From: G&P
Message: 65793
Date: 2010-02-05
>The World Loanword Database … allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, …
My goodness! How does it cope with English? And how does it decide when a word is naturalised? For example, is “wine” given as a Latin loan word in English? The concept of loan word versus native word is a very German way of thinking. There, books of loan words, with the native word equivalent, are available in bookshops. In English the status of words as loans is so unclear that such a way of thinking doesn’t reflect the way the language works. For example, how many people think of “shampoo” or “pyjamas” as loan words? And when a word is borrowed three times with different meanings (e.g. gentle, jaunty, genteel) can it cope?
Peter