8. Loanwords in Romanian

Schulte, Kim

doi:10.1515/9783110218442.230

“…Maltese (a phylogenetically Semitic language) has 35.1%-30.3% loanwords of Romance (Italian/Sicilian) origin (Comrie & Spagnol, 2015). Although French and Romanian are sister languages (both descending from Latin), about 12% of Romanian types are French borrowings that came into the language in the past few centuries (Schulte, 2009). For both language pairs we manually define a set of allowed insertions, deletions, and substitutions of phonemes and morphemes, based on the training sets.…”

Section: Adapting the Model To A New Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Lingual Bridges with Models of Lexical Borrowing

Tsvetkov

¹

,

Dyer

²

2016

jair

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Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a "donor" language to a "recipient" language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and-in contrast to cognate relationships-borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated languages (for example, about 40% of Swahili's vocabulary is borrowed from the unrelated language Arabic). In this work, we develop a model of morpho-phonological transformations across languages. Its features are based on universal constraints from Optimality Theory (OT), and we show that compared to several standard-but linguistically more naïve-baselines, our OT-inspired model obtains good performance at predicting donor forms from borrowed forms with only a few dozen training examples, making this a cost-effective strategy for sharing lexical information across languages. We demonstrate applications of the lexical borrowing model in machine translation, using resource-rich donor language to obtain translations of out-of-vocabulary loanwords in a lower resource language. Our framework obtains substantial improvements (up to 1.6 BLEU) over standard baselines.

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“…To illustrate the ease with which a language pair can be engineered, we applied our borrowing model to the French-Romanian language pair. Although French and Romanian are sister languages (both descending from Latin), about 12% of Romanian types are true French borrowings that came into the language in the past few centuries (Schulte, 2009). We employ the GLOBALPHONE pronunciation dictionary for French (Schultz and Schlippe, 2014) (we convert it to IPA), and automatically construct a Romanian pronunciation dictionary using Omniglot grapheme-to-IPA conversion rules.…”

Section: Adapting the Model To A New Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Constraint-Based Models of Lexical Borrowing

Tsvetkov¹,

Ammar²,

Dyer³

2015

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Langua

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Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a "donor" language to a "recipient" language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and-in contrast to cognate relationships-borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated languages (for example, about 40% of Swahili's vocabulary is borrowed from Arabic). In this paper, we develop a model of morpho-phonological transformations across languages with features based on universal constraints from Optimality Theory (OT). Compared to several standardbut linguistically naïve-baselines, our OTinspired model obtains good performance with only a few dozen training examples, making this a cost-effective strategy for sharing lexical information across languages.

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“…Moreover, lexical transfer during the history of the Romance languages was not restricted to the influence of Latin alone, and contact among the Romance languages and other neighboring Indo-European languages was very frequent and vivid. According to a recent survey of 2,137 common words in Romanian 38 , for example, 894 (41.8%) were classified as loanwords from other languages. The majority of these borrowed words were transferred from Slavic donor languages (about 14%).…”

Section: Borrowing Is a Constitutive Part Of Language Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution

List

¹

,

Nelson-Sathi

²

,

Geisler

³

et al. 2013

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Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution.

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8. Loanwords in Romanian

Cited by 108 publications

References 0 publications

Cross-Lingual Bridges with Models of Lexical Borrowing

Cross-Lingual Bridges with Models of Lexical Borrowing

Constraint-Based Models of Lexical Borrowing

Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution

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