English is full of foreign languages! As the world gets ever more connected, English pulls in all sorts of phrases and words--whatever gets the job done. From Latin and Greek terms in law and medicine to French words for food and dance, from Sanskrit to Russian and Chinese, English prospers and grows as it borrows.FOREIGNISMS: A Dictionary of Foreign Expressions Commonly (and Not So Commonly) Used in English is a fun, fascinating, alphabetical guide to hundreds of these terms, complete with easy pronunciation explanations. Never flounder or feel at a loss: with FOREIGNISMS, you'll know exactly what these funny, fancy, foreignisms mean.
Очередная книга серии англо-русских тематических фразеологических словарей знакомит читателя с иностранными заимствованиями, пришедшими за многовековую историю в английский язык из латыни, французского, итальянского, немецкого, шведского, китайского, русского и других языков.200 идиоматических выражений сопровождаются информацией об их происхождении, значении и употреблении.
"This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages." --Book Jacket.
Intended to bridge the gap between two languages of the Indo-European family, this is the first comprehensive bifocal approach to lexicological aspects. Through its theoretical distinctions and applications, the book recommends itself to language professionals and to any reader interested in learning more about words. It starts with a brief theoretical account of overlapping terms, which are given crystal-clear disambiguations. The book then focuses on structural representations of word formations and word relationships, outlining their hierarchicalness and branching directions and revealing various levels of materialization entailed by lexical productivity and frequency of occurrence. Each of these hierarchies defines its related techniques and explains lexical creations, adaptations or adoptions and interrelationships. The approach adopted here proves English to be consistent with formative and sense-related hierarchies, and shows it to have reached a climax in language evolution with its status of a global language, making it the standard in comparative linguistics.
Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology brings together ten papers on aspects of the history of words and vocabulary, which address aspects of Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including Caribbean varieties), German, Italian, Māori, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages. In the first four essays, focussing on pre-1800 material, Karel Kučera and Martin Stluka’s opening essay discusses the plotting of the relative historical frequency of common words, drawing on their work with the diachronic portion of the Czech National Corpus; Ian Lancashire asks why Tudor England had no monolingual English dictionary; Chiara Benati discusses the interplay between Low German, High German, and Latin in an early modern surgical text, and Mateusz Urban sorts out the competing etymologies of English balcony, Italian balcone, and similar forms in Persian and Russian. The next six turn to more recent material. Jane Samson analyzes the nineteenth-century debate as to whether the Māori language was too primitive to have a word for “blue”; Vivien Waszink discusses the Dutch prefixes bio- and eco- and their documentation in a new dictionary; Tommaso Pellin examines a series of attempts to provide a grammatical terminology in Chinese; Lise Winer surveys the naming of fauna in the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago; Mirosława Podhajecka writes on the treatment of Russian loanwords in the current revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, with special attention to Google Books as a research tool; and Isabel Casanova asks whether Portuguese dictionaries should register English words. The contributions to this volume share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users.
Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.
