I’m not looking for a constructed language… an esperanto, or an interlingua. I am after what “established” language has the most, non-trivial loan words. That is, words that are used in daily conversation.
I’m guessing it’s going to be either English or Japanese. Beyond that, I’m interested to see what you guys have to say about it.
Quite possibly it is English, spoken in a wide range of environments, a lingua franca in many more, and effectively the international language for science and information technology.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll (a shorter version of this is often attributed to one Eddy Peters, otherwise unknown.)
I’m going to nominate Armenian-- most of its inherited lexicon was replaced by loan-words from Iranian languages at some point in its history, to such an extent that linguists at first thought that it was an Iranian language. It took a while to sort out the non loan words from the loan words and figure out that Armenian is its own branch of the Indo-European language family. I can’t think of a citation for that off the top of my head, though, or come up with numbers.
The question is, at which point does a loan word stop being a loan word?
If you define a loan word in Spanish as “any word not derived from Latin”, that throws away over half of our vocabulary; pare it down to “acquired within the last hundred years” and it goes down to less than 1%, even with all those fancy new fields such as avionics and computer science whose terms are unlikely to be made from thin air and definitely not direct derivations from Latin.
The question really doesn’t have a meaning. Is English a creole of Old English and French or Old English with an enormous number of words borrowed from French. Is Old English (= Anglo-Saxon) a creole of two West Germanic languages (Anglic and Saxon) and one North Germanic (Jute, or Old Norse) or a West Germanic language with a lot of NG borrowing? These questions have no real content and neither does the OP.
Except English, itself, is comprised of tens of thousands of loan words from French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish etc.
is there a statute of limitations on when a loan word no longer counts as having been loaned?
Hari: Technically, English cannot be considered a creole, as it did not pass through a pidgin phase.
Of course this question has a meaning. To a linguist, the native vocabulary would be the set of words passed down from the ultimate ancestor language in an unbroken succession, and identifiable as native vocabulary and not loans in the ancestor language, and new words solely derived from inherited morphemes, as far back as is traceable. Under this definition, loan words never stop being loan words as far back as our knowledge holds.
From a practical perspective, loan words are often readily identifiable because of the unique phonology and morphophonology of a language-- how sounds can go together to form words. We can even identify loan words into Proto Indo-European because they violate the constraints on how roots could be formed.
On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to quantify how we define “most,” whether as a total percentage of words or a percentage of commonly used non-technical vocabulary. The OP said “That is, words that are used in daily conversation,” so I think he was aiming for the latter.
To be really pedantic, there are no* loan words. It is postulated that all human languages descend from a common source. A word borrowed from Chinese into English just “came home” so to speak.
*except words explicitly made up of sounds and not parts of words already in existence, and those would probably be restricted to onomotopoeic words that cannot be traced
It’s postulated, but not proven, that there was one human language and not a variety of different dialects in different human groups instead.
It’s also going to be impossible to prove this one way or another without a time machine, because there isn’t going to be conclusive evidence when what sounds became words and a language during development of humans.
By that definition, I guess that most languages spoken today will have 80% or more of loan words, because everything beyond hunter-gatherer style will have been adopted from another language - borrowed from Latin (or French) or Germanic …
Albanian is heavily laced with words that are unquestionably loan words. Japanese is a hell of a word-stealer, too, especially from Chinese and English.
IANAL but what in the world is the “ultimate ancestor language”? Grunts and pictograms?
Why do you say that? Surely when Cedric was tending the pigs and Leon was eating the porc, they communicated in some sort of simplified dialect that would have been called a pidgin if there were any linguists around at the time.
Urdu. All of its words are taken from either Farsi or Turkish.
When two groups desire to do business with each other but they do not share a language, a rudimentary pidgin is created to allow them to make deals and communicate simple concepts to each other. A creole is formed if a large enough group of children are raised learning that pidgin as their native language, at which point they regularize it, add missing tenses, aspects, and moods and flesh out the vocabulary.
I don’t believe there’s much evidence that, especially the latter half happened in the 1000s. I suspect it’s more likely that the Norman victors required their new servants to learn french and the servants started to fold french phrasings and vocabulary into their pre-existing language framework.
I would like to nominate Maltese. It’s a Semitic language (related to Arabic), but 50% of the vocabulary is from Italian and 20% is from English. In fact, it has so many Italian words that at one time it was considered a dialect of Italian.
That’s the main problem. I guess we could count a word from a particular language that can be traced every step of the way to its earliest known ancestor language, always following predicted sound changes, to not be a loan word. But even a word that’s generally not considered a loan word today might end up to have been borrowed somewhere along the way.
As Nava points out, even Romance languages have loan words from Latin; those that have been borrowed back from Latin later in their evolution. This may lead to doublets of words, one of which evolved from Latin following a predictable path, the other one being nearly identical to the Latin source.
English grammar is thoroughly West Germanic. Its vocabulary might come from Latin sources to a greater extent than the other West Germanic languages, but it’s definitely not a creole. I’m reminded of Maltese, which apparently is a Semitic language with a vocabulary that’s largely derived from Latin through Italian or French. We have other examples in this thread of languages with a much greater proportion of words from a particular foreign source than English, which nevertheless are in no way considered creoles.
But as I tell English speakers every time I discuss linguistics with them (I’m not a linguist, I’m not an expert at it, but the subject interests me): the same pressures that have affected English have affected other languages as well. All languages change over time and end up borrowing from others. English speakers seem to think their language is unique in some regard; it just isn’t so.
I should have been clearer. A creole is created by the generation (or their children) who grow up speaking the pidgin as their primary language. There is no evidence that such conditions existed in Britain.
Also, why Cedric and Leon? Cedric sounds like a Germanic name, but Wikipedia (without cite) seems to believe it was invented in 1819, though possibly modified from a Saxon name. But today I can’t help but think “French” when I hear that name. The list of famous Cedrics on that page does include many Frenchmen.
As for Leon, it’s a name of Greek origin. Was it in use among Normans?
What is different is that English has, for historical reasons, been the language of a big-ass world-spanning empire, and thus become in the modern world something of a worldwide lingua franca.
This has exposed it, and continues to expose it, to more borrowings from different sources than most other languages. Yes, other European nations had world-spanning empires, but in the musical chairs game of imperialism was over, England was sitting in the last chair when the music stopped …