Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook

by Martin Haspelmath (editor), Uri Tadmor (Editor)

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 (http: //loanwords.info) allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages

Genres: Linguistics

1102 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Loanword Typology project overseen by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor began in 2004 and aimed to provide hard figures instead of the merely impressionistic claims that linguists had made hitherto, e.g. "Body part terms are generally not borrowed". The project heads drew up a large list of meanings, rather like a Swadesh list, that could be found in the vast majority, if not all, languages. The list was also subdivided into various semantic fields such as "Agriculture and vegetation", "Food and drink", "Kinship", etc. International scholars of various languages were called on to produce an equivalent list of words for these meanings and explore which ones were borrowings from other languages. Ultimately a lexical database resulted, comprising 1000-2000 words from 41 individual languages, and this book here was published as a capstone.

After an introduction by Haspelmath and Tadmor, this book consists of chapters on the individual languages that the project mined. The project sought to avoid choosing closely-related languages, as this could skew results (i.e. each language would have inherited the same set of borrowings into its parent language). Thus we find only one Uralic language (Kildin Saami), one Turkic language (Sakha/Yakut), and so on. The choice of languages does, however, cover the whole world, and as with many typology compendia, anyone working in a narrow field of just one family will enjoy the exotic features of languages from half a world away.

[Mahira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loanwords in the World's Languages, woah. It took me slightly over three years to go through this book cover-to-cover. Granted, there was a lot of shorter and longer breaks in reading as it wasn't a priority for my academic endeavors, but still, I am glad I went through with it and finished it.
From the general descriptive stance, I probably can't add anything more about the publication than what's already been said by my fellow reviewer (Christopher). From a personal stance, I am really happy something like this exists and all the impressions, guesses and guesstimates suggested hundreds of times over can now be disproven or supported by empirical data from a wide variety of languages from around the world (even if there are some additional ones I would like to see there, such as any representative of the Kipchak languages and North American indigenous languages).

I don't expect many a reader to go through it, like me, from cover to cover, but if you are a starting linguist with interest in language contact, I would recommend it, as while the chapters are structured similarly, each author approaches the issue from a slightly different perspective, with a different background, sometimes literature and writing style, and so it is a quite compact overview of the state of things at the time of publication with lots of article-writing "examples". :) Anyone else can look for what is of interest for them in there, I am sure everyone will find something as the options are varied and plenty.