No _essential_ disagreement here, but I
think you overestimate the importance of "effective communication". I agree that
the explanation of directional borrowing in terms of "prestige" is often
circular. So, alas, is explanation in terms of communicative needs. Did Chaucer
and other Middle English writers use French words to improve communication with
fellow Englishmen? There's little reason to think so. Innumerable French loans
replaced perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon synonyms (kingly --> royal,
stow --> place, rightwis --> just, eme --> uncle, hewen -->
family, steven --> voice, yeke --> cuckoo, bergh/barrow --> mountain,
arn --> eagle, ayenbite --> remorse, inwit --> conscience, kith -->
acquaintance, wight --> creature, lea --> lion, full --> very,
... -- one could adduce examples almost ad infinitum), and even if the
existence of French/native doublets or multiplets (like
<help/aid/assist>) eventually resulted in functional (semantic or
stylistic) specialisation, which might be seen as conducive to more precise
communication, it was an after-effect, not intended by the original
borrowers.
Although borrowings often patch lexical
gaps in the receptor language, they are just about equally often redundant (in
Polish, for example, the native compound <je,zykoznawstwo> and the loan
<lingwistyka> are 100% synonymous; either could be used to name a
university department, and both _are_ so used). If you were completely right
about the role of prestige (cultural or political dominance) as isignificant in
comparison with communicative needs, core vocabulary (body parts, kinship terms,
etc.) and grammatical structures would not be replaceable, and minority
languages would not be evaporating at the present rate.
The Yiddish-speaking Jews living in the
Slavic-speaking part of Central Europe borrowed numerous Slavic words -- not
culture-specific terms for characteristically Slavic institutions, foodstuffs or
whatever, but everyday vocabulary including even words for body parts ('navel',
'mouth') or living things ('duck', 'raven', 'stork') presumably well-known
to the Jews before their first contact with the Slavs. This case is especially
interesting in view of the fact that the very last thing the traditional Jewish
communities wished to do was "assimilate". They certainly did not regard the
Slavic adstrates as culturally superior, and Yiddish was sufficiently effective
for all their communicative needs. However, Yiddish was not the language of the
state and while many of the Jews found it necessary to learn Polish or Russian,
very few of the goyim ever learnt any Yidish. Accordingly, the
inevitable diffusion of loans was mostly from Slavic into Yiddish rather than
the other way round.
I suspect what really matters is the
relative proportion of bilinguals (X/Y-speakers) in the speech communities in
contact (the native speakers of X and Y) -- not necessarily a function of
relative prestige, but at least correlated with it.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 9:49 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Gothic prestige and borrowing
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 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.