is a global
lingua franca is because it is functional in international communication.
That is what a lingua franca does. That's why it's on almost every page of a
Polish dictionary. If some other language suddenly got "prestigious" and
didn't allow effective communication at science, technology, popular culture,
trade, etc., it would not stay a lingua franca for long.

So I don't believe that English was importing from French and Latin after
1300 because of prestige. I think it's main reason for importing because the
language needed new words and configurations of words to account for a
changing world. I don't believe Chaucer or Shakespeare (especially not
Shakespeare) were trying to impress anyone with their knowledge of French or
Latin. I believe they were looking for better ways to say things. To be
more precise in communicating. Borrowing was a way to acheive that goal.

Any language that is highly adverse to borrowing is conversely at a
disadvantage.

Piotr also wrote:
<<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.). >>

I think that calling those languages "substrates" is my problem here.
American English was already there when those languages arrived. And they
certainly reflect later additions to Am English both in time and often
meaning. And I think that again the words often reflect an addition to the
culture (particularly in terms of food, eg, the ubiqutous "tacos," "pizza"
and "pirogis" ) and sometimes in other meanings. (There is a famous old
comedy routine that describes the difference between "kvetching" and plain
old complaining, "chutzpah" and plain old nerviness.) An important threshold
test for borrowing in American English, I would suggest, has been whether it
is considered to add something new in meaning. In American English, "je ne
sais quoi" does not mean the same thing as "I don't know what."

<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.>

If you are going to import new ideas, new goods, new technologies, new
administrative systems, new ideologies, etc, you are either going to borrow
or have to create neologisms in your language. Borrowing is probably faster
and more universal (more "lingua franca".) And it simply makes your language
better at describing the world around you.

The source language doesn't need to be prestigious, but it probably does have
to add something noticeably worthwhile. Perhaps that is what Gothic had to
offer Slavic.

Steve