--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "G&P" <G.and.P@...> wrote:
>
> >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?
That is not obviously an issue with this dictionary, unless you are suggesting some words have been excluded as not naturalised. (Thai boe_M (_M etc. denoting the tone) '(telephone) number' might be an omission for the 'modern world' section.)
They've had problems with coinings, which are most obvious in Thai - they've omitted the issue of calques, treating them as new words. Is this where you've decided naturalisation is an issue - the author of the Thai section may once have had difficulty deciding when the loan status of second elements made compounds into loans - compare the treatment of the Thai word for 'book' with the word for 'wine'.
By contrast, the Thai Royal Institute Dictionary seems to treat modern coinings of loan replacements as borrowings, citing the generally English inspiration as the ancestral form.
Scanning through the vocabulary though, I think he finally decided that compounding in Thai made a word not a loanword. The most extreme example is bi_L daa_M 'father' and maan_M daa_M 'mother' being 'clearly borrowed' but bi_L daa_M maan_M daa_M 'parents' having 'no evidence for borrowing'. It's difficult to be sure - a few very obvious loans are marked as 'no evidence for borrowing'.
There aren't many non-Thai calques - Dutch _motor fiets_ 'motorbike' is the only one that leapt out at me.
Richard.